Recently I worked on a promo for the film Green Zone here at Foxtel Box Office. The film is full of great helicopter shots over Baghdad, so I suggested we work some 3D supers into shots to give the promo more impact. Having just finished beta testing Camera Tracker, The Foundry’s new 3D tracker for Adobe After Effects, I knew it would be perfect for this project.

Camera Tracker—originally developed for The Foundry’s high-end compositing tool Nuke X—gives After Effects users powerful 3D tracking tool directly inside After Effects.

Having used a number of other trackers on the market, I found this to be similar to PFHoe from Pixel Farm. It’s very simple to use and incredibly powerful. Full integration with After Effects means there is no longer any need to open up a stand alone application and have to transfer the data around.

Camera Tracker has the key features you’d expect in a 3D tracker, including free camera and rotating camera options, focal distance and lens distortion settings. Once a scene is tracked, removing weaker points from the point cloud is quick and easy before solving the camera and creating the scene.

You still have control over the point cloud to choose the desired orientation of the scene, and the option to create Solids or Null Objects from the points is handy.

I generally found that the first solve was solid and the camera behaved as expected. Having said that, the camera moves were shot professionally and had plenty of detail to track. I’m yet to test it on long unstable shots with multiple zooms and pans for example.

With CameraTracker, The Foundry has made 3D Tracking more approachable, and given users a new world of creative options inside of After Effects. I certainly recommend it to any After Effects user who wants to add match-moving to their toolkit.

You can check out more of my work at brettmorris.com

The Foundry has released 3D Camera Tracker and Kronos, two exciting new plug-ins for Adobe After Effects.

A Day In Paris by Benoit Millot. Beautifully shot on Canon 7D, with tight 3D integration.

An inspired 3D short film by Sebastien Laban & Virginie Goyons.

Amateurmedia.net has some terrific type-based Cinema 4D tutorials.

It will come as no surprise to Motionworks regulars that I’m a big fan of Brian Maffitt. Brian is a veteran trainer and someone that I have aspired to while developing my own presentation style. The foundations of my After Effects knowledge were built watching Brian’s Total After Effects series. [Read more]

Superb CG architectural renderings. Quite beautiful and hypnotic.

French motion design artist Pierre Magnol of GKaster has some truly stunning work, you must see.

In this Adobe After Effects walkthrough learn how Red Giant Holomatrix was used to give grungy 3D text a dynamic sci-fi look. Grab a 10% discount over at Red Giant Software using this code “motionworks10”.

Watch tutorial (14min, 42MB)

In this extended tutorial learn how to identify the field order of footage and interpret it collectly; create a realistic Jumbotron-style look using CC Ball Action, Glow, Levels and Curves; turn the jumbotron into a 3D column mounted on grungy wire mesh using Zaxwerks 3D Layer Warps; and fine tune the look by adding animated arrows plus a touch of [Read more]

Beautiful work by Korb. Check out his reel too – magnificent in it’s simplicity. Via @engine.

Maltaannon is back with a new tutorial on getting control of the Adobe After Effects camera.

Dosch Design has a superb collection of high resolution HDRI images, including the very handy Chrome & Studio Effects V2 series.

In this recording of a recent e-seminar, learn how to create a Sopranos–style text look, inspired by HBO. Main tools covered include Adobe After Effects and Zaxwerks ProAnimator.

As with all graphics on Fox Classics, the palette for this spot was restricted to orange, black and white. Being that this is Sunday “Night” at the Movies, it made the most sense to use black as the base color. Most of these movies are from the 60’s/70’s and when I heard the music (The Supremes) I thought of one of those old 70’s-style beaded door curtains and decided to use that as the basis of the design. Read more

For this Adobe After Effects project the brief was pretty open but I had to include graphic elements from the Crime and Investigation network’s existing identity along with key words and footage from various “ci” programs. The channel tagline is “look closer” so I decided to use glass panels similar to the glass slides one uses to examine specimens under a microscope. Read more

Aixsponza has kindly given Cinema 4D users our very own teapot model for radiosity testing.

Chris Zwar has a new 3-part tutorial covering planning and creating a complex 3D project in Adobe After Effects. (via Todd Kopriva).

Digieffects has announced a new Adobe After Effects plug-in for simulating a 3D scene from 2D stills or video footage. The Camera Mapper was developed in collaboration with Mark Christiansen, author of After Effects Studio Techniques.