Last week in After Effects

...is the week or so of assorted After Effects tutorials, tips, and scripts & plug-ins new and old.

Read Last week in After Effects at PVC.

After Effects Lately

...rounds up new tools for lip-sync and creating Digital Cinema Packages, plus tutorials for difference mattes, film looks, Element 3D, time-lapse, and more.

Read the roundup of the previous week on PVC: After Effects Lately.

Volumetric lighting in After Effects

...is a new survey at PVC.

Volumetric lighting, Crepuscular rays, God rays, and the like are visible rays or even globes of light. You can't see lights themselves with the built-in lighting in After Effects (for background see Cameras, lights, and points of interest), so plug-ins are used to help make light visible.

One of the first published examples of volumetric lighting in AE used the Radial Blur (Zoom) plug-in, and was presented by Sam DeWitt in a 1995 issue of DV Full Motion. Later tutorials are quite numerous, though they leverage newer filter effects like CC Light Burst, CC Light Rays, CC Radial Blur, CC Radial Fast Blur, Trapcode Shine (with a unique shimmer control), or similar.

...read the rest of Volumetric lighting in After Effects at PVC.

Recently in After Effects

is up at PVC, featuring news on Element 3D, Pixel Cloud, 3D Invigorator, a 3D properties panel, and more.

Here's a trailer for GenArts Lensflares Pack 3, free from Mylenium:

Element 3D: new AE plug-in [updated]

Video Copilot has released Element 3D, an After Effects plug-in (originally 'Atom') that lets you import and animate 3D models, even as a particle array, and extrude text and mask shapes in real time. It’s for all of us, for hi & low end, for straight 3D and more abstract experimentation alike, at least if you have a more recent OpenGL graphics card.

There are some additional details and reviews in Element 3D: new After Effects plug-in at PVC, which has been updated with new resources.

Creating Fire in After Effects

...is a roundup of tutorials and free projects now at PVC.

One item mentioned is by Video Copilot, who posted an effective campfire or torch-like flame in a free fire project for After Effects:

"Here is a little test I made using CC Particle World and some vector blur to make Fire. It’s not perfect but an interesting study. One of the key things I did was used a wiggle expression on the particle birthrate to give a variable emission pattern like something was burning inconsistently. It’s a little slow to render but it is very high resolution."

Read the rest in Creating Fire in After Effects at PVC.

After Effects News Roundup

is up at PVC, featuring 3D models in AE, 3D camera tracking, ray-tracer, performance, scripting, and more.

Be sure to catch Lester Banks' First Look at AtomKraft 3D Environment for After Effects, a series of movies along with text that explain many of the features of this forthcoming comp renderer. Here's just one of Lester's overviews: