Workbench

Tutorial 106: Making Waves

In this week's tutorial we take a request from YouTube user LRZMRQ. He asked us to take a look at two videos that have a similar wave effect—Lullaby Theories: A Secret Message and CNN - Love in Conflict - Yana's Letter—and recreate it. Also, check them out. They're both worthy of w...

Sweat Equity Podcast Appearance!

I was on the Sweat Equity Podcast yesterday! There's some small NSFW bits in there so throw on some headphones! We talked about how Workbench started, advice for new artists, not exhibiting the work of others, as well as some other diverse topics. I had a blast on this one!

Tutorial 105: Reverse Direction with Expressions

This week, we're looking at reversing the direction of things like trim paths, and other effects that use ranges, like text animators. Our expression is simple and I'd even call it elegant since we basically end up with one quick math equation that suits both the forward and reversed directions.

You can apply this to pretty much any parameter you'd like if you need to reverse the way things are moving. I would highly recommend you animate from 0-1 and multiply that value by the maximum value o...

Tutorial 104: Interesting Reveals

Happy almost New Year patrons! Got this one a little early for you too. We're on vacation, so I made a few tutorials to cover a couple of weeks!

So let's kick of 2018 with another glitchy tutorial that allows you to quickly and easily reveal any element. This technique is infinitely extensible since you can basically use any effect to get a different animation. It's a super handy way to build out a ton of text, but it's also easy to add to backgrounds so you can get transitions too. And it's s...

Tutorial 103: Isometric Projection

Hey Patrons! Got this one a little early for you!

This week we take a look at how to make an isometric projection by either faking an isometric camera in After Effects, or using the SSR—Scale, Shear or Skew, and Rotate—method.

We also rig up a cubic object so that we can control it with sliders. You can use this to build anything cubic, like buildings. And I forgot to mention it during the tutorial, but if you duplicate the sides and make them smaller, you can combine them with a rep...

Tutorial 102: Character Organization

This week, we have a quick workflow tip. For some reason, I've seen a bunch of people split their layers in order to do 2D character animations where body parts pass in front of and behind other parts. In this quick tutorial we tie a slider to a minute adjustment of z-position so we can have a single layer pass on either side of a character. animate the position, but if you don't want to separate the dimensions, it can be unruly to deal with. And usually you want to keep X and Y tied together fo...

Tutorial 101: 2D-3D Parallax

Got this one up a little early. I hope you guys enjoy it! 

This week we look at a useful way to map a precomp's frames to its position on screen. This allows us to fake a 3D rotation as things move across screen. You basically animate shape layers to the extreme positions, add our expression, and you're done. You can also do this with 3D layers. Just rotate them a little bit and bring them in. In this example I animated the trees by putting a null in the middle of them, parenting a camera...

Tutorial 100: Rollin' Rig

We've hit 100—100 tutorials and 10K subscribers! What a way to end the year! But before that, Santa's got to come to town. He's upgraded his ride a little bit.

This week's tutorial looks at a nice way to set up a rolling car rig, but we also look into calculating the angles between wheels so we can add some additional movement to the car's suspension. Relevant expressions on our site linked above. B...

We made it. Thank you all!

I don't even know what to say except I hope we can make this number a lot larger in 2018!

Tutorial 99: Glitchier Glitch Text

This week, we add another glitch text tutorial. The big takeaway here is to use CC Image Wipe along with a good matte to overlay middle grey on top of another matte to make a displacement map. Since middle grey means there will be no displacement, everything that was displaced by brighter and darker values in the original matte will begin to return to their original positions as the grey overlay animates in. We also use compositing masks to mask other displacement.

Our mattes come...

Black Friday Sale!

Hey, what's up patrons! We're having a Black Friday sale in our store!

But there's even more news. We've got two new products launching. The first is one I've been wanting for a bit but just never got around to building.

Quiver 2 expands upon version 1 by allowing you to manage your library of expressions right from the...

Tutorial 98: Flocking

I've been working late this week to launch a few things, and because of that—and wanting to be done in time to enjoy Thanksgiving— I finished this week's tutorial tonight. It'll go live for everyone on Friday as normal, but I thought you guys might be happy to see it early if you're not stuffing your faces or falling asleep after dinner like I do pretty much every year.

Anyway, after talking with Paul Conigliaro (aka @conigs 2017-11-23 07:53:56 +0000 UTC View Post

Tutorial 97: Improved Single Layer Track Mattes

Now I can push content a little early to Patrons before this post becomes public, which is pretty cool. So the newest tutorial is up! I happened to get it done a little early. So check it out.

I received a comment on an old tutorial and realized there is a way to improve upon it now that we have access to mask path points in expressions. The expression (link above) looks at our first position key and uses that to calculate an offset so that the mask that we apply this to stays put. Take note, ...

CEP!

I'm finally getting around to working on figuring out how to code CEP panels versus straight ScriptUI panels. So I'm starting with my first script, Quiver. I'd always wanted Quiver to be able to not only recall your library of expressions, but also to be able to maintain it. The new version of Quiver will likely go up slightly in price, but if you've already bought it and decide to get the next version, the upgrade will just be the difference.

I can't wait until this version is complete!

Tutorial 96: Mask Vertex Expressions plus Grading

This video was sponsored by VideoBlocks. And because of that we have some nice footage to work with. And we're using that footage to take a quick look at a feature I've been dying to have in AE since at least 2005—mask vertex expression access! It's finally here in CC 2018!

I've needed this so many times, from locking other layers to masks to generating connecting lines on the fly without having to resort to scripts or a bunch of Beam effects. Here, we're using it to draw triangles on our fo...

Tutorial 95: Fluid Motion

In this week's tutorial we take a look back at two of our first few tutorials—Tutorial 02: Radial Delay and Tutorial 03: Blobs—in order to simulate what's going on in a shot on Dribbble by Alexander Pyatkov for Motion Design School called 2017-11-03 04:52:43 +0000 UTC View Post

Tutorial 94: Quick Tips 06

Here's another collection of Quick Tips for you guys. The time for each tip is as follows:

+ 0:21 - Fit To View Shortcut

+ 0:31 - Slip Tool

+ 1:02 - Center Anchor Point

+ 2:02 - Compare Screen Positions

+ 2:50 - Update Markers

+ 3:54 - Time Entry Shortcut

+ 4:26 - Moving Text

+ 4:58 - Modifiable Keyboard Shortcuts

+ 5:10 - Shy Layer UI

And that's it. I hope some of these help speed up your workflow! Also go grab 2017-10-27 04:31:11 +0000 UTC View Post

Slit-scan Mattes

Hey guys! I rendered out a few of the mattes from our last tutorial 4000x4000 px so you can use them on a lot of different things. Grab them, and your other reward textures, here. There are static mattes and a pair of animated ones—set those to loop using Interpret Footage which I think is still cmd+opt+g in the Project Panel. I think they also added a button on the bottom left of ...

Stackable Text Animators

In Tutorial 92 a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned there'd be some stackable text animator presets. I've made a few more and uploaded them here with the rest of your presets. Sorry for the delay. We've been at it pretty hard as I explained in that post. There will be more stackable presets ...

Tutorial 93: Slit-Scan Displacement

I guess I should've mentioned that slit-scan photography is where the name for this came from. Special cameras expose time across the frame so you can easily discern things like a photo-finish for example. For some reason this is more explained on Wikipedia in Strip Photography than in the Slit-Scan article.

By build...

Tutorial 92: Stacking Text Animators

If you're like me, you probably feel like you've animated text every which way by now. I always feel like finding a new way to animate text that looks good and doesn't feel cheesy or forced is one of the most challenging aspects of working on a project and it's often the part I dread the most. It's great when you've figured it out, but I usually procrastinate on my way to getting there.

