Script of the Week: 3D Extruder

Note: this is the third in a series featuring one After Effects script per week, now appearing at the beginning of each week. For an overview on scripts, check out the debut post.

You are planning out an animation, or perhaps you’re at the 11th hour refining it for a deadline, and you realize that some real 3D elements such as extruded and beveled text would add to the look of what you’re doing. But for whatever reason - and there are many - it’s not convenient to use an external tool to create 3D text. Maybe you are working somewhere that the basic installation of After Effects is all you have to work with. Or maybe you have a bunch of other options, including a copy of Cinema 4D, but because you’ve already created the design and animation right in After Effects, and like working that way, the idea of bringing in a third-party tool just sounds like it will obstruct your process.

Adobe After Effects has been a 3D application for a long time without ever really allowing you to work with layers that themselves have 3D depth. Yes, plug-ins such as Particular create true 3D particles, and there are even ways to get a 3D model on a layer (Zaxwerks Invigrator will extrude a logo, and Plexus (which despite appearing at aescripts.com is a plug-in) and the upcoming Element import .obj files). But After Effects itself has long been what is often called a “2.5D” app, with the “postcards in space” model whereby a layer can inhabit true 3D space while itself being 2D. This has led to a number of compensation methods, including the rather clever trick of stacking a set of these 2.5D layers so that together, the stack has 3D depth.

Script of the Week: BG Renderer

If you’re an After Effects power user who has gotten at all into scripts, you are most likely already familiar with BG Renderer, which really changed the game for scripts by providing an alternative to much more expensive solutions to any studio or individual in an After Effects render crunch.

Lloyd Alvarez apparently first devised this script on behalf of a studio that had huge rendering needs, yet was unable to harness the full computing power in-house for a simple reason. As great as the After Effects render queue is, when you click Render, the user interface - and thus the whole app - is tied up until the render is completed.

The industry solution for this problem used to be a separate render software, Nucleo Pro from GridIron Software, but Lloyd’s story is that the studio didn’t want to pony up the several hundred dollars that each license seat cost, despite that a few hundred dollars compares favorably with the cost of buying a new Mac Pro or other dedicated render station and the software to run on it.

Like other After Effects nerds, Lloyd knew that there is a free way to render After Effects compositions in the background, on spare or unused processors, while continuing to work in the After Effects UI. The aerender application installs along with the main app and can be run from the Terminal or a DOS shell, but the process is far from automatic. Getting it to work at all requires typing the correct UNIX string, and customizing it so that it doesn’t take so much processing power as to make the system unusable requires extra understanding.

BG Renderer was written to harness the full system resources while providing a low-cost interface available directly in After Effects, and it is available for all versions of After Effects from CS3 onward. If you have a system with multiple processors (you do) and sufficient RAM to support them (ideally in After Effects this means 2GB of RAM per proc, but you can sometimes get away with as little as 1GB if not working with large format footage and stills), and you’ve ever needed to keep working while pushing out a render, you’ve justified purchasing this script.

Introducing: After Effects Script of the Week

The most recent edition of After Effects Studio Techniques included a new sidebar category: scripts. Over the past several years since it was introduced in After Effects 6.0 , scripting in After Effects has gone from a hidden feature set that a few nerds played around with to reduce tedious tasks, to scripts that provide substantial feature additions in After Effects.

You could refer to scripts as hidden in plain sight, as these highly useful add-ons are now available to everyone, yet not everyone uses them or stays up-to-date with what is available for their use. This new series addresses that.

As something of an evangelist on behalf of the best scripts out there, my goal is to help anyone who uses After Effects - not just the power users - to incorporate these simple additions, one week at a time.

Most of the scripts featured here will link to aescripts.com as a central repository for scripts, where most of them are available as donation-ware. If you want to get moving faster incorporating scripts, browse the descriptions, add a script to your cart, and pay the suggested donation; it goes directly to the developer.

Red Giant’s newest Plot Device: Magic Bullet Looks 2

Red Giant Software today unveiled Magic Bullet Looks 2 in dramatic fashion, boosted by a fun, humorous trailer called Plot Device that shows off what the software can do. Included in the new suite are nine individual point products also available individually, including the brand-new Cosmo for automated touch-up and an version 2 upgrade of the widely popular Looks software.

Full suite cost is $799, but current owners of previous versions pay as little as $199. Watch for more in-depth coverage to follow!

Free Stereo Footage from Artbeats, and an After Effects tutorial showing how to use it in CS5.5

Here’s a 7 minute tutorial to get you started incorporating 3D graphics and 3D footage using the stereo 3D pipeline in After Effects CS5.5. To learn more, look for the CS5.5 electronic update available to readers/owners of my book, After Effects Studio Techniques CS5, which will be available sometime this month (details to follow).

Artbeats, your source for royalty-free stock footage, is offering everyone a free HD clip from their new Stereoscopic 3D (S3D) library. If you’ve been wanting to try your hand at working in 3D motion, this free download is the perfect opportunity to test it out.

For those of you who are not ready for 3D, you can download the same clip in 2D for use in your everyday high def projects. You can download the free clip now thru July 5th.

Premiere Pro for DSLR in a few easy steps

Let’s face it, a lot more editors, artists and animators have Premiere Pro loaded on the systems they use every day than are actually using it. And yet over the last few years—and in particular over the past year, since Adobe started demoing real-time playback of all kinds of files, including 4K RED .r3d source, in Premiere Pro on systems with CUDA-enabled nVidia cards—there’s been this notion that the application is really pretty good, and worth learning more about. Sure, clients tend to ask for other non-linear editors, so even if your day-to-day job demands that you edit in some other application, the question remains, what are you missing out on in Premiere Pro, both with its integration with other Adobe apps and by itself, if you’re not using it? I’ll be focusing on this in more than one article.

ASSIMILATE announces Mac support for SCRATCH, updates product line and prices

ASSIMILATE today announced version 6 of SCRATCH for Mac and Windows, as well as SCRATCH Lab, a lower priced toolset aimed at rapid on-set and dailies work. Both will ship “during Q2” this year.

SCRATCH 6 includes many updates, the biggest of which is availability for the Mac. Long among the most highly regarded color correction tools, the software has until this point been Windows-only, and moving to the Apple platform at the dramatically lower price of $17,995 represents a leap forward in accessibility to a much broader pool of color correction artists.

From the press release, SCRATCH’s new compositing, color grading and paint features include:

After Effects CS5.5 in Production

It’s only been a year since After Effects CS5 was released, which brought the application to 64-bit and introduced Rotobrush. With the announcement today of After Effects CS5.5 we are looking at the most rapid upgrade since Adobe unified all of its applications into one dancing,kicking line of graphical chorus girls known as the Creative Suite.

What did the After Effects team manage to accomplish in a year? Maybe that isn’t entirely a fair or accurate question, since there are often features that are in development, or even most finished, before a given development cycle begins. Nonetheless, for many artists version CS5.5 of After Effects may constitute more of a “must-have” than the previous couple of releases, if features alone are the gauge.

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