web

After Effects-Spider Web Animation

Tutorial: Spider Web Animation in After Effects

So here’s a tutorial that may mimic a certain theme you’ve seen before. I show you how to create a spider web in Illustrator and then animate it to catch text in After Effects. It’s not limited to just text, you could make it catch anything, even footage. Here’s a link to the font I used. I’ve also included the web I created in Illustrator, in case you don’t have that application you can still follow along. I know it’s a big file, but After Effect’s continuous rasterization was messing up the effects added to the web, so I made it big enough to not require scaling it up. Lastly, I forgot to mention one little part that makes the web a little more realistic, but I didn’t want to go back and redo part of the tutorial since it was already compressed by the time I thought of it. A spider web has slight variations in the thickness of the web, or it at least appears to. It probably has to do with how the light hits it. So there’s a way to achieve this: Just ad a solid with fractal noise as a track matte above your web. Set the track matte to luma with some setting seen here on this screenshot. It just adds a little variance to the web.

beachball

New Tutorial: Beach Ball in Cinema 4D

I just posted my newest tutorial on the tutorials page. It shows you how to make a beach ball model in Cinema 4D. It’s a pretty easy model to make, but I show you an easy way to texture it to get it to look like a 100% too- legit-to-quit beach ball. Yeah. Check it out.

Also, I will probably reorganize the tutorial page soon, it’s getting pretty crowded over there.

beachball

Cinema 4D – Model a Beach Ball

Check this tutorial out if you want to see how to model and texture a beach ball in Cinema 4D. The modeling process is pretty easy on this one and then I show you how to use the selection tag to texture the beach ball properly.

galaxy

New Tutorial: Create a Galaxy with Fractal Noise

My newest tutorial is posted. It shows you how to create an entire space scene in After Effects using primarily the fractal noise plug-in. I got inspired to do this based on part of this tutorial where it showed how to use fractal noise to make a star field and I took it a bit further. Fractal Noise has always been considered one of the most useful plug-ins; I’ve used to create tons of different things from clouds to curtains. Check out the video and you’ll be on your way to creating a scene straight from outer space.

galaxy

After Effects – Outer Space Galaxy with Fractal Noise

Tutorial: Outer Space Galaxy with Fractal Noise

This tutorial uses the always handy fractal noise plug-in to create different elements in an outer space scene. Space gas, planets, and star fields originate from this versatile plug-in. With the right settings you have a nice looking galaxy environment that you could move a camera through if you so choose, or it can be a good background for a title sequence.

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New After Effects Tutorial: 3D Stroke Glow Animation

So my latest tutorial creates a design that is a bit hard to describe. It’s a sort of a 3D stroke-light streak-burst-glow-particle-explosion-reveal-animation. That name just rolls off the tongue. This video is a practical example I made with the technique.
If I remember correctly I got inspiration from a Ford Flex commercial like this one at some point last year (It’s towards the end):
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shake

Cinema 4D – Camera Shake Tutorial

Check out this tutorial to learn how to simulate camera shake in Cinema 4D. It’s a pretty easy tutorial, but it shows you how to create User Data and use it with Xpresso, which could be good to know when designing other things down the road. Here is a ZIP file that contains the Cinema 4D project to use for this tutorial.

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I’m Dumb

I forgot to post the file that goes with the paper rip tutorial. It is now available here.

New Tutorial: Crumpling Paper in Cinema 4D

So I finally posted a new tutorial. This one shows you how to make a crumpling paper animation in Cinema 4D, like this video.

 I discovered the basis for this tutorial while doing a lot of experimenting with the Cloth Tag in Cinema 4D. It definitely saves a ton of time rather than the alternative of keyframing the entire animation. I would recommend playing around with the settings rather than just using what I gave you; you can get different results for you animation and experiment a little bit.

I’m going to make an effort to post tutorials more frequently. If you become a registered user I will send out a notice when a new tutorial is posted, or you can subscribe to my feed.

 Feel free to email me any questions you may have about this tutorial.