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!

Shh! A sneak peek at what I’ve been working on…

So what exactly am I doing with all the mocap stuff I’ve been working on with KinectToPin + After Effects? Well… add in expression-controlled facial animation and using Dynamic Link to live-switch unrendered AE comps via Premiere’s multicam setup (I am kind of freaked out that this seems to Just Work), and it looks like we’re about to have an animated Actually Happening. Shhh!

I’ve been figuring this out as I go, but once I have all the elements rigged it should be almost trivial to make new episodes. Also I built the set in PHOTOSHOP which is ridiculous. I don’t have any proper 3D software on my laptop, so the table is all Repousse shapes extruded from rounded rectangles.

Kinect + AE: A better way to control the puppet’s head

So in my Kinect + After Effects tutorials I offer a couple ways to rig the puppet’s head, but neither one is an ideal solution: the first one leads to occasional face-stretching and the second to increasing the manual animation workload substantially.

But there’s a better way! Put the anchor point in the center of the face, and attach the position keyframe to the Head control point. Then apply the following expression (based on one originally found here) to the rotation parameter:

this_point=thisComp.layer("Spine").effect("Head")("Point");
that_point=thisComp.layer("Spine").effect("Neck")("Point");
delta=sub(this_point, that_point);
angle=Math.atan2(delta[1], delta[0]);
ang = radians_to_degrees(angle);
(ang+90)%360+transform.rotation

Now the head will rotate to match to the angle formed by the head and neck points, but without the weird distortion the Puppet Tool can cause. You can tweak the head’s attach point by shifting the anchor point.

Side Project: The Fix Helpline Video

Just completed a freelance animation project to introduce The Fix‘s new treatment helpline. Take a look:

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.

Animation Test: Kinect MoCap with After Effects

I’ve been doing a lot of work with rigging Kinect-controlled digital puppets for After Effects animation. I’m using a combination of Nick Fox-Gieg’s KinectToPin for Processing and a bunch of expressions to smooth things out and make connecting pins to their source tracks a little less painful. I’m hoping to put together a tutorial soon, but in the meantime here’s a test render of a puppet created from a very old engraving:

Great News: AEFlame for CS5!

Hooray! The fine folks over at AEScripts are now hosting a beta release of AEFlame for CS4/CS5. Best of all: it’s still free, so there’s nothing stopping you from spending the afternoon making big swirly fractal designs.

If you need a refresher on how exactly this (admittedly rather baffling at first glance) plugin works, take a look at my tutorial.