Article Focus: In part two of his shotgun tutorial, Michael Park will demonstrate how to incorporate the 3d footage together with 2d footage in After effects and use different filters to create the distortion surrounding the blast from the barrel of the shotgun and the air distortion trailing the individual shotgun pellets as they race towards the camera. He will also cover some time remapping techniques to add some more interest to your shot.
Creating a shotgun blast using 3ds max and AE: Part 2
Greg,
Glad you liked it. If you want to make the trails more oblong, rather than circular, simply elongate the trail spheres and make sure you dont have any rotation applied in pflow. If you wanted more of a solid stream effect, just increase the number of trail particles and increase the blur level in the trails precomp for a smoother effect.
Creating a shotgun blast using 3ds max and AE: Part 2
Mike I was out of town for the weekend. Just got your email and watched the tutorial. Awesome. Thanks again for it. One question to add, if I wanted to make the distorted effects more oblong than circular, how might I achieve that?
Creating a shotgun blast using 3ds max and AE: Part 2
Thanks Tim for the VMWave/bootcamp thing, but, I don't have an Intel based Mac that both of those apps need to run. Well looks like I'm stuck with the monterous learning curve of Maya. Don't get me wrong Maya is a great tool if you can use it and the thing about the tutorials that are out there is that they don't actualy acheive anything and so it's dificult to think how to use the the tools that are available. The tools I use in AE, I use because I have used them following tutorials countless times.
Creating a shotgun blast using 3ds max and AE: Part 2
Not to get too far off topic Steve, but the system requirements for 3DSM 2008 at autodesk don't mention Mac support. I also couldn't find anything about it in the autodesk press releases, or in that fount of definitive wisdom, the COW's Max forum.
Can you point me in the right direction? Maybe you know something Mike. I'd be happy being wrong about this...
Creating a shotgun blast using 3ds max and AE: Part 2
First of all, Tim and John, thanks for the nice feedback. I am glad you found the tutorials useful. With regard to max and macs, I am in the dark, as for better or worse, I grew up a pc guy. The ole cant teach a dog new tricks thing. But the prinicples in the tutorial should hold for any 3d application. My goal was to demonstrate how to use a 3d program in conjunction with afx and get the best out of each.
Second, Tim, your wish is my command. I already have 2 new tutorials, which should come online any day now, on how to use Trapcode's particular to achieve a shimmering glitter effect. There are 2 tutorials - one simple, and one more advanced using expressions. I hope you enjoy them. If you have any specific requests for tutorials, please let me know, and I will see what I can do.
Once again, thank you for the kind words and best of luck.
Creating a shotgun blast using 3ds max and AE: Part 2
First, I love this tutorial. GREAT stuff!
Second, I'm willing to bet that Max will never come out on Mac. The good news is that, thanks to Boot Camp, you can use it on your Mac computer. Folks all over the Cow are doing it.
If you're willing to sacrifice a bit of performance, you can buy VMWare Fusion, which runs Windows as a Mac OS application. You can put 3DSM in your doc, and it will automatically launch exactly as it needs to. Please try the free trial at vmware.com. I think you'll find it answers all your needs.
Sorry for the tangent. I'd just hate for any Mac user to miss out on Max.
Again, great tutorial Michael! Please sir, may I have some more? :-)
Creating a shotgun blast using 3ds max and AE: Part 2
Hello Michael,
Great tutorial, but, I'm on a Mac, and so can't use 3Ds Max. Do you know of anyone doing a similar tutorial on Maya 2008. Oh and buy the way don't you think it's about time that industry professionals like yourself, Aharon Robinowits and Andrew Kramer got onto 'Autodesk' and lobbied them to bring out a version of ‘3Ds Max’ for “”Mac””, (as it seems to be the app. of choice for people like yourself). We poor Mac users seem to be getting a raw deal with tutorials that include integrating 3D objects into AE from third party apps.
Creating a shotgun blast using 3ds max and AE: Part 2
Abraham,
Thanks for the kind words. Export formats are pretty universal. As I stated in part 1 of the tutorial, I prefer to export my 3d renderings to as series of image files such as .pngs or .tgas. The reason being, that these formats dont have some of the same compression problems as do other codecs or formats. avis, movs, mpgs...all compress the video stream to make the file smaller. That is fine for final output, but when you want to apply effects, it can cause problems. I recommend exporting to pngs with an alpha channel, and then importing the image sequence into after effects as I showed in part 2 of this tutorial.
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