• Log in / create account

 

• Article
• Discussion
• Edit
• History

From PlugInFinder

Contents 1 The Stats 2 Purchase The Magic 3D FX 3 Demos 4 Description 4.1 General 4.2 Camera 4.3 Grid 4.4 Cubes 4.5 Sides 4.6 Light

The Stats

• Developer: CHV-electronics
• Version: 1.0
• Platform: Mac
• Host Applications: Apple Final Cut Pro 5.1.2 and Apple Motion 2
• Part of CHV Magic 3D FX
• FxPlug and Mac Universal Binary

Purchase The Magic 3D FX

• Magic 3D FX
• CHV FxPlug Bundle 11-2006 - All FxPlug Plug-ins from CHV-electronics

Demos

Click here for demos

Description

CubeGrid 3D creates a grid of identical cubes. The grid is highly adjustable and offers a wide variety of parameters to tweak. You can freely move the camera around and create beautiful transitions. A light source highlights each cube and creates specular light reflections on the surfaces.

The parameters are divided into 6 sections, which are described below.

General

• Anti-Aliasing - Switch on/off the anti-aliasing feature of the borders of each side. Note that this features slows down render times a little bit, but gives you much nicer results. CHV suggests that you turn off this option for your animation creation process, if your computer is not fast enough to be able to run this plugin in realtime.

• Transparent - Switch this option on to make the cubes transparent. In transparent mode all the light from the cubes will add up. You can adjust the brightness of the whole scene by adjusting the light source.

• RandomSee - RandomSeed sets up an initial state for the internal random number generator.

Camera

This section defines the position and lens of the camera and the direction where the camera will look at.

• Perspective Angle - This defines the length of the lens for the camera.

• Distance - With this parameter you can move the camera along the viewing point forward and backwards.

• Move Left/Right, Move Up/Down, Move Forward/Backwards - Use these three controls to move the cube along the grid.

• Look Left/Right, Look Up/Down, Tilt - These three parameters rotate the camera around the point given by the Move parameters as a center point.

Grid

This section defines how the single cubes are spread out in the 3D space.

• Grid X, Grid Y, Grid Z -Define how many cubes you want to see. The actual amount of cubes is even higher than the values of these three parameters. A value of "1" means that there will be one cube. An increase to "2" adds one cube to each side of the first cube. "3" creates a total of 5 cubes in the specific direction. The maximum number of cubes is 29 x 29 x 29, which is a total of 24389 cubes.

• Gap X, Gap Y, Gap Z -Define the distance between the cubes. A value of "0" will assemble all cubes at the same spot (center).

• Random Position - Originally all cubes are lined up in a well defined grid. This parameter will scatter the cubes throughout the 3D space randomly. A value of "0" will bring all cubes back to the original grid position.

• Random Rotation - Originally all cubes are facing into the same direction. This parameter will rotate the cubes in a random way around their own center.

• Ordered Rotation - This parameter rotates all cubes simultaneously around their three axis.

Cubes

This section defines how each cube looks like.

• Cube Width, Cube Height, Cube Depth - These three parameters define the size of the cubes.

• Separate Sides - Here you can separate the six sides of the cube from each other. A value of 0 creates a cube. Higher settings move each side further away from the center of the cube.

• Animation Amount - With this option the cubes will be automatically animated. The cubes will move around their designated position in the 3D space. Animation Amount controls how far the cubes will move away from their original position. Animation Speed controls the speed of the cubes.

Sides

This section controls the textures that will be used on each side of the cubes, as well as the orientation and rotation of each side. To apply a texture simply drag and drop the desired texture to one of the image wells. If you use this plugin with Motion, you have to add the needed texture at first to the Media-tab before adding it to the plugins image well.

With Orientation you can flip the applied clip or image horizontally, vertically or both.

Use Rotation to rotate each side of the cube independently.

Use the control Crop Border to crop any unwanted border from the applied textures.

If no texture is applied to a side, it will use an adjustable color. Each side can be given it's own color. Use the Color control box to select the desired color.

Light

• Enable Light and Specular - Here you can switch on or off the light method for the cube. If this control is switched off, you will see that the cube appears much brighter. This might be confusing. So you have to understand that this control does not "switch on a global light" that illuminates the cube. This control selects between a flat lightning model, which makes the cube shine with full brightness, and a light model with a light source that creates specular reflections with an angle dependant method to illuminate the surfaces.

• Light Brightness - If Enable Light and Specular is enabled, the colors you select with these two controls are use for the ambient and diffuse light in order to illuminate the cube.

• Specular Brightness-Adjust the size and brightness of the specular reflection. This control only has an effect when Enable Light and Specular is enabled.

Light model switched off	Light model switched on Small specular light	Light model switched on Larger specular light