Graphic plug-ins: how users can help build the best plug-ins

Post, July, 2004 by Ann Fisher

Wanted: better management of multiple layers in 3D space, a simpler method for painting multiple objects with one brushstroke and, the big one, integration with the After Effects environment.

How can you help get your needs met? Pick up the phone and call the plug-in manufacturers or start typing away in those Internet industry chat rooms (see sidebar on page 44). It may be safe to say that plug-ins, those specialized tools that add so much to the visual effects creation process, are the most user-friendly part of the content creation business. The plug-in manufacturers depend on beta testers and all the rest of you.

"Usually we pay a lot of attention to online forums; a lot of times products come out of user ideas," says Jim Tierney, president/founder of Digital Anarchy. "For example, with 3D Assistants a user came to us with that idea. He spec'd it out, told us what he wanted and he's actually getting a small amount of royalties because of it. That's unusual.

"Anarchy Toolbox is a set of nine filters that came out six months ago; three-fourths of those are directly in reponse to what we saw people post on the list. For example, Path Distort is one of the filters and it allows you to take a shape or layer and draw a bezier path and then bend that layer around that path. So if you have a snake texture and a rectangular layer, you create a snake path and bend the texture around the path and get the snake. Someone requested it on creativecow.com and we were surprised that After Effects didn't have it to begin with. We're always contributing," he says. "It's just a great resource to get a feel for what people are doing with After Effects."

What follows are several graphics plug-in manufacturers' latest offerings.

MANUFACTURER: Digital Anarchy (www.digitalanarchy.com)

PLUG-IN: 3D Layer 1.0

PLATFORM/SYSTEM: After Effects, Apple Final Cut Pro and Discreet Combustion

COST: $179

MAJOR FUNCTION: "Right now After Effects, and pretty much all the compositing apps out there, are limited to just flat planes in 3D space. You can't really bend them," says Jim Tierney. "It's basically a single polygon out there in 3D space. 3D Layer allows you to use gray scale displacement maps to actually displace and bend the layer in 3D space. The layer has thickness, which the regular 3D layers don't. It just makes it a little bit easier to create something that looks like it has a little bit more substance than the normal layers in most compositing applications."

RELEASE DATE: April 2004

PLUG-IN: Digital Anarchy's 3D Assistants

PLATFORM/SYSTEM: After Effects for Mac and Windows

COST: $199

MAJOR FUNCTION: "These are a little bit different than normal plug-ins, they aren't effects filters per se," says Tierney. "They help you manage, arrange and animate the regular 3D layers in space. The thing about After Effects is they have this whole 3D space but they haven't really given users a very good way of dealing with a large number of layers, so if you want to create a sense of 3D space generally you want to have 3D layers all over the place. The way to do that without Assistants is move all those things manually. So if you have 50 to 100 layers that you want to arrange or animate, it can be very tedious. 3D Assistants allow you to create geometric shapes with layers, disperse layers throughout 3D space, and helps you manage and animate these things without having to hand animate. It's one our most popular."

RELEASE DATE: Summer 2003

PROJECT USED ON: The open for the Palm Springs Film Festival (2003) featured hundreds of stylized palm trees in the background. An ID for CBS station KUTV featured more than 100 videos in the background with a logo flying in on top of it.

MANUFACTURER: Boris FX (www.borisfx.com)

PLUG-IN: Boris Red 3GL

PLATFORM/SYSTEM: After Effects for Mac and Windows. Over 20 hosts, including Avid Media Composer, Symphony, Xpress, Xpress DV, Xpress DV Pro and Newscutter, and Apple Final Cut Pro.

COST: $1,595 (New training DVD is available for $79 through the Web site)

MAJOR FUNCTION: Motion tracking, vector paint, rotoscoping, advanced 2D and 3D titling, high-end image processing, 2D and 3D compositing.

"The biggest new feature is that a lot of the features are open GL accelerated, which really speeds up the previews," says Anne Renehan, Boris' director of communications. "Where you see the biggest performance boost is working with 3D objects. It does have some nice onscreen interactors so you can move things, crop them or rotate or tumble them. You can now use bump maps on 3D objects; they give something a 3D appearance by using the luminance. You can do it with preset textures like rock and brick or you can use an image tile. You can map a map to a sphere to make something look like a planet and then use that same image as the bump map to really give it a 3D texture, then you can move that sphere in 3D space and have it interact with other objects.

"As far as text and titling, we added tons of new features: Generator Tab allows you to do text randomization features, Matrix-style, generating tons of random text or you could use it to have text scrambled and then reveal a familiar phrase. We also added Jitter, which you can combine with the text generator so you can jitter different sorts of parameters like the color of the text, position, angle, scale or hue."