Unless you're going to split apart text and animate each piece, it's often difficult to get thi...

Tutorial 91: LEGO Style

LEGO my EGGO. Sorry, I've got nothing better than that (especially if you're a Patron who saw me make that same joke earlier). Well, hopefully this tutorial is better than that, and if not there's a project file.

A couple of weeks ago, Victoria Nece, AE's project manager, posted a sweet LEGO rig she made. I mentioned that it'd make a neat tutorial and she said to go for it. She graciously offered up her...

LEGO my EGGO?

Sorry, I've got nothing better than that. Well, I guess the tutorial will be better than that, but I haven't recorded it yet.

This is a just a quick sneak peek at what we'll be looking at tomorrow. A couple of weeks ago, Victoria Nece, AE's project manager, posted a cool LEGO rig she made. I thought it'd make an interesting tutorial, so I asked her if it was cool to recreate it. So that's what we're going to do!

I made this version and I tweeted her about a place where we differed so it'...

Tutorial 90: Engraving

90 weeks solid, even through a hurricane. Crazy. Thanks for coming with us on this journey!

I realized while editing this that I didn't use my Workbench space so the main comp is a little smaller than I'd like, but I've provided a project file, so you can mess around with that.

This is a quick technique using the same method we went over in 2017-09-29 06:12:39 +0000 UTC View Post

Tutorial 89: That Grainy Texture Look

Almost to 90. Crazy. :)

Power is back this week. It's been a busy one, but we were able to tackle a request to turn Tutorial 85: Integrated Textures into a version of that grainy texture look that's becoming popular. 

Our version is simple and it solves two main goals: do this in one layer and make sure the textures don't slip. I've seen a few of these tutorials out there already so I wasn't going to make one unles...

Tutorial 88: Curving Text

We're getting this one out a little early for the Patrons. I'm surprised I'm getting this one out early, but all I can do at the moment is sweat and work on this tutorial, so I guess it makes sense. #ThanksForNothingIrma

Anyway, this week's tutorial is a quick look at a neat way to animate text as if it's on a curved surface using a simple Displacement Map setup.

Also, for anyone curious, our house was undamaged. A piece of soffit fell straight to the ground and that's about it. None of ...

Tutorial 87: Angular Controls

In Tutorial 85: Integrated Textures, we made an interesting shadow out of a displaced layer. I thought it might be useful to change the default controls of Displacement Map from Max Horizontal and Max Vertical Displacement to Angle and Distance sliders. So I built that. And I continued to apply that expression to similar parameters—like position. That allowed me to animate things diagonally as easily as I can m...

Switching to Monthly payments

Hi everyone! At some point soon, we'll be switching over to monthly payments. We'll just expand the tiers so that they'll correspond to the new values. For example the $3 per video tier will become $12/month. From what we can tell—since there's surprisingly little info on how to actually do this switch with respect to the tiers—you'll have to update your pledges to fit the new tiers since I can't modify ones with pledges. It also has to happen at the beginning of the month or else we'll lose...

Tutorial 86: Quick Tips 05

Man, 86 already. We've come a long way together. 

Quick Tips 05 is here! I do have two small notes though. Difference mode turns black where pixels exactly match. So it's extra useful for matching two images or things with a lot of colors. I probably could've picked a better example.

And the other note I'd like to make is that, I'm still not sure I explained the way I use LoopOut the best way possible yet, haha. Instead of having to set up an guess how to set keys on each end of a c...

Tutorial 85: Integrated Textures

This week's tutorial expands upon last week's Rubber Stamp Texture tutorial. We look into different effects you can achieve by sandwiching things between CC Composite effects, including textures on layers, shadows, or both. And if you precomp and check the continuously rasterize switch, you can lock displaced textures to the layer for more utility. As with a lot of my tutorials, experimentation is necess...