Workbench posts
Tutorial 106: Making Waves
In this week's tutorial we take a request from YouTube user LRZMRQ. He asked us to take a look at two videos that have a similar wave effect—Lullaby Theories: A Secret Message and CNN - Love in Conflict - Yana's Letter—and recreate it. Also, check them out. They're both worthy of wat...
Sweat Equity Podcast Appearance!
I was on the Sweat Equity Podcast yesterday! There's some small NSFW bits in there so throw on some headphones! We talked about how Workbench started, advice for new artists, not exhibiting the work of others, as well as some other diverse topics. I had a blast on this one!
Tutorial 105: Reverse Direction with Expressions
This week, we're looking at reversing the direction of things like trim paths, and other effects that use ranges, like text animators. Our expression is simple and I'd even call it elegant since we basically end up with one quick math equation that suits both the forward and reversed directi...
Tutorial 104: Interesting Reveals
Happy almost New Year patrons! Got this one a little early for you too. We're on vacation, so I made a few tutorials to cover a couple of weeks!So let's kick of 2018 with another glitchy tutorial that allows you to quickly and easily reveal any element. This technique is infinitely extensibl...
Tutorial 103: Isometric Projection
Hey Patrons! Got this one a little early for you!This week we take a look at how to make an isometric projection by either faking an isometric camera in After Effects, or using the SSR—Scale, Shear or Skew, and Rotate—method.We also rig up a cubic object so that we can control it with sliders. Y...
Tutorial 102: Character Organization
This week, we have a quick workflow tip. For some reason, I've seen a bunch of people split their layers in order to do 2D character animations where body parts pass in front of and behind other parts. In this quick tutorial we tie a slider to a minute adjustment of z-position so we can have a s...
Tutorial 101: 2D-3D Parallax
Got this one up a little early. I hope you guys enjoy it!This week we look at a useful way to map a precomp's frames to its position on screen. This allows us to fake a 3D rotation as things move across screen. You basically animate shape layers to the extreme positions, add our expression, and ...
Tutorial 100: Rollin' Rig
We've hit 100—100 tutorials and 10K subscribers! What a way to end the year! But before that, Santa's got to come to town. He's upgraded his ride a little bit.This week's tutorial looks at a nice way to set up a rolling car rig, but we also look into calculating the angles between ...
We made it. Thank you all!
I don't even know what to say except I hope we can make this number a lot larger in 2018!
Tutorial 99: Glitchier Glitch Text
This week, we add another glitch text tutorial. The big takeaway here is to use CC Image Wipe along with a good matte to overlay middle grey on top of another matte to make a displacement map. Since middle grey means there will be no displacement, everything that was displaced by brighter and darker...
Black Friday Sale!
Hey, what's up patrons! We're having a Black Friday sale in our store!But there's even more news. We've got two new products launching. The first is one I've been wanting for a bit but just never got around to building.Quiver 2 expands upon version 1 by allowing you to manage you...
Tutorial 98: Flocking
I've been working late this week to launch a few things, and because of that—and wanting to be done in time to enjoy Thanksgiving— I finished this week's tutorial tonight. It'll go live for everyone on Friday as normal, but I thought you guys might be happy to see it early if you'...
Tutorial 97: Improved Single Layer Track Mattes
Now I can push content a little early to Patrons before this post becomes public, which is pretty cool. So the newest tutorial is up! I happened to get it done a little early. So check it out.I received a comment on an old tutorial and realized there is a way to improve upon it now that we have acce...
CEP!
I'm finally getting around to working on figuring out how to code CEP panels versus straight ScriptUI panels. So I'm starting with my first script, Quiver. I'd always wanted Quiver to be able to not only recall your library of expressions, but also to be able to maintain it. The new vers...
Tutorial 96: Mask Vertex Expressions plus Grading
This video was sponsored by VideoBlocks. And because of that we have some nice footage to work with. And we're using that footage to take a quick look at a feature I've been dying to have in AE since at least 2005—mask vertex expression access! It's finally here in CC 2018!I've nee...
Tutorial 95: Fluid Motion
In this week's tutorial we take a look back at two of our first few tutorials—Tutorial 02: Radial Delay and Tutorial 03: Blobs—in order to simulate what's going on in a shot on Dribbble by Alexander Pyatkov for Motion Design School called Telegram Logo Animation.This concept can be done ...
