February 2019 - Video Production News

Free Loop Script for After Effects!

in Featured, Motion Graphics, Scripts and Plugins/by Chris Kelly

Looping in After Effects has never been easier. There are tons of looping expressions and different ways you can get your footage or keyframes to loop. Remembering all the techniques can be tricky, so we decided to make the Crate’s Looper Script

Download the 100% Free Crate’s Looper Script Here

You must be logged in either as a Pro or a Free user to download the script. Drag and Drop into your After Effects > Scripts Folder

If you want to loop footage or media make sure to select the footage in your Project Window. Set the amount of times you want it to loop and hit Apply. You can also select your footage by pushing the ‘…’ button on Crate’s Looper Script.

The Time Remap option is auto-checked. This is the most popular looping option for Footage or Compositions. It creates 2 key-frames, one at the beginning and one at the end of your layer. If you want to loop another parameter, such as rotation or position, un-check this option. (Box 1 on the Right)

You can choose to loop-in, loop-out, or both! Looping-in will loop from the last key-frame to the first key-frame. Loop out, the more often used, will loop from the first key-frame to the last. Loop-In/Out will do both of these options.

Let’s take a look at some of our different looping options now. See where it says ‘none’ on our right? Select that drop-down. You will see these amazing looping options! Check out what each one of them does below.

Ping – Pong allows your animation to go forward until the last key-frame and then repeat the animation backwards. It’s like the popular Boomerang effect you see everywhere!

The Continue Loop is really interesting, instead of stopping on the last key-frame the animation takes into account the motion parameters and makes them continue on indefinitely.

Cycle is a useful loop. This will start your animation over to the first key-frame after the last key-frame.

Offset is definitely the most interested. We used 3 key-frames to really show this one off. The animation cycles through all 3 key-frames (start, finish, halfway back to start) but continues it’s directional movement. The animation repeats but is ‘offset’ from the difference in the key-framed parameters. This one is especially fun to make complex animations with!

Want to check out more of our scripts? See them all here

Download Space Matte Painting VFX Assets

in Featured, Visual FX/by David Blaker

Download space matte painting VFX assets here

Space is every VFX artist’s dream!

Planets, nebula, galaxies, stars, black holes and thousands of other interstellar features can be built together into a spectacular colorful mess.

In cinema, there are no rules to what our galactic scenery can look like. We can experience the dark and dangerous feel of Interstellar, or the vivid and lively action packed sets from Guardians of the Galaxy.

If you’re new here, ProductionCrate is a library of thousands of visual effects, sound effects, graphics and other creative resources – all available for you to download to save time and money! Here you can access a whole bundle of space related effects to build your incredible VFX projects.

One of our favorite collections is the huge array of nebula assets. These come as high resolution (4000×4000) graphics that you can composite into your space backgrounds. This can be done in most compositing software, such as After Effects, Hitfilm or Nuke. You may even drop several of them into your 3D software to create 3D nebulae instantly!

If you need to get started, check out our basic star texture background. This will be the perfect canvas for you to start building out your scene.

We’ll love to see what you create with these space VFX assets. You can check out a full tutorial which will breakdown the pipeline behind CGI a space scene.

If you want to check out even more cool content, have a look at our Helicopter VFX tutorial!

How To Make Bouncy Text in After Effects!

in After Effects, Featured, Motion Graphics, Written Tutorials/by Chris Kelly

Ever wanted to know how to make bouncy text in After Effects, per-Character, as quickly as possible? It’s really easy! The Text Animator in After Effects is actually quite easy to customize, with tons of hidden features. This is a great introduction if it is your first time using it.

First off, type in your text you want to bounce with the Text Tool (Ctrl + T)

Toggle down the arrow to the left of your text (Box 1 Below) so you can see the Animate button.

Toggle the Animate Button (Box 2 Below)

Select the Position Parameter from the Drop Down (see left)

Note all the other different parameters you can animate here!Opacity, scale, skew, rotation can all be animated independently or all together. For us, we will just use the Position parameter for this tutorial.

After selecting ‘Position’ you will see the Animation Controls (see below image). There you will see ‘Add’ with an arrow similar to the ‘Animate’ arrow. Click that. ‘Property’ and ‘Selector’ will appear, scroll over and click selector and choose ‘Wiggly’. If you are familiar with the Wiggle Expression this is a similar tool specifically for Text Animation.

For now, just select Wiggly, let’s get that text bouncing.

This is another great place to explore around if this is your first time trying the Animator tool for text! Notice the Expression option? There is a lot of powerful uses there, we will return to it in another tutorial.

