Effects A-Z tip: Card Wipe

From here, life goes on at PVC...

The After Effects: Effects A-Z tip series from Motionworks continues with guest host James Zwadlo demoing the Card Wipe transition effect in After Effects.  Card Wipe (AE Help) and Matrix (from AE Scripts) are both easier to use than the Card Dance effect.

Update: here's the latest ones available in the series...

• The CC Flo Motion Effect January 30, 2012
• The Channel Blur Effect December 10, 2011 by maltaannon
• The Change Color Effect October 24, 2011 by Jack Grundy
• The Cell Pattern Effect October 8, 2011 by John Dickinson (makes rocks!)
• The Caustics Effect October 5, 2011 by Eran Stern
• The Cartoon Effect August 16, 2011 by Zola
• The CC Bender and Bend It Effects July 5, 2011 by Quba Michalski

Here's the list of previous posts on the Effects A-Z tip series from Motionworks.

'Matrix' AE script makes cards dance

AE Scripts has a new After Effects script, Matrix, which breaks your layer into pieces and animates it for you with a bunch of options.

It's an inexpensive script, but it's not clear what advantages it has over built-in effects like the Card Dance filter [see comments for some good reasons]. For more on Card Dance and similar effects, see Animate a Photo Mosaic in After Effects, Card Dance transition, Camera Rig script & Particular 3D Ribbon, and Serial 3D flip effect in AE.

See also a Total Training video from Brian Maffitt (he created the effect) on Using gradients to control the Card Dance plugin's behavior, and Ayato's Card Dance Flag.

Card Dance transition, Camera Rig script, & Particular 3D Ribbon

Via Lester Banks, Chris Hodgson of syrup syrup has an After Effects tutorial on Motion Design Love that demonstrates how to create a transition using the built-in filter Card Dance. AE Help has more on Card Dance, which only works in 8-bit/pixel mode but is able to use the AE camera and lights in the same composition.


MDL - Create a cool logo transition using card particle from Motion Design Love on Vimeo.

And, via Motion Design Love's This week in Motion Design series, Hypoly posted his Simple Camera Rig Script that will set up a simple camera rig with rotation and position controls located in one Control Null. He says it's easier to use than the Simple Camera Rig by Maltaannon, and explains how to make his work with Videocopilot's Sure Target 2.

Hypoly also shows you how to create a 3D Ribbon / Wire in AE with Trapcode Particular and a few expressions.




3D Ribbon / Wire in After Effects from Hypoly on Vimeo.

Serial 3D flip effect in AE

MaxAfter has posted an After Effects tutorial and project in Flip Effect, which shows you how to manually create a pattern of shapes and flip them.

An alternative might be the built-in filter Card Dance (covered by MaxAfter earlier), which only works in 8-bit/pixel mode, but is able to use AE camera and lights in the same composition. Using a Repeater operation on a Shape layer doesn't seem to offer much of an advantage here either, but for examples check out Eran Stern's More of the Same series of tutorials. For more on Card Dance see other AEP posts tagged Card Dance and Chris Zwar's Halftone effect – using Card Dance, which uses the Card Dance filter and a Shape layer with the Repeater operation.

Unplugged 5: interview with Brian Maffitt

Motionworks interview Unplugged 5 features Brian Maffitt, co-founder of Total Training and Atomic Power Corporation. Maffitt's Atomic Power filters Shatter, Foam, Vegas, Colorama, Radio Waves, Wave World, Card Dance, Caustics, Psunami, etc. were mostly absorbed into After Effects.

Update: Unplugged 5: Brian Maffitt (Part 2) is out Aug 23.

Animate a Photo Mosaic in After Effects

This post has been updated on PVC as Animate a Photo Mosaic in After Effects: A few resources. The quick tip for making an animated photo mosaic in After Effects is to generate the mosaic externally and animate with the built-in Card Dance plug-in.

Here's the legacy leftover:

Other suggestions from the AE-List discussion included using Card Wipe, Shatter to animate the mosaic, and using particle sytems like Trapcode Form. Also mentioned, by rendernyc, was the experimental filter Moza by NABscripts. But it's no longer available and only seen on a Japanese website; according to a Russian site, it "only works with TSS3 and Open CV (requires cv100.dll)."