October 14, 2010

Learn random expressions with earthquake tutorial

On AEtuts started a series of After Effects tutorial videos on expressions with Felt Tips. The first, Shake It Up With An Expression Earth Quake (previewed below), is

"a basic look at the various random number methods in After Effects expressions. I go on to use some of these techniques to build an earthquake effect that you can easily adjust with a series of sliders. The tutorial is aimed at intermediate After Effects users who have some experience with the program and are looking to learn more about the power of expressions."

By the way, you can find other reviews of similar material by Chris Meyer, who recently posted on wiggle and random number methods. See also Random Numbers methods (expression reference) in AE Help for reference.


Felt Tips explains a bit more:

"This is not a tutorial about making some eye-candy effect. I’m well aware that you can build the same effect with a couple of keyframes and the wiggler. This is about setting up a simple effect with expressions to make a much more controllable animation, that is faster and easier to experiment and work with than the manual equivalent. There are very few good screencasts on the topic of expressions. This is the first in a series that attempts to fill that gap.

As with all series’ it starts simple, with some grounding principles. This is to make sure that it’s not just about copying and pasting someone else’s code, but gaining a thorough understanding of the process for yourself, so that in the future you can design your own complex expression systems. The next one will be building on that knowledge rather quickly. Very soon, you will be writing expressions to automate processes which would take you hours by hand – and shortly afterwards, doing things that can *only* be done with expressions."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Awesome expression!!!