Notice the Wiggly Selector (1 Box Below) You will see the familiar Position parameter and stopwatch. Next to that you will see the X and Y coordinates. We want this text to bounce up and down on the Y Axis. Let’s Increase that number to something low. 18 Works for our purposes.

If you hit the spacebar and preview you will notice that your text is already bouncing! If you want to customize further, that’s easy. Notice the Range Selector (Box 2, see right image) You can control the End or Start of the bounce on your text.

Use the stopwatch to create keyframes. You can have your text bounce Left to Right or Right to Left easily.

Drop down your Wiggly Selector (see below) for even more parameters you can customize. Change the speed of your bounce by increasing or decreasing your Wiggles/Second. Change your correlation if you want less, more or all characters to bounce together or completely independently. There are many settings here, the best way to learn is to do, find the right animation for your project!

Preview Videos Feature Update

in Featured, Features/by Chris Kelly

We’re always looking for ways to improve your workflow and speed up your process.

Time is a valuable thing, especially with deadlines. One of our users had the fantastic idea of adding Navigation Arrows to our Video Previews on FootageCrate. These allow you to browse search results or bundles a lot faster and more efficiently than before.

Browsing our massive library just got better, enjoy!

The Preview Arrows are on the left and right (See above) for all Video Previews. Simple search or select the category of content you want to browse, select any effect for the preview window and start searching.

Kick down a door with VFX!

in After Effects, Featured, Visual FX/by David Blaker

Whether you’re making a dramatic entrance, or you just don’t like doors, kicking down doors with VFX can be an awesome addition to your movie.

We featured a shot in our Captain Marvel VFX tutorial that included just this, and now we’re showing you how we did it!

You can apply these steps to almost any software, so whether you have Blender, 3Ds Max, Maya or Cinema4D, you’ll be able to follow along. Likewise, most compositing software (After Effects, Premiere Pro) will be powerful enough for you to use these techniques.

Watch our quick tutorial on how you can create your own door-kick VFX!

Want to learn even more compositing tricks? Check out our UFO invasion tutorial!

Spaceship UFO VFX – Tutorial

in After Effects, Featured, Visual FX, Written Tutorials/by David Blaker

Download HD UFO VFX Assets Here

Whether they’re friendly or not (usually the latter), no Sci-Fi movie is complete without alien spaceships flying over a city. They’re some of the coolest VFX shots out there.

We’re super happy to be introducing these new HD UFO effects, all available for you to download! We even have a free option, so this tutorial is for all of you.

Inspired by Independence day, District 9 and Arrival, we want to show you how you can create your own blockbuster CGI alien spaceship. So let’s get started with the tutorial!

You can use almost any compositing software for this tutorial, whether that’s Nuke, Hitfilm, or Premiere Pro. I’ll be using After Effects!

We’ll first need the city that our outer-worldly visitors will be hanging out over. I’ve gone for the popular choice, New York City! You can download the same image here from Pexels.

You can apply the same VFX techniques to a video if you would rather use that! If you haven’t yet downloaded the UFO assets, download the effects here.

We can drop our first spaceship into our shot! You’ll find that it’s already looking incredibly realistic without any work needed to be done. FootageCrate elements are all designed to make your workflow as easy as possible!

The first adjustment we want to make is ensuring that the lighting is in the correct direction. You’ll see that the sunlight is coming from the left side of the screen, so if the UFO asset doesn’t match, simply flip it horizontally. This makes the scene seem consistent.

The next small adjustment we can perform is adding a tint effect. Make both colors match the sky, so that the UFO appears to be distant in the sky. Typically, you’ll increase the tint if the spaceship is larger or further away to give a sense of scale.

Feel free to go crazy and add even more of our spaceship assets! Once again you can change the tint levels so that the closer spaceships have less of it applied (which you can see in the top right asset).

If you have buildings that are supposed to obstruct the view of some of these VFX assets like I have here, you can either rotoscope the foreground, or use a simple color key with the sky as the target! We can then use this duplicated layer above our UFO effects to put the buildings in front.

And it’s as easy as that! In no time we have our VFX UFO invasion underway. Add any final corrections you would like to your scene. I’ve even used our Auto-Cinemabar plugin to quickly create the cinema aspect ratios in a single click!

We’ll love to see what you create with these UFO VFX assets! If you’re tempted to create your own UFO animations, Pro Users can download our model here.

If you’re interested in more compositing tutorials, check out our Helicopter tutorial.

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