A 3D Hello

I’m sure that most of you have watched Avatar. No? You must be kidding me! Everyone should experience this award-winning 3D movie at least once.

Anyway, I am not here to talk about how to make an Avatar-like movie – that’s way too advanced for us to discuss here! The main thing I want to point out today is that the digital world is now going 3D. From 2D animation to 3D animation; from 2D film to 3D film; from 2D games to 3D games – everyone is catching onto this major trend!

But why 3D? Hmm. I would say because it’s eye-catching, engaging and realistic. Don’t you agree with this?

Revolutions are everywhere. Not too long ago, Adobe Flash CS4 introduced 3D transformation functionality. Back in my university days, when I had to do animations which included rotating designs from one side to the other, it was such a torturous process! Frame. By. Frame. Can you imagine that? But now, I can simply flip the design by 180º or zoom it in and out in the twinkling of an eye! If only this feature was introduced earlier…

As you may be aware, among Integricity Visuals’ projects are creating 3D montages and opening gambits for corporate clients. We usually do the animations in Adobe After Effects. Well, After Effects is a cool software. Check out this site to see how it’s used in producing the movie Avatar.

Well, it used to be an impossible mission for me to work with this software – there was once when I just could not get what I wanted, and ended up doing the animation in Maya (another 3D animation software) instead, which I am more familiar with. However, I realized that I needed to learn anyway, so I searched for tutorials online. To me, there’s no short cut to being an expert; we all learn through trial and error.

Other than that, a tip for better integration of 3D into your animations is: understand how the camera works! ;)

Nowadays, learning how to use After Effects is not difficult. Just perform a Google search and you’ll get thousands of tutorials. One of my favorites is Video Copilot – their free video tutorials are simply cool and easy to follow, and teach you many useful shortcut keys. These help speed up your work (which also mean going home earlier! :p).

By the way, did you know that Adobe developers sometimes hide surprise ‘easter eggs’ in some of their applications? Well, since Easter was just last weekend, to end my post,  I am giving you an After Effects Easter egg. Follow the steps below (it only works if you have After Effects installed):

1. Open After Effects.

2. Create a new composition, then add anything to the stage (solid will work fine).

3. Go to your ‘Effect Controls’ panel (Window->Effect Controls). You will see your computer name and the item you’d just created. (e.g. Comp 1 * Orange Solid 1)

4. Hold down the Shift button and click just right of the words. If you did it right, you should hear a sheep sound.

[source]

I heard the sheep sound! So cute. Did you hear it too? :)

If you are still not ready for 3D technology, be quick to catch it, or the world will not be waiting for you!

Shu Wan
Digital Artist
Integricity Visuals