Gallery for 3D Assistants.

Started by After Effects guru Brian Maffit, Total Training has been teaching motion designers for over 10 years. For their After Effects 5.5 training set, Total Training used the 3D Assistants extensively to design the DVD interstitials.

At left, the Cylinder Creator Assistant was used to create a 3D video wall. The After Effects 3D camera was placed inside to create visual interest.

Spinning video wall for a training video. [play]

An award winning designer, editor and animator, Rob Birnholz has over 25 years in the film and video industry. The movies shown at right were created as the introductions for two years of the Palm Springs Film Festival.

In both projects, he used the 3D Assistants to quickly animate complex elements. Rob had this to say about his work:

"For the 2003 project, with the help of the 3D Assistants, I was able to create and animate a full grove of palm trees in about 30 minutes. Trying to manage that many 3D layers would have taken forever, to say nothing of trying to animate them all by hand. The 3D Assistants were a real life saver on this project.

"The 2007 project was similarly assisted. Original art was delivered as a single Illustrator file. After seperating out the shapes into layers, I used the Assistants to spread them out in Z-space, either in line or as crowds. Still had to tweak a little (of course), but I'm sure I saved hours."

2003 Palm Springs Film Festival intro [play] (2.5 mb)

2007 Palm Springs Film Festival intro [play] (26.5 mb)

“This project involved a great deal of 3D and we were looking for faster, more intuitive tools, specifically for accomplishing some of the complex 3D shots.” [play]

"We saw an exponential increase in our productivity as we no longer had to manually arrange the 3D layers. It's an amazing, time saving design tool." [play]

Gino's design company is Pixeldust Films, and his day job is with the company that owns Market Express. Gino said this about his project, "We need to raise excitement about the Market Express platform (sales support and materials), and I'm creating a series of 30 second spots to raise platform awareness, generate excitement, and help get new users onboard.

"Creating the cube using your 3D Assistants was a total cakewalk. The text is parented to each square. I used the Box Creator to create the cube. Then I added a camera, parented the 'squares' to a 3D null, and rotated it around using the orientation parameters.

"Had it not been for the plugin, I would have either came up with a different concept altogether or would have spent a lot of extra time creating the cube the 'old fashioned' way."

Gino's cube at work. [play]

This project was created for Entertainment Today, a 40 minute strand on one of the National Breakfast shows in the UK. It's a sophisticated composition that features animated spirals and circles made out of cubes.

Designer Tim Clark said this about his work: "I used the Spheriod Creator and Cylinder Creator for this project. Instead of flat planes I used a 3D box, created using After Effects' 3D layers. In some shots the boxes multiply as they animate, which was quite cool."

Entertainment Today spot. [play]

Bryan Ebzery is a designer who heads up animation and video production at salesforce.com, the technology and market leader in on-demand business services. He used 3D Assistants to create a product promotion on the company's homepage.

Promo for Salesforce.com website. [play]