Visible sound with Cymatics

Below is a recent TED Talk from Evan Grant, Making sound visible through cymatics. It's nice to see an old idea get some high profile exposure; Hans Jenny's '70s 2-volume book Cymatics had been hard to find, but was reprinted awhile back, and the film narrated by Jenny is now on DVD (pieces are on YouTube). Cymatic figures are more often called Chladni patterns, especially in acoustic and physics texts, and are used to study nodes and vibration in instruments like violins and tablas. Someday sound will be important in providing cues in visualizations.

See also AEP posts Music of the spherical particles and Visual music and motion graphics.

"Energy Drink" tutorial for After Effects

Artbeats now has both parts of Eran Stern's "Energy Drink" tutorial, which "takes you step-by-step through designing a 3D object using Photoshop Extended, animating it in After Effects and adding a reflection." The second part shows how to add a particle explosion and a "pendulum" animation of text.

Unfortunately, original viral version of Ideocracy's Brawndo has ruined energy drinks for some people:

Occlusionist: a new AE filter in beta

Ambient occlusion render passes are usually added to a comp with a Multiply composite mode, but Stefan Minning has found demand, features, and improved render speed enough to share another After Effects filter, Occlusionist.

The filter should be available in a few weeks when render times are "more on par with what After Effects users are comfortable with" (see Comment)

Here's a few words from Stefan (also the maker of the AE filter Normality):

"Ambient occlusion is an approximative global illumination method that checks to see whether any given point on a surface is occluded by other surfaces. ... It’s an incredibly useful tool to give your renders more depth and a more realistic appearance.
...
The Occlusionist requires a depth and a normal pass to do its thing. Once you’ve gotten those rendered out of your 3D program of choice it’s pretty straightforward to create ambient occlusion effects: Apply the Occlusionist plug-in, calibrate your normal- and depth pass and there you go — clean (or noisy, as you wish) occlusion effects right in After Effects."

Panoramas in After Effects

Paul Tuersley's script pt_Panorama (was makePanorama) appeared recently in Recreating a Lexus commercial and now appears in a Video Copilot demo project of an Oval Office. Actually Video Copilot recommended this script over a year ago; see 3D Panorama AE script. Anyway, you can see the weakness of this approach (when close to the AE camera) in the oval molding, but it's mostly likely easier than building a panorama in Photoshop and using a Distort filter in AE.

Alternatives by Russell Brown can be found in his tutorials for Photoshop CS4 Extended at The Russell Brown Show: Spherical Panorama (at AdobeTV) and Advanced Spherical Panorama Stitching Techniques.

Last and not least, see Carl Larsen's a nice 4-part tutorial on Building a Cube World in After Effects, and his Horizon replacement with Mocha for AE v2 at Toolfarm.

Oh, and of course the camera-aware Trapcode Horizon was built for this purpose (video tutorial).

Update: a few more resources that popped up covering the various wrinkles in general subject...

• Mark Christiansen explains some in After Effects Script of the Week: pt Panorama.
• The options have improved in Photoshop by CS5.5; see info in Help (1, 2) and various resources from Richard Harrington.
• Also, AE Scripts released Edge blending, a solution by erLab to build up panoramic projections with 2 or more projectors. This script will create the necessary comps for you render and be able to create this using standard video projectors.

AE Apprentice #9: Shape Layers

Chris and Trish Meyer have released After Effects Apprentice Video Tutorial #9 onto PVC.

This short video 'provides a jump-start for using the vector-based Shape Layers that were introduced in After Effects CS3. It demonstrates how to create “parametric” and “path-based” shapes (using the Mask and Pen tools, respectively), setting the color for fill and stroke (including creating gradients), editing shapes, adding shape effects, and how multiple shape paths and groups interact within the same Shape Layer. This is one of our favorite recent additions to After Effects; if nothing else, you should reach for a Shape Layer whenever you used to create a solid - they’re much more flexible.'

Effects A-Z: CC Time Blend FX with Brian Maffitt

Motionworks' sorta weekly tour of built-in AE filters continues with CC Time Blend FX with Brian Maffitt. This is nostalgia that still informs:

"CC Time Blend FX was originally published as part of the Final Effects plug-in set, but is now included in After Effects as one of the Cycore (CC) plug-ins. In his recent Unplugged interview, Total Training founder and After Effects legend Brian Maffitt discusses the Total FE (Final Effects) training series and how he used Time Blend FX to make realistic smoke and plasma [before Spawn's Violator]. It’s my privilege to tell you that Brian has given Motionworks permission to host the Time Blend FX tutorial. It’s over 10 years old (the After Effects was black and white back then) but is still amazingly useful. Special thanks to Carey Dissmore for transcoding from tape."

Effects A-Z: 'Auto' Effects

Motionworks' sorta weekly tour of built-in AE filters continues with the Auto Color, Auto Contrast, and Auto Levels filters; see Effects A-Z: Auto Effects with guest Topher Welsh.

Chris & Trish Meyer have a similar series on Lynda.com, except it is running though filters by Effect category (as in the Effect Menu). Chad Perkins had a similar treatment in his Lynda.com 2008 series After Effects CS3 Effects.