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Well if we’re going to do some axe-throwing I figured it would safer (for me) to design it in 3D first. As for Sam, well he still has to watch out for the real axe but don’t worry, we have plenty of band-aids and bactine.
The 3D model is fairly simple, I took a picture of the real axe, and then traced to rod for a lathe modifier like this. The blade was a little trickier but I managed to box model the shape and added turbo smooth.
I used a couple of textures and Vray to render and I may have added a couple of Optical Flares as well. The scene took me about 5 hours to make.
What will be useful here is having the object exist in real life to do close-ups or shots of someone holding the axe and then we can use the 3D axe for other exciting things. Someone pointed out this example in the new Resident Evil trailer of a throwing Axe at the end…
My model is still missing the decorative piece on the top of the Axe but that thing can go to H#))!
And I’m not talking about some old deodorant but the kinda axe that keeps you safe at night. An axe opens up a lot of possibilities, people don’t mess with people that have Axes. It’s a fact.
Now I have this cool axe and I need to do something with it so I’m going to call Sam and see what we can arrange. Maybe we can throw the axe at the camera or even throw a camera at the axe, I don’t know!!
But whatever we do, we’re going to have some fun.
After working through a test project yesterday with the 3D orbit Preset, one of the things I noticed is how slow the expressions made my fairly simple comp. Admittedly, there were several expression connections but there wasn’t crazy rocket science equations that required cloud-computing. So, why so seriously slow?
It never really bothered me before but with the impressive speed performance that the 64-bit native After Effects CS5 brings, I can’t help but think of other areas in need of improvement besides my marriage (JOKE! I love you honey… but we need to talk.)
So before I present this to the folks at Adobe, who have been very open to new ideas, I wanted to post my thoughts and hopefully gauge community interest in such a core feature improvement and where it currently stands.
Look, expressions are fine for linking a few parameters together but for more complex systems, there has to be a way to make it faster and more integrated. This would lead to more powerful custom presets and functionality and make certain work flows more practical.
Think of the POTENTIAL!! And I’m not talking about your teacher telling your mom, he thinks “Andrew has a lot of potential but he...
READ MOREI found some time to play around with the powerful 3D Orbit preset and a free icon pack. I created small groups of Icons that were linked to a Null Object and then after making 6 groups, I used the 3D orbit preset to control the smaller spinning groups with a larger spinning group. Similar to how the moon orbits the earth and our earth orbits the sun. ( and our sun of course orbits William Shatner.)
Now, I also used expressions to offset the the layers in each group so the icons did not overlap each other like in this tutorial