MAD MMX titles + volumetric AE 3D

@Lester Banks noted Physalia's opening title sequence done for MAD MMX, a conference held last week in Spain. There's a bit more information on Motiongrapher, and Create Motion Motion has more on 3D scanning.





Note: For some similar work, see 'House of Cards' built from data and Maltaannon's House of Form.

Some of the stuff in Physalia's titles sort of recalls Brian Maffitt's demo of AE 3D at MGLA in 2003,

"After Effects guru Brian Maffitt of Total Training took time off from the Creative Cow Conference to share with us some tricks on using 3D space in After Effects.

In his first example, he took some 3D layers that were elements of a biplane, enabling the Advanced rendering engine to take intersections into account. He then precomposed the biplane layers. The initial result was a flattened, 2D version of the plane. However, once he enabled the Collapse Transformations switch for the precomp, he now had a fully 3D plane again, with the advantage that it could be manipulated by animating the single precomp layer - a very nice trick

Brian then moved onto a demo that used a sliced human head that he downloaded from The Visible Human Project. He took the layers, distributed them horizontally by small intervals, and then turned them all into 3D layers. He then rotated them all in 3D space. Next he precomped them, resulting in a solid 3D head that he could spin around. To make the head semitransparent, he reduced the Opacity of the slices and blended them using Transfer Modes, resulting in a luminous, volumetric model of the head. Different transfer modes resulted in different features being highlighted.

Brian then showed other ways you could use this technique to create volumetric 3D models in After Effects. For example, he created a loop using the Fractal Noise plug-in, duplicated it 60 times, offset them in 3D space, and then offset them in time from each other. The result was a series of cloud formations that seemed to rise up from a floor."Note also Chad Perkins' brief look at Photoshop Extended volumetrics and DICOM images mentioned in Photoshop text as 3D volume in AE.