Favorite Plug-ins for AE

[Fede]

Trapcode Particular - too many uses to mention.

[rsquires]

Reelsmart Motion blur

Absolutely invaluable plugin for AE which creates motion blur by using optical flow to determine speed and direction. I use this all the time for adding motion blur to 3d renders and even to live action that was shot with a high shutter speed. Also they do a deinterlacer that is really useful although in this day and age I see it's uses gradually disappearing.

Frischluft Lenscare and Flair

Lenscare is a depth of field plugin which simulates out of focus effects and with the depth of field plugin can use a rendered depth matte to control the strength of focus.

Flair has the best glow there is in my opinion, offering loads of control and a pleasing look. Great for diffusing 3d renders. Also there are radial blurs which have a setting for lens aberrations

all the best

rich

[arneltapia]

Reelsmart motion blur is indispensable. It is very useful than rendering with motion blur from your 3d program. Absolutely a real render-time-saver. :cool:

[miurajiro]

Thanks for the tips guys!

Yeah, Red Giant has some great plugs. They seem to be on top.
Rich, i appreciate your others posts as well with incorporating C4D.
Any other dark horse unknown amazing plugs?

[Khalor]

ObviousFX (http://www.obviousfx.com/) has a few handy (and free) plugins - I've found the Copy Image function to be a real timesaver.

[evanfotis]

Do you have it working on CS3?
Here CopyImage worked only till v7 :-(
In CS3 it is grayed out in the menu...

[ediris]

Trapcode plug ins, all of them.
Zaxwerks ProAnimator

[ftaswin]

Do you have it working on CS3?
Here CopyImage worked only till v7 :-(
In CS3 it is grayed out in the menu...

Make sure you have comp tab or view tab selected, not project window. Worked well here.. :P



Ft

[biliousfrog]

Frischluft Lenscare (see above) although I've been using AE's own lens blur much more lately.

Reelsmart is quite good but it can be a PITA to get the vectors output from 3d apps correctly (I'm looking at you Lightwave!). The automatic tracking mode works well though.

The two that I really love are Magic Bullet Looks and Knoll's light factory. When used subtley they can really enhance footage and add a sense of familiarity to cg. It's really fast to get that warm, diffused, film look of Wall-E for example but, with looks especially, there are so many possibilities to take your footage from spare room to Hollywood. Looks is quite pricey but I get so many comments on the 'look' of my animations that it has paid for itself many times over. I use it on almost everything now to add that final polish.

[Shademaster]

I use Frischluft Lenscare and Magic Bullet Looks almost exclusively nowadays :).

I did all my color work for this animation in Looks:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=154&t=695446&highlight=porsche

Didn't have Frischluft then for the DOF, I experimented with it last week and I am not going back!

[aesnakes]

Has anyone used Pete's Plugins, they are great and free. we used them for some music video animations, the "tv pixel" effect was a great one.

Trapcode plugins are amazing and you cant be without them

RealSmart Motion Blur 2 - is great if you need to create motion blur without any camera data...ie: 2D cartoon work.

Puffin ImageLounge (Now Red Giant) - Real Shadows Plugin is great to create shadows on the ground for characters. We used it to push flash TV animation pas the "Flashy" look.

[rustbucket]

Key Correct Pro has yet to be mentioned. Its great for adding light wrap quickly and cleaning up nasty keys.

Unmult has always been a life saver when you need to create an alpha quickly (and its free).

Ive heard good things about Frischluft Lenscare, although im not sure what advantages it has over Lens Blur since they both accept z depth passes based off luminence. Anyone care to elaborate?

[suztv]

I love Trapcode particular - but I use Shine and Starglow a lot too. Yeah they're cheesy - but it seems to distract the Art Director and it makes the client happy. I guess they're a lot like crows - sparkly things make them happy. But you can use shine as a colorant or glow - I've noticed that using that seems to produce a much more desirable glowy effect.

Of course let's not forget 3D stroke - what a lifesaver!


I also like CC Sphere and Cylinder - I mean how could you not like them!

Also - even though this is built in like CC Sphere, I use it habitually and cannot remember what it was like without it. Time-remapping! Absolutely invaluable for precomps, loops animated sequences etc.

[DecWest]

Woah! 'MB Looks' is EXACTLY what I have been looking for :cool:

[FrostyPanda]

Trapcode Particular

There's so many uses of it but I love making audio wavy things with it as shown here (http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/audio_to_animation/)

[Fuxianer]

Knoll Light Factory. A great tool to make subtle flare and bleeding fx to give your images some more depth and lense imperfection, especially combined with Trapcode Particular (to create flare spots on your lense).

Primatte for keying.

Re-visions plugins for morphing and time remapping.

[Shademaster]

Knoll Light Factory. A great tool to make subtle flare and bleeding fx to give your images some more depth and lense imperfection, especially combined with Trapcode Particular (to create flare spots on your lense).

Primatte for keying.

Re-visions plugins for morphing and time remapping.

I forgot about the re-vision time-remapping plugin! That is such a lifesaver for long renders of slow movements. We actually timeremapped a 75 frame sequence to 225 frames without any visual anomalies. Rendertime for each 3D rendered frame was over 2 hours so we saved around 300 hours of rendertimes with that!

[renkin]

Speaking of Magic Bullet there is their de-artifacter plugin wich gives better looking results than the Key Correct one.

[Apollo05]

magic bullet and trapcode form

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