After Effects 2013: features & requests

...and the AE team's thoughts on the future.

With 3 actual updates to After Effects in 2013, it's become difficult for many users to keep track of all the new features. Reading through today's post by Todd Kopriva is a good way to do a reality check of what's happened this year.

Read the rest at PVC... Top After Effects feature requests of 2013.

Circles in After Effects

Making circles in After Effects seems like a trivial exercise, but there are a ton of approaches to their various forms in design.

Circles come in movement and repetition, from expressions & scripts, as Shapes, masks, particle effects like Particle World, Bubbles, Ball Action, from the Circle effect, CC Sphere, Polar Coordinates, Wave World, Radio Waves, halftone effects (Card Dance, Particular, effects), and so on.

A few of the many circle-related tutorials and resources for After Effects are sampled in Circles in After Effects on PVC.

Spirographs in After Effects

Spirographs in After Effects had it's 15-minutes of fame years ago and were lost in the mists of time (around here anyway), except for a few tutorial/project posts. Revisiting the topic reveals a variety of approaches and directions.

Read the article at PVC...

Spirals in After Effects

Spirals are used as design guides and elements or paths for text, shapes, particles, and layers. Here's a few resources for using and creating spirals in After Effects and other Adobe applications.

Think outside the box —  and inside the sphere — with A 5-Part Exploration Of After Effects Spiral Filters by Brian Maffitt, the grand daddy of spiral tutorials (pictured). This is from an era before the Path Text plug-in and the Textacy text engine!

... see the rest at PVC, Spirals in After Effects.

The Ray-traced 3D renderer in After Effects

A big addition to After Effects CS6 was the introduction of a Ray-traced 3D composition renderer that handles reflections, transparency, index of refraction, environment maps, in addition to the existing material options. Today in Creative Cloud CC, the chief limitation is still render time, but there's set-up advice for those willing to overcome the obstacles to get the lovely renders.