After Effects Roundup June 2023 #2

 

Among several videos posted recently, SternFX shared his Top After Effects Extra – the MoBar script. Eran says that this multi bar toolthat will make you more efficient and save hours of manual labour in After Effects. Note that the creator, MotionApe, offers some useful free tools too.

 

 

The best After Effects tutorials for motion design, animation, 3D and more, by Tom May on Creative Bloq, is a collection of After Effects tutorials attempting to help you boost your skills — for the beginner or pro.

Nick Greenawalt says he has tons of free animation courses, project files, and tools on his website. He even teamed up with Animatable to share “the best free cartoon lens flare” After Effects plug-in.

 

Learn Mograph has a list of his ESSENTIAL FREE PLUGINS for After Effects: FX Console, Saber, DecomposeText, Export GIF, and RIFT. Chris also shares his other favorites in Speed up your After Effects Workflow with these five plug-ins:

 

Will Taylor finished his goal of 100 Daily After Effects Tips! Here’s an example:

See more

My favourite effects/techniques in After Effects:

– CC Composite
– CC Starburst/Light Burst
– Extrusion for Morphing
– Easing Complex Path Rigs
– The Secret to Stunning Gradients
– Animated Depth of Field

I've made a mini-tutorial for each one under this tweet. 🧵

— Will Taylor (@visualsbywlroo) June 21, 2023

 

You already know that “PARTS” (position, anchor, etc…) are the Transform Properties shortcuts. But Learn How To Edit Stuff goes beyond and added 2023 After Effects Shortcut Master Class to his YouTube channel.

 

Boone Loves Video has The Easiest Way to Animate a Map in After Effects 2023 (NO PLUGINS).

 

Jake In Motion posted Top Easing Tools for After Effects in 2023, which shares info on some of the 3rd-party tools for After Effects that help make fancy easing keyframes easier.

 

In You’ve Never Seen Displacement in After Effects Like THIS!, Texturelabs is taking the Displacement Map effect into new territory by displacing things outward, rather than any one direction. For extra fun, you can re-view You’re Using Displacement Maps Wrong – After Effects from MOBOX.

 

3D Displacement in After Effects – NOW POSSIBLE! demonstrates how you can make 3D landscapes in After Effects with the  ProductionCrate LaForge plug-in. Apparently membership in assets offerings has benefits.

 

Helium + HeliumX Lite Free from HeliumX is a new 3D toolset for 3D animation in After Effects. You might even join HeliumX AI Beta.

Some are also excited abouwt Extrudalizer for After Effects by IVG Design. That was a fake Canadien accent.

 

MographAE from Kai Henthorn-Iwane is an interesting sounding toolkit for After Effects to help create complex animations quickly, with three cloners and five effectors.

 

How to Make 3D TEXT in Unreal Engine 5 by School of Motion features guest host Aharon Rabinowitz. Both Aharon and SoM has been creating a wide variety of Unreal tutorials lately. Of course, the flurry of Unreal tutorials is related to developments in virtual production mentioned below.

 

 

For The top 10 AI journalists in 2023, Muck Rack combed through their own data to identify the artificial intelligence (AI) journalists who are among the most viewed profiles on Muck Rack in 2023. Unfortunately this leaves out important contributions by tech generalist Kevin Roose, Matt Wolfe (Youtube and Futuretools), Jonny Elwyn, and PVC’s Jeff Foster (who is only concerned with tools relevant to our industry).

The latest overview is AI Tools For Motion Design That Are Actually Helpful by School of Motion (pictured).

Newer tech companies are answering moves by big companies, with new releases of Midjourney, ilumine AI and Stability.ai, as well as answers like Facebook Voicebox AI and Dropbox Dash AI search. See Big AI News You Probably Missed This Week by Matte Wolf of Future Tools. Matt also had a bunch of other news a few days earlier, and Look At What We Can Do With AI Video Now! from last month.

 

 

AEP recently posted a mid-month roundup, After Effects Roundup (Generative Fill edition), with tutorials by Chris Vranos and others on Generative Fill + AE tracking. But of course there’s more.

Motion Design Hotline: Content Aware Content with Evan Abrams and Kyle Hamrick was on Adobe Live. They discuss how to make content with Content-Aware Fill. This sometimes confusing feature can create clean plates, remove repulsive refuse, and deliver decent difference mattes. They also look at the latest form of fill, the new Generative Fill in the Photoshop (beta), and posted work files so you can follow along.

 

3 HIDDEN Uses of Remove Tool Even Adobe Didn’t Know! – Photoshop by PiXimperfect covers Magic Straighten on Hairline and Beard, Connecting Lines to Fix Artifacts, Create Smooth Edges, and Generative Fill vs. Remove Tool.

 

Creating Animations with Adobe Firefly and Premiere Pro with Cyrus Yoshi Tabar is an Adobe Live video that demonstrates the importance of text prompts with Adobe Firefly.

 

This Guy Edits posits that AI will replace 80% of all editors.

 

Photoshop Training posted 5 Mistakes To AVOID with The Photoshop Generative Fill.

 

 

Runway Gen-2 appeared earlier this month, as covered in After Effects Roundup (Generative Fill edition).

Learn How To Edit Stuff works at Runway and shared This Only Took an Hour to Make?! | Runway Gen-1 and After Effects Tutorial.

 

Things are moving quickly for competitors in AI; according to AI Flux, Zeroscope Text2Video is now BETTER than RunwayML Gen2 (FREE). AI Flux followed it up yesterday with updated details in Zero Install ZeroScope XL Text2Video on Replicate (How To)! NO GPU!

 

AI Flux also posted Experimental MidJourney 5.2 Updates are Mind-Blowing! and Stable Diffusion XL 0.9 IS HERE! Better than Midjourney? (and a later update). SDXL is open source and requires less VRAM.

 

Matt Wolfe followed with his own take in MidJourney Levels Up With This Major Upgrade.

 

Nick St. Pierre posted Additive Prompting v2, Parts 1-10, “a full compilation of Midjourney tutorials on how I use my Additive Prompting framework to control my image generations, from beginner to advanced prompting.”

 

As AI News explains, Nvidia’s NEW Neuralangelo AI STUNS The Entire Industry (Now Announced). While not alone in some features, Neuralangelo revolutionizes 3D reconstruction by transforming 2D video clips into detailed 3D structures. Also rumored are updates to OpenAI’s ChatGPT suggest an upcoming business version with features that promote collaborative workspaces, personalized profiles, and a groundbreaking (for a few days at least) document-reading capability.

 

 

PVC recently posted Virtual Production Primer by Damian Allen and Learn how to set a visualization shoot in Unreal Engine by Jose Antunes. Sara Dietschy has a good backgrounder from NAB presentations in Why is Virtual Production EVERYWHERE all of a sudden??

 

Virtual production has a ton of traction, but is it here to stay? A few months ago, CoPilot wondered Is Virtual Production the Next Tech Bubble? But then they were inspired by the Virtual Producer website to ask Is Generative AI taking over Virtual Production?

 

 

Polygon has some background on an issue of AI replacing artists in Yes, Secret Invasion’s opening credits scene is AI-made — here’s why.

Skip Intro, brought to you by the “Copaganda” guy, posted TV is about to Change. Forever. It discusses the Writers Strike as signaling the beginning of another massive turning point, this time centered around streaming and artificial intelligence.