28th April 2008

Today we looked at displacement maps. To do this, we decided to create a swimming pool. We wanted to create a room with a swimming pool in it with the water flowing around the pool.

The first thing we had to do was create the room. To do this, the first thing we had to do was create the walls, floor and ceiling as separate images so we could put them together to make a room. We downloaded some textures and edited them in photoshop to make the walls the sizes and shapes we wanted. It was important to remember the size of all the walls so we could put them together in after effects afterwards.

Here are the textures we created.

These are the main textures for the room. We put the pieces together added some lights and animated a camera around the space.

The next thing to do was create the water. We did this by creating another solid, the same size and position of the floor of the swimming pool. We raised it up slightly to become the water level. We then added a fractal to this solid the same way as we created the background in a previous lesson. To animate it, we added the simple expression “time*300″ to the evolution property.

We fiddled with the parameters until it looked like rippling water. Next we precomposed this layer, took it out of the room composition and added it to the main composition. We then added an adjustment layer and applied a Displacement Map to it. We used the water comp as the displacement layer and adjusted the settings to come up with this. We also lowered the opacity of the original water comp to around 20%.

25th April 2008

Today we created an animation to composite over my maya animation. I needed to create a thought bubble with a worm dinner in it. Firstly, I created the images in photoshop.

As we created this in photoshop, it meant we could add this image into after effects with the layers.We created the thought bubble in after effects and animated it with a simple scale keyframe. We then did the same thing to each of the layers of the food image and timed it to work with the rest of the animation. We then downloaded some sound effects from the internet and added them to the animation. This is what we were finished with.

21st April 2008

Today we started looking at expressions within after effects. Expressions are a form of Javascript used to help animate in after effects. Expressions make it possible for each layer to react to one another and create complex animations when it would otherwise of been very difficult and complicated to do so.

The first technique we looked as was a way to make layers follow each other around the work space. The way we did that was create some code to make the layer look at previous layer and copy its position and scale from a set amount of frames before it.

To do this, we used the valueAtTime function. This gives us the value of a property on a layer at a certain time.

First of all, we created a simple animation of a circle moving around the screen. We then duplicated this layer and switched off the keyframes. We then created a new expression on the position parameter. We did this by pressing shift,alt,=.

The code we wrote was this

thisComp.layer(index-1).transform.position.valueAtTime(time-0.5)

we used the pickwhip tool to select the previous layer to make the writing easier. This code means, look at the layer before this one, and the value of the position of the layer half a second ago. We added the same thing to the scale parameter.

Once we had done this, we simply duplicated the layer 10 or so times. This gave us this animation.

The next thing we looked at was using “sliders” and variables within out expressions. This technique enables us to change numbers within our expressions without having to go back type in new numbers. This can save a lot of time. To create a new slider, firstly, we create a null. We then add a new slider to that null from the effects and presets box making sure we name the slider something memorable.

The next thing to do is turn this slider into a variable within our expression. We created two, one for horizontal and one for verticle distance. To make a variable linked to the slider called “H” and “v” we use the following code.

H=thisComp.layer(“Null 1″).effect(“H”)(“Slider”)

v=thisComp.layer(“Null 1″).effect(“v”)(“Slider”)

All we type is “distance=” then pickwhip the slider we created. This creates the variable we can now use in our expression.

The following is the expression used to create a slider that changes the distance of layers on top of each other.

H=thisComp.layer(“Null 1″).effect(“H”)(“Slider”)
v=thisComp.layer(“Null 1″).effect(“v”)(“Slider”)

thisComp.layer(index-1).transform.position+[H,+v]

We then keyframed the sliders and came up with this.

We then combined our knowelege of variable and sliders to come up with the following animation using the brightness effect. The code written worked so that the further the layer was from the first layer, the darker the layer was.

The code for the brightness effect is as follows…

a=thisComp.layer(“yellow”).transform.position[0]
b=transform.position[0]

0-(a-b)/

We then did the same thing using the blur effect.

14th April 2008

Today we would create an effect where we use many photo’s to create one large one. Much like a mosaic using other photographs.

To achieve this effect, we needed to use an external piece of software called “andreamosaic” found at this address, www.andreamosaic.com/andreamosaic

We created a photo mosaic of this picture

and using photo’s on my harddrive we created this mosaic

We set images to consist of 50 images across and 90 down, making each picture 50 pixels wide and 37 pixels high. This information wold be important later.

We then imported this image into after effects and made it into a composition. We then added the Card Dance effect. This effect works by slicing an image up into different sections and animating them to move around the screen. As we knew the dimensions of each image, we set the parameters to those sizes. Row=90 and column=50. We then created fractal to use at the map for the animation. We set the Z position to react to the black and white shapes of this fractal. We animated the mutiply keyframe in this effect to make sections come together. This is what we rendered.

Next we created a new background using two fractals. We added a tritone effects to colour the fractals and added a radial blur to the layer. We also added a glow to the mosaic layer. This is what we were left with.

10th April After Effects

Today we started by finishing the Oman TV logo that we started on the 9th.

We had to add the text on at the bottom of the logo. We decided to add a blured trail as it moved onto the screen. We did this using the time/echo effect. This effect only works on Pre-composed layers and text. You cannot use this effect on a layer that has a keyframes as it renders its echo from the original layer info, not the keyframed info. We precomposed the layer with the motion keyframed and added the echo effect. We tweaked the echo time, decay and echo number parameters to come up with this.

We then added a background using the fractal technique we learnt on 9th March.

This is the final animation.

We decied to now make another animation using the same logo. We decided to make this one 3D and unlike the other one which grew from the inside out, we thought it wold be good to have the pieces of the logo come together from off screen.

We did this with some simple 3d animating of the layers positioning. After we’d done this, we added a camera which we animated to rotate around the logo.

We then added another background made up from a few fractals, some colour correction and blur and added some glow around the whole logo. We then added some simple sound effects to emphasise the collisions of the layers.

9th April 2008

Today we decided to design a sting for Oman TV. To to this we would take the logo and make it grow a part at a time until the logo was complete. Here is the original logo that was designed on softimage

The first thing we had to to was separate all the elements on to different layers. We did this using Photoshop. Once we had done this, we imported the photoshop file into After Effects as a composition.

We wanted the centre circle to appear from white, like a sun. We decided to do this using the new CC light rays effect. By keyframing the intensity from a lager number to a small number, we gave the impression of an extremely bright light coming into focus. We also changed the colour to white.

The next thing we did was generate a Write-on to reveal the rim of the center. We drew a mask around the circle making sure we pre-composed it first. We then used the co-ordinates of the mask to generate the write on. We then deleted the mask.

We then animated the “sunbeams” that are eminating from the circle. We did this by changing the anchor point of each beam their base and keyframing the scale of all of them. We used the sequence layers tool to automatically sequence them. We added an ease in to the last of each keyframe to smooth the motion.

The next thing we animated was the flag in the center. We did this using the same technique as we used on the titles we created on 25th Febuary. A simple animated mask was used to make the flag appear.

Next we grew the vines at the bottom of the logo. We did this using exactly the same technique as the vines we created on 22nd Feb.We then added a simple light to give them more depth and also added another light rays effect. We animated the center point to make the light move through the vines.

The last thing we did today was the center logo. Again we used the CC light rays effect to give the impression a very bright light shinning through the logo. We used two copied of the logo, one just for the bright glow and the other for the logo on the top. We key-framed this to appear once the light had died down.

The final result of the day.