Tag: animation

Pixar is giving away their 3D animation course

Posted on by danigriffin_fho7l4

PIXAR IS GIVING AWAY THEIR 3D ANIMATION COURSE

 

Many of us animators and motion designers started in this amazing field, delighted by watching cartoons and movies in our childhood. A lot of people from my generation will remember the animated shorts from Hanna Barbera: The Flintstones, Tom and Jerry, The Road Runner or Top Cat and his gang between others. Animation techniques started evolving and in the upcoming years 3D animation emerged opening a new world of possibilities that generated a revolution in the animation industry. One of the first 3D animated movies was Toy Story (1995), and with it Pixar astonished a whole generation.

It is precisely Pixar who today opens the doors to this wonderful world of magic and fantasy by giving us all their knowledge in a free online course called “Pixar in a Box”. Pixar in a Box is a behind-the-scenes that shows us how the geniuses of Pixar work to create all these incredible animated films that children and adults love so much. In this online course you can learn many techniques such as animating bouncing balls, create a swarm of robots, make virtual explosions among many other things. Everything you’ve learned at school like math, science, computing and humanities is used daily in the animation industry to create all these wonderful stories.

The content of this course features:

• The art of Story Telling
• Illumination
• Simulations
• Color Science
• Virtual cameras
• Effects
• Patterns
• Rigging
• Animation
• Landscape modeling
• Character modeling
• Crowd creating
• Virtual sets and scenes
• Rendering

Pixar Animation in collaboration with Khan Academy are sponsored by the masters from Disney. Take advantage of this excellent opportunity that they are giving us for free! Learn or maybe improve your knowledge in the exciting world of 3D animation.

Here is the link to the course: https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/pixar

Oh my God! I love this free plugin!

Posted on by danigriffin_fho7l4

Oh my God! I love this free plugin!

In my more than 25 years being a Video Editor, Post producer and Motion Designer, I haven’t been able to choose the best plugin to recommend to my colleagues, friends and students, but  Mr. Horse’s has come up with such an amazing product that there is no way I can’t recommend  Animation Composer for After Effects to them.  It has become part of my “essential items” and It is worth every of my hard-earned pennies. It’s super useful, easy to use and customize. I use it in my daily work at the advertising agency I work for as it is a high-speed production environment where we need to deliver things for yesterday and with the highest possible quality. The best of all is that there is a Free version!

I am not the kind of person that usually buys every plugin that comes out to the market, and I really don’t use many plugins on my daily work because most of the time I have to share my projects with other animators, but since Animation Composer creates animations based on scripts if the other user doesn’t have the plugin he will not have any problems using my projects. If you are thinking in the one and only plugin you should spend your money, this is the one.

I started using the free version and after using it for a couple months I fell in love with it and bought some of the expansion packages they offer. In my case I bought “The Most Handy Motion Presets” (a must have!) and afterwards I bought the “Shape Transitions Package” and “Shape Elements” pack.

Here’s a list of some of the expansion packages they offer are:

 

  • The Most Handy Motion Presets
  • Text Presets
  • 3D Motion Presets
  • Filmmaker’s Transitions
  • Shape Elements
  • 2D Special Effects
  • Titles and Lower Thirds
  • Textures
  • Shape Transitions
  • Backgrounds
  • Animated Illustrations, and
  • Essential Sound Effects

This plugin is now being used by 70,000+ motion designers around the world and the number keeps growing. Give a try, check it out @ mrhorse.tv you won’t be disappointed.