After Effects

Yes, the U.S. Independence Day is upon us once again! Whatever your country or holiday, here are some methods of creating some beautiful explosions in the sky with After Effects, CINEMA 4D, and other hosts. There are some great plug-ins out there for making fireworks too.

One of the first paid projects I had in Cinema 4D was to create glass. Let’s say that I did things the hard way! Here are some tutorials so that you don’t make more work for yourself and tutorials to give you specialized looks with your glass.

3D Volumetric Fractal Flames for After Effects and Premiere Pro for only $229. Mettle has harnessed the beauty of fractals, made them 3D Volumetric, GPU accelerated, with Ray Marching and Force Fields. Ideal for creating space scenes and VFX. There’s a tutorial for getting started with Flux as well.

With the hot weather in the northern hemisphere this week, cook down mentally with this free lesson from Proteus VFX school on creating a procedural snow shader with Redshift and 3ds Max. Heck, you could make yourself a snow cone!

Create photorealistic lighting effects with Blackmagic Davinci Resolve and Sapphire Edge Rays. For more cool lighting effects, Check out Boris FX Sapphire for Davinci Resolve, After Effects, Premiere Pro, and other hosts.

Jesus Fernandez walks you through some basic steps to light an interior scene using Redshift and Autodesk Maya.

Red Giant has released a free 12 tutorial series for Trapcode Form 3, taught by Chad Perkins. Here are the first 3 tutorials in the series, as well as a link to download a demo version of Trapcode Form 3, and the press release from Red Giant.

In Episode 1 of the Maxwell TV webinar,  learn how to create a nice wet asphalt material with puddles. Mirce from renderji.com also discusses his latest archviz project created with Sketchup and Maxwell. And, Maxwell is on sale right now. Details below!

This question has come up many times with people looking for tips or the best products to use. This is a complex topic with artists who specialize in match moving. Techniques and tricks will vary based variables like lighting, movement, whether things go off screen, if the footage is handheld, if there are tracking markers, etc., so these tips and tutorials are more general. Whatever your project, you still want your results to look invisible. Here are a few tutorials and some products for better results!