This is a series of experimental branches that mimic various pineoid species. The technique is built around exploiting some features in Plexus 2 to build hierarchical structures.
Note: Due to limitations in the plug-in itself, the parameters will not animate and even require a manual refresh while editing parameters. The easiest way to do that is to toggle visibility of the topmost layer labelled Branch back and forth.
Using the good old Card Dance effect, this pine tree is assembled from a set of tiles. As illustrated in the example picture, even without modifying the layer maps just changing the lighting and camera along with some other parameters can result in different looks. By modifying the layer maps this can be further tweaked to produce other looks.
Note: The effect uses the plug-ins internal camera to fake rotation while retaining consistent lighting. Decouple the camera by disabling the expressions if you want to use a comp camera.
Welcome to my resources for After Effects, Cinema 4D and whatever I come up with and what you think might be useful. Please note that all the stuff provided here is meant for learning and experimentation. You may use it for commercial projects as well, but if you do so, do the decent thing and donate a few bucks. You can do so by clicking on the button below to make a donation.
Be aware that I cannot offer any form of guaranteed support if you can’t figure out things. You can ask me questions on forums or shoot me a mail, but accept that the stuff being free, you are not entitled to demand anything. Likewise, I reserve the right to withdraw, rework and modify stuff as I see fit. As they say "Availability may be subject to change.".
Note:Though some content may be listed, you will not find it for immediate download. This is due to bandwidth and file size constraints. You will also encounter situations, where only parts of the content are provided instantly or none at all. Such content can be made available and adapted to your needs, but this will need to be on a paid basis via different methods.
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One more setup exploring and exploiting Trapcode Form 2‘s rotation maps, this produces a bipolar force field similar to a magnetic field. By duplicating the sub-comps constituting the maps, more fields can be added.
Based on some experimentation with Trapcode Form 2‘s rotation maps, this is a transition effect that mimics a zipper.
While it’s largely parametrized and rigged with expressions, you may need to animate a few things manually like the fly because there may be alignment problems due to how the maps are sampled. Substitute the images and custom particle shapes with your own graphics and videos in the respective pre-comps.
This is a little demo using Trapcode Form 2‘s rotation map feature. It illustrates how to use different maps to scatter and distribute stuff in the scene and how animating a few map parameters can create the illusion of motion.
This is an exploration of the new features in Plexus 2. As announced earlier on my blog, here is the project file for your own experimentation.
Note that all effects are created using Plexus‘ primitives and linked to reference layers using expressions. Linking is based on the naming convention in the project, so layers not matching the pattern will not drive the primitives, but may still be used inside Plexus using the Layer Object for instance.
While it’s quite common for 3D programs to support IBL (image based lighting) to simulate scene lighting based on realworld photographs, this is not always technically possible or feasible for plug-ins in After Effects, especially if they use OpenGL. This package tries to provide some of this functionality by using arrays of normal lights and arranging them in your composition and in addition sampling the color from input imagery. The setup contains a light dome setup to simulate 360 degree illumination as well as an area light for direct, soft lights that can easily be modified and customized using expressions. Refer to the included PDF file for more details and usage instructions.
The second download re-uses the setup with a few extra controls for Plexus. It’s kind of a tec demo to illustrate how you can control large numbers of lights using pixel data in a pre-comp and easily create some pretty fancy lighting or other effects based thereon. This setup would just the same work with your favorite lens flare plug-inb or tools like Trapcode Lux.
