Grab your tools & go!

Anarchy Toolbox is a little different than the rest of our products. Most Digital Anarchy plugin sets follow a theme, like text effects or chart creation. The Toolbox is more like a grab bag of really cool, practical effects that we had wanted to create for awhile.

Gradient Path stroked a gradient along each vector pathd. Anarchist Edge placed glowing contrasting lines around the objects. [play]

What's in YOUR toolbox?

Some Toolbox plugins are an intelligent version of functions that exist in After Effects, but have only simple options and limited parameter control. For instance, our Noise Complex tromps over the two parameters included in AE's Noise filter. The Gradient! plugin is an easier, more flexible way of creating gradients than Ramp or Colorama.

Other plugins don’t exist yet in After Effects, but should. Like Path Distort's ability to fully wrap (to slink, really) an object along a Bezier path. We figured it was about time we introduced these functions to you. So let's get started!

With Anarchist Edge and Advanced Dis Map, transform a duotone pattern into video wallpaper. [play]

Graymaps are fun. (really!)

How does Anarchy Toolbox create its sophisticated imagery? Some of the plugins use grayscale mapping to control ow they behave or what they output. This is a pretty sophisticated way to composite. Many After Effects filters (not just ours) use graymaps. Happily, most of these processes are hidden from you. But it's quite powerful to know how graymaps work.

Gray mapping is the art of using a black-and-white image to push the pixels of another image around. These b/w images are typically called grayscale maps or graymaps. Often the desired result is a displacement effect. But not always; for instance, graymaps can be used for blurring.

So how does dismapping work? Let's say you have a graphic that you want to work on, for instance, a Photoshop file of a flower.

To create its effect, the Toolbox plugin points to a second image which is grayscale. This grayscale image is the graymap. The plugin then tells the graymap to push and move your original flower graphic by a specified amount of pixels.

You can see an example of this on the Designer Blur page.