Get the look of Trapcode’s 3D Stroke with no plugins!

So Trapcode’s 3D Stroke is a great After Effects plugin with a long history. And it’s only about a hundred bucks, so if you make a living animating just go buy the real thing. It’s a lot less hacky.

If you’re a cheap bastard, though, or if you enjoy using AE features in ways they’re not designed to be used, have I got the free preset for you!

Kinect MoCap Animation in After Effects — Part 4: Rigging a Digital Puppet

Yes, it’s the part you’ve all been waiting for: it’s finally time to set up your character layers!

This was originally going to be in Part 3, but there are so many steps I realized I needed to break things down a bit more.

Kinect MoCap Animation in After Effects — Part 3: Building the Puppet Rigging Template

Welcome back! So now that you have your tracking data recorded, it’s time to build a character to apply it to. This is where things get a bit complicated.

Kinect MoCap Animation in After Effects — Part 2: Motion Capture with KinectToPin

Welcome back. You have your USB adapter and you’ve installed all the software I linked in Part I, right? Now it’s time to get KinectToPin up and running.

Kinect MoCap Animation in After Effects — Part 1: Getting Started

Hello, I’m Victoria Nece. I’m a documentary animator, and today I’m going to show you how to use your Kinect to animate a digital puppet like this one in After Effects.

After Effects Tutorial: Edmonson Cartoon Effect

Requires After Effects CS4+. Use the Cartoon effect to turn a sequence of still photographs into animated line art. You can composite the result over a wide range of textured backgrounds.

Note:
Almost a year to the date I originally wrote this tutorial, I can finally make it public because the film has been released! You can watch it here: Jury Selection: Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Company.

This is the trailer, which is almost entirely done with the effect I’m about to explain:

I’m currently working on a new Constitution Project film about Edmonson V. Leesville Concrete Company. In the past, we’ve used methods like digital puppetry to avoid filming reenactments. Edmonson is a much more recent court case than the others we’ve covered (1991), but the US Supreme Court only permits audio recordings of oral arguments, so there’s still no footage of the proceedings.

We were actually able to interview several of the people involved, however, resulting in tons of sharp, clear green screen footage (It’s also our first CP film in HD), as well as hundreds if not thousands of still images. So what to do with them?

Crochet an Android Robot

I love the Android logo guy. He’s adorable. So I thought I’d make a stuffed one!

Okay Paintings

It is possible to create great-looking digital paintings with Photoshop. But it can’t be done with filters alone: at the very least, you’re going to need a tablet and some drawing skills. Running effects on a photo is simply no match for work done by hand.

Embroidered Text in Photoshop

A friend of mine was working on some logos for a little league team and asked me for a way to make text look as if it had been embroidered onto a uniform.

After a fair amount of experimentation, it turns out it’s not that hard to do — but it does take a little tweaking. The final results are surprisingly versatile.

Get it Straight

Here’s a quick Photoshop trick that takes the guesswork out of rotating your images.