Gravity preset, Unpack Precomp script + more

@AdobeAE notes some free utilities by Jesse Toula, who has the new tutorial on Custom Shatter Maps. Among the templates and footage for sale are his Unpack Precomp script and a Gravity preset, Quick Gravity, and a separate tutorial.

[Update: didn't check to see if this was the same but Jesse Toula now has a Gravity in After Effects tutorial on Creative Cow.]

There's probably more resources in AE Help, but you can also check out a script palette that's been shipping with AE called Gravity.jsx for a bouncing ball effect. For something similar with expressions, see Dan Ebberts' Bouncing Ball example on MotionScript, and his gravity expression triggered by a marker at Creative Cow (see also Expression example: Animate scale at each layer marker):

g = 1000; // gravitational constant

if (marker.numKeys > 0 && time > marker.key(1).time){
t = time - marker.key(1).time;
y = g*t*t/2;
value + [0,y]
}else{
value
}

Update: see also Better Bouncing in After Effects on a similar preset by Ian Haigh.

Custom Shatter Maps for After Effects

Jesse Toula has a new video tutorial on Custom Shatter Maps for the Shatter effect in After Effects.

Additional tips can be found in AE Help, in Design a Breathtaking Body Shatter Effect by Lloyd Alvarez on AEtuts, and Planet Explosion from Video Copilot.

There's also a good thread with some info derived from Brian Maffitt (who originally designed this "Evolution" filter) [and update: maybe the definitive explanation in Chapter 5-6 of Brian's classic tutorial, via Shatter plug-in tour from Total Training vault].

Update: Jesse adds extra detail and corrections to his tutorial,

'I recently got some notes on my tutorial, "Custom Shatter Maps" from the creator of the "Shatter" effect, Brian Maffitt. He tells me that there are a couple little things I misinterpreted.

1) Shatter maps do not "ignore" black, they ignore transparency. In my case, the background was set to black, so what I was calling black was actually transparent.

2) "Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Blue, Green, Red, White, and Black. Those are the only important colors to consider when making a Shatter map, and anything else will be "clamped" to those colors inside Shatter. You can turn off "interpolate palette" in Colorama to force the primaries in the shatter map, which will give you an excellent visual preview of the results."

So there are a couple notes straight from the creator. Keep them in mind when you are making your shatter maps.'

Pseudo or custom effects in After Effects

Jesse Toula has a new tutorial, Creating Pseudo Effects for AE, a full intro and update on custom effects:

"Pseudo Effects, sometimes called 'custom effect controls' and 'custom expression controls' allow you to put all of your controls into a single 'effect'. You can set your own defaults and value ranges so that users can use the reset button to return to the defaults you chose. There are many more advantages to using Pseudo Effects, and this tutorial will go over all of them as I walk you through creating one from scratch. The creation of these controls is done in an .XML file, so for those of you how do not feel comfortable writing your own code, or just want to speed up the process, I also end the tutorial by showing you a way of creating all of the XML without doing any programming by hand."

Custom effects are similar to Animation presets and to the more specific but limited examples in the Behaviors Presets in AE. "Pseudo effects" is the name originally given by Charles Bordenave (aka nabscripts at AE Scripts), who posted an "Effect Creator" script at AEnhancers in 2006.

Maltaannon popularized and deployed custom effects in a variety of ways starting around 2007. See his What CustomEffects are for an introduction to his tutorials and products.

AEtuts had a series on custom effects in late 2009, along with others posted since. You can wade through the search results at AEtuts (or Google) for all the posts. Here's a smattering of some other custom effect resources:

• Create Your Own Custom Effects! by Momcilo Stojkovic is the opener for a week of custom effects at AE Tuts. This text tutorial shows you how to modify and reimport PresetEffects.xml, so you can group and save expression controls as a unique filter/preset in After Effects.

• AE Tuts posted a cool preset and tutorial with Distribute Your Layers in 3D – Custom Effect by Rob Schofield. This preset effect is similar to part of RGS Plane Space (was 3D Assistants) and Create3DShapes and 3D Layer Distributor from AE Scripts.

• Topher Welsh rounded up 17 Custom Effects at AE Tuts; see also the AEnhancers library

• Pie Chart, a custom effect preset for AE by Jorrit Schulte (he collected his others with a video at Video Copilot)

• Ellipse Tool Plus from Hypoly (James Chiny)

• Eran Stern has a Creative Cow AE podcast, Markers Leaks, an introduction to his preset and Custom Effect which he uses to trigger actions using layer markers inside of Adobe After Effects.

Procedural Crumble and other Shatter resources

Procedural Crumble is a new tutorial from Video Copilot:

Build a procedural crumble effect in After Effects using the Shatter plug-in in a unique way. We also composite dust elements from Action Essentials 2 and talk about following your dreams.

You can also download the project files.

For more info on the Shatter Effect, see this sample of resources:

• AE Help
• Shatter plug-in tour from the creator of the effects (part1 below)
• Design a Breathtaking Body Shatter Effect by Lloyd Alvarez on AEtuts
• Planet Explosion from Video Copilot
• Custom Shatter Maps from Jesse Toula
• Shatter and disintegration: techniques for our time on more tutorials by Andrew Kramer and others
• other AEP posts tagged Shatter
• [update] Angie Taylor showed how to use control layers with Card Dance and Shatter at Digital Arts. 
• J. Schuh posted Shattering Glass with Adobe After Effects 
• Extruding 3D Text & Shapes 2: The Shatter Method from Andrew Devis
• A Simple Puzzle Animation With The Shatter Plug-in by Tibor Miklos

AE Preset: Back N Forth + animation aids

Back N Forth is a free sine wave generator preset for the position, scale, and rotation in every axis of your objects inside of After Effects:

What this means is that with this preset, you can automatically make your layers move from side to side (or up and down) in a motion that is always equidistant from the center on both ends! This is different from using something like “Wiggle” in that wiggle is more or less random motion, whereas sin waves are constant and fluid.

Author Neal Barenblat has another preset as well, Flicker On.

Back N Forth joins other recent expression-based presets as animation aids, like Gravity preset from Jesse Toula and Better Bouncing by Ian Haigh. See foundation basics and much more from JJ Gifford (plus harmonic motion) and Dan Ebberts.

Not disimilar is Ease and Wizz, a script to generate alternative keyframe interpolations for After Effects (especially to the sine-like Easy Ease). Looking at pictures by Chris Meyer is the fastest way to see what behaviors you get with this script. Author Ian Haigh has a nice demo on AE Scripts; here's a preview:

Continuing with tangents off sine animation are some tutorials for creating animation of sines:

• Creating sine animation with the Wave Warp effect by Aharon Rabinowitz
• Generate a Dynamic Morphing Background Design with Sinedots by Stefan Surmabojov at AEtuts+ (below). Sinedots is available free for CS5 and earlier from Philipp Spöth (deja vu).

Update: animationPATTERNS, by Markus Bergelt, is "a keyframe-based easing assistance, that allows you to edit and create new easing types. It comes with a dockable palette, a set of default interpolation methods like bounce, rubber, pendulum... and is very easy to use! !animationPATTERNS does not work with properties that already use expressions. They'll get replaced by clicking apply pattern."