In this walkthrough tutorial learn some of the techniques and workflow used to create a battle-scared Captain America Shield using Cinema 4D, Photoshop and After Effects.

Watch Example (Captain America)  |  Watch Example (Chris Evans)

In this walkthrough tutorial I demonstrate how After Effects, GenArts Sapphire, Red Giant Key Correct (use motionworks10 for a 10% discount) and Video Copilot Optical Flares were used to create sweeping title graphics. If you purchase MovieType for Cinema 4D  you also get membership to MovieType Plus, where I discuss how Cinema 4D and MovieType were used to style and animate the text.
Watch tutorial (flv) | Watch tutorial (mp4)

COMING SOON, MovieType for Cinema 4D is almost here. In this sneak peak I explain what MovieType is and demonstrate a few of the many presets that will ship when MovieType is released soon.   Watch (flv) | Watch (mp4)

As with Nick’s previous products – the HDR Light kit and HDR studio kit — City Kit comes as a Cinema 4D library file, with all the goodness in an easy-to-find and usable format within the Cinema 4d content browser.

Upon first inspection of the City Kit you will see a City Rig Day, City Rig Night, Cement Ground and a Daylight and Presets folder.

The Presets are a great way to get started fast. They include City On The Water, City Text and MoGraph City.

City On The Water instantly presents you with a surprisingly convincing scene of a city surrounded by water.

City Text is a top-down view of text positioned amongst buildings, with an “Inception” feel.

and Mograph city is a more graphical looking city, with a single colour material on the building, ambient occlusion and a gradient as the background.

City Kit ships with a range of tutorials, presented by Nick and co-developer Chris Schmidt, covering everything you need to know to fully maximize your City Kit use. Nick covers the basics of the day and night cities and how to get the most out of them by customizing the size and density of your city, the lighting presets to give your city the richness and life, and some tips and tricks for visually pushing it to the next level.

Nick has put a lot of thought into the City Kit, keeping all the settings to a minimum, while allowing for advanced customisation, which gives users the flexibility to create their own individual looks.

Already examples have started showing up around the web, where people have built entirely new cities with new buildings, such as this Sci-Fi city by Daniel Terrazas of Mamba Studio.

In this example I created the Tron Legacy city look in just 15 minutes!

Zaxwerks has released ProAnimator 5. This version has many new features that users have been asking for, including an built-in path editor, layers, and warping.

aescripts has posted a nifty new Adobe After Effects script that adds a subtle bevel to your After Effects layers, making them appear “more 3D”.

In this step-by-step tutorial for Digital Juice learn how to take a layered Photoshop file and breath life into it in After Effects, for a grungy mechanical look with loads of depth. Specifically we look at preparing Photoshop files in Photoshop, how to import the photoshop file into After Effects, animating by creating expressed relationships between layers, positioning layers in 3D, simple camera, lighting and depth of field techniques.  Watch Tutorial

Note: Adding 100 at the end of the expression isn’t actually necessary when working with Rotation (or any property that can have a negative range). I usually use it to reverse Opacity (which won’t return a negative value so needs the +100). Adding 100 to Rotation simply added another 100 degrees to the returned value which had the result of “flipping” the linked cog. You could simply use *-1 or simply add a minus (-) at the front of the expression, such as: -thisComp.layer(“My Layer”).transform.rotation. Thanks to Harry Frank for the help here.

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.