Workbench

Tutorial 84: Rubber Stamp Texture

Cheers! I'm a big fan of print looks—those are my blockprints in the corner of my studio behind me—so I decided to figure out a way to put a stamp texture on a layer, and it turned out I could do it pretty easily and using only one layer thanks to CC Composite. And boy do I love CC Composite, especially now that I know what that "RGB Only" checkbox does. So that's what this week's After Effects tutorial is all about! I hope you like this look as much as I do. The technique I developed has th...

Workbench One Layer Stamp Texture Preset

Hey guys! Here's a link to a new preset I've put into our shared folder. It allows you to add this rubber stamp look to any layer. There's a quick tutorial on it coming tomorrow, but you'll need to experiment to get the look you're after and there's a lot of options.

Tutorial 83: Semi-Automatic Animation

Yes, that was a Lil Wayne reference.

This week's After Effects tutorial shows you how to use markers to trigger and retime animations contained in a precomp from a main comp. It is based on Dan Ebberts' Triggering Animation with Markers expression with a couple of differences. First, Dan's technique uses a layer with the markers on it—we use comp markers because we finally have scripting access ...

Tutorial 82: Pixel Sorting and More

This week, I happened upon an effect I hadn't noticed before. It's called CC Kernel. It's part of the Cycore Effects that have been bundled with AE for quite a while now. It's actually pretty powerful. For more information—kind of—check out the PDF linked on our website (http://workbench.tv/tutorials/2017-08-04_PixelSortingAndMore/). I say kind of because the information is sort of vague unl...

Smart Bar Graph Presets

Hi! Thanks for your support!

The preset for this week's tutorial is attached.

Also attached is a Quiver script for the null/layer you parent to the bar. You add it to the layer's position property.

Tutorial 81: Smart Bar Graphs

This week, we go over a requested tutorial to lock items to the end of a bar graph. Since this uses a nifty way to determine the lengths of the bars, you can use real world data. Set up your Max Value slider to your largest data point, and set each bar's Value slider to its actual data point. Adjusting your Max Length will adjust how long the bars will display. I would recommend setting up one, and then making a control layer with sliders to link to Max Value, Max Length, and Thickness so you ca...

Tutorial 80: Auto-scale Trimmed Paths

As always, thanks for your support!

This week, we take a quick look at an expression that will automatically scale Stroke Width when the length of the stroke is below a certain threshold so our trimmed strokes don't just pop on or off.

Here's the relevant code that we apply to the Stroke Width property of any strokes we want to scale. This expects a Trim Paths placed outside any shape groups—it should be under the main Contents of your shape layer.

ramp = 5;

start = content...

New Preset - Scale Trim

Hey guys, here's a new preset I'll explain in this week's tutorial (most likely) but here it is so you can use it now and also don't have to make it yourselves. :)

Scale Trim, scales stroke width when a line is trimmed at either end so that it doesn't just pop out of/into existence.

It's in our presets folder on Dropbox, but if you don't feel like finding the link, here's a direct link: ht...

Tutorial 79: Procedural Mattes

Note: If you're a Patron that has access to my textures, there should be a post before this one that has your link!

This week, we're exploring a technique to make a procedural grid matte to use as an element, a track matte, or a displacement map. I'm sure there's a ton of other stuff you can do with this technique. It also pairs nicely with Tutorial 77: Glitchy Dot LED Thing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeCj1Xk...

Procedural Mattes

Hey guys! I've put the Procedural Mattes from this week's tutorial in this folder. They called Griddy 01-03. Go grab them!

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/pwndmxfqr80xeay/AAA65txPC7Unp_zXJln9uaLAa?dl=0

Yo patrons!

As I'm writing about this week's tutorial, I just realized I should've given you guys a heads up about the 4th of July sale (although I basically thought of it on July 4th so...). Anyway, I know these messages are probably more direct to you guys. So if you missed my messages about the sale on twitter/FB hit me up and I'll hook you up with a 20% off code.

Thanks for your support! At some point I'll have a patron only sale—probably for our next script release.

Tutorial 78: Unconventional Bouncing Boxes

First, there's a hidden youtube-related joke in here, so the first person to find it gets a free copy of StackIt (which we released this week as I'm sure you probably saw, you faithful patrons).

As for the tutorial itself, this week, we're looking an an interesting interaction between offset paths and open path shapes. It allows us to make simple strokes into stroked shapes. It can definitely be taken further than this and I encourage you to do so. For example if you want to have a bunch of of...

Tutorial 77: Glitchy Dot LED Thing

This week we take a look at making some quick LED-style dots that can be used in a variety of ways—from just making an LED look, to making random dots for background elements. There's a couple of useful tips thrown about in there, like how to break your comps up into even squares and an expression for staccato movement. It's altered a little below with notes in case you need more guidance.

f = 3; //number of frames for each evolution step

e = 20; //degrees to evolve each step

t =...

Glitch Mattes

Hi guys, here are the mattes from the Breakout tutorial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fK87FxWBdDg). Enjoy!

Tutorial 76: Preserve Transparency

This week, we're talking about a little switch in After Effects that you might have overlooked for quite some time. But it can be useful for compositing things together when you need more complex transparency or if you need to build up transparency through multiple layers—like if you had a lot of shapes animating in separate layers and you want to fill them with multiple textures in a single comp. It's also helpful when you want to see the top layers instead of just their alpha channels. Prese...

Tutorial 75: Breakout

If you need a quick way to make blinking boxes for glitches or whatever, this technique is a super quick way to do it. All you have to do is draw some quick shape paths, throw some noise on them and cover them with mosaic and you're all set.

Tutorial 74: 3D Book

This week we go over a really quick technique Sev made to make a 3D-ish book in After Effects. This could probably also be combined with some sort of warp or distort effect to get a book that lays open. There are some collisions in the project file (where a page goes through another) but at most framerates, you'll never notice it. If you have an issue with it, either add frames in between each move until it's perfect, push each layer farther back in 3D space (modify the expression on position), ...

Textures

As promised, with the new reward tiers, here's a link to a folder of some textures. This will be added to, so feel free to save the link. I'll post when I've added some new ones. Thanks!

Migration

Here's a little early access peek at a blog post for tomorrow!

Presets

As part of the new reward tiers, here's a link to the presets I'm sharing. Most of the ones in here at this moment are from the initial pack you get when you sign up to be a patron. But there are three new ones in here that start with "Motion Lines" in their names. Those three are useful for items that are moving at speed. You parent them to a layer and move that layer.

Those presets should also loop if you loop them right before the stroke width is animated to zero.

Thanks! See you guys...

I've shaken up the tiers a bit!

Hi guys, I have to level with you. When I first started on Patreon, I wasn't entirely sure about what to offer for my tiers. So I think it's been ok, but I don't feel like I've been able to offer you guys the value I'd like to in support for your patronage, so I have an idea to change that.

Obviously, I'm a working artist. When I started Workbench a year and a half ago, things were a bit slow. But 2017 has been the exact opposite. I've had plans to start an expression tutorial series that I wa...

Quick Tips

We're going to be putting out another Quick Tips volume this week, and so I'm going to put those up here so you guys can see them early.

Also, I'm thinking of switching around the way some of these tiers work. I find that it's more difficult for me to keep up with this while I'm in the middle of projects, so I'd be offering more free stuff (textures, presets, maybe even songs) for each tier. So I think it'd probably be a benefit to you guys, while making it easier for me to bring you guys extr...

Tutorial 72: Text Animator Modes

Every time I mess around with text animators, I find something else useful. This week, I played a bit with the modes to get an idea of how they can combine—to see what's possible. I didn't have a much time to explore as I would have liked, so pardon the decidedly uncool examples in this one, but my hope is that—as always—you'll take it and run with it. Just make sure you hit me up @workbench_tv if you make anything cool (or if you have any clue as to what can be done with the Min or Max mo...

Tutorial 71: Greeble Wipes

I had some sort of stomach flu last week and I had to prepare for a shoot on Saturday so I must've missed this in my haste! Sorry about that. If you haven't seen this one yet, we take a look at a technique to use greeble textures as wipes and other mattes. If you're looking for information on how to make these textures, check out Eyedesyn's tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up-N1Z_ZiEM

Tutorial 70: Pump up the Jam

In this week's tutorial we use an audio layer to drive animation without using third party plugins like Trapcode Soundkeys. We also get a sneak peak of our next script—tentatively named StackIt!

Also, if you want to try your hand at making some music, check out Auxy. It's really fun! The interface is great and there are some great tutorials in the app to get you started in a few minutes.

And as always, if you make anything cool, tweet me @workbench_tv!

Auxy: 2017-05-12 22:06:35 +0000 UTC View Post

Tutorial 69: Revealing Text

If I thought it was busy last week, I was in for a shock. Thankfully I recorded this early. I've actually edited the tutorial and written this from a hospital room because, like our daughter, our son is deciding to come slightly earlier than expected (but not pre-term thankfully).

If you decide to use the presets, bear in mind that you'll have to adjust the effect controls to suit the typeface you're using. But I also hope that you'll try this idea out on your own and come up with something co...

Tutorial 68: Outline Reveal

It's been a busy week over here, and I always get asked about how I make certain parts of our intros, so I figured this would be a good time to make a tutorial like this. It's not the most advanced, but it does show an easy way to create a nice reveal. I didn't have the time to mess around with this, but I think it could be very interesting when combined with Tutorial 59: Shape Expressions (https://youtu.be/y9G0QAoHqzk), or eve...

Tutorial 67: Glitch Mapping

This tutorial expands upon Tutorial 65 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPYlMIPCwWE to show a much faster way to map and render ASCII characters as well as any other characters or graphics you'd like to map. There's a little bit of setup involved if you want to make custom maps, but there would be anyway. Our project file already has a few included.

See UNVI art's tutorial for a nifty way to use Particle Playgro...

Tutorial 66: Point Control

This tutorial explores a useful technique for tying a point control to position, so you can freely move a layer around that already has position animated, and save it as a preset. While you can also use the Transform effect for this, this ensures that your vector-based layers stay crisp if you choose to scale them up and you don’t have to worry about any bounding box weirdness.

Thanks for watching!

Tutorial 65: ASCII & Text Generation

Today we take a look at using an expression using sampleImage to generate text and make some really slow rendering ASCII art. I’m sure there are faster ways to do this, but this is an academic look at the process behind it, so that you can learn these techniques and hopefully find another use for them.

While I was able to make the intro work, unless you really need this effect, it’s not worth attempting. I had to split up my HD frame into 4 quadrants. Two were rendered as stills...