Tutorial 94: Quick Tips 06
Here's another collection of Quick Tips for you guys. The time for each tip is as follows:+ 0:21 - Fit To View Shortcut+ 0:31 - Slip Tool+ 1:02 - Center Anchor Point+ 2:02 - Compare Screen Positions+ 2:50 - Update Markers+ 3:54 - Time Entry Shortcut+ 4:26 - Moving Text+ 4:58 - Modifiable Keyboar...
Slit-scan Mattes
Hey guys! I rendered out a few of the mattes from our last tutorial 4000x4000 px so you can use them on a lot of different things. Grab them, and your other reward textures, here. There are static mattes and a pair of animated ones—set those to loop using Interpret Footage which I think is still c...
Stackable Text Animators
In Tutorial 92 a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned there'd be some stackable text animator presets. I've made a few more and uploaded them here with the rest of your presets. Sorry for the delay. We've been at it pretty hard as I explained in that post. There will be more stackable preset...
Tutorial 93: Slit-Scan Displacement
I guess I should've mentioned that slit-scan photography is where the name for this came from. Special cameras expose time across the frame so you can easily discern things like a photo-finish for example. For some reason this is more explained on Wikipedia in Strip Photography than in the Slit-...
Tutorial 92: Stacking Text Animators
If you're like me, you probably feel like you've animated text every which way by now. I always feel like finding a new way to animate text that looks good and doesn't feel cheesy or forced is one of the most challenging aspects of working on a project and it's often the part I dread...
Tutorial 91: LEGO Style
LEGO my EGGO. Sorry, I've got nothing better than that (especially if you're a Patron who saw me make that same joke earlier). Well, hopefully this tutorial is better than that, and if not there's a project file.A couple of weeks ago, Victoria Nece, AE's project manager, posted a swe...
LEGO my EGGO?
Sorry, I've got nothing better than that. Well, I guess the tutorial will be better than that, but I haven't recorded it yet.This is a just a quick sneak peek at what we'll be looking at tomorrow. A couple of weeks ago, Victoria Nece, AE's project manager, posted a cool LEGO rig she ...
Tutorial 90: Engraving
90 weeks solid, even through a hurricane. Crazy. Thanks for coming with us on this journey!I realized while editing this that I didn't use my Workbench space so the main comp is a little smaller than I'd like, but I've provided a project file, so you can mess around with that.This is a q...
Tutorial 89: That Grainy Texture Look
Almost to 90. Crazy. :)Power is back this week. It's been a busy one, but we were able to tackle a request to turn Tutorial 85: Integrated Textures into a version of that grainy texture look that's becoming popular.Our version is simple and it solves two main goals: do this in one layer and ...
Tutorial 88: Curving Text
We're getting this one out a little early for the Patrons. I'm surprised I'm getting this one out early, but all I can do at the moment is sweat and work on this tutorial, so I guess it makes sense. #ThanksForNothingIrmaAnyway, this week's tutorial is a quick look at a neat way to an...
Tutorial 87: Angular Controls
In Tutorial 85: Integrated Textures, we made an interesting shadow out of a displaced layer. I thought it might be useful to change the default controls of Displacement Map from Max Horizontal and Max Vertical Displacement to Angle and Distance sliders. So I built that. And I continued to apply that...
Switching to Monthly payments
Hi everyone! At some point soon, we'll be switching over to monthly payments. We'll just expand the tiers so that they'll correspond to the new values. For example the $3 per video tier will become $12/month. From what we can tell—since there's surprisingly little info on how to ac...
Tutorial 86: Quick Tips 05
Man, 86 already. We've come a long way together.Quick Tips 05 is here! I do have two small notes though. Difference mode turns black where pixels exactly match. So it's extra useful for matching two images or things with a lot of colors. I probably could've picked a better example.And th...
Tutorial 85: Integrated Textures
This week's tutorial expands upon last week's Rubber Stamp Texture tutorial. We look into different effects you can achieve by sandwiching things between CC Composite effects, including textures on layers, shadows, or both. And if you precomp and check the continuously rasterize switch, you ...




























