It's a native plugin for After Effects CS6 and up that gives you soft shadows, radial shadows and inner shadows, and it comes with three presets to help you quickly get the results you're after. However with Shadow Studio you can simulate these effects in a much faster manner. Shadow StudioĪdding shadows to your work can be computationally expensive, especially if it's being done by raytracing, and it's a great way to slow down your workflow. It's built on Academy Award-winning planar tracking, and can easily handle even the most challenging tracking, masking and stabilisation projects. While After Effects does offer pretty good tracking tools (including the bundled Mocha AE plugin from Boris FX), if you're after something more advanced, it's worth upgrading to the feature-rich Mocha Pro. This powerful, versatile plugin supports both AE and Premiere. This is especially so when combined with other After Effects plugins, or mixed with a 3D camera from a 3D application, which can be imported into After Effects along with foreground plates for objects such as spaceships. While it won't work for every planetary shot, Orb will work for 90 per cent of them and is an invaluable tool for previz. Orb uses a similar 3D engine to Video Copilot's excellent Element 3D plugin, and is focused on creating realistic planets and offers a range of unique tools to make planetary creation easily.
For example, if making a model of a populated planet, how can the line between nighttime and daytime be adjusted to ensure cities can be seen at night and not in the day? You might think that creating planets is an easy task in 3D – create a sphere, apply textures, done! However, getting a world to 'look' right can be a trickier task than imagined. If you're after more AE knowledge, then don't miss our roundup of the best After Effects tutorials. These After Effects plugins will help enhance your workflow, add features that simply don’t exist in the core After Effects application, and simply make stuff look cool. In this post, we’ll take a dive into the glorious world of After Effects CC plugins for 2020. Adobe After Effects CC is a core application for so many artists because it can do so much out of the box, but when coupled with the huge range of third party plugins it can take things to another level with new functionality or a streamlined workflow. The right After Effects plugins can transform the way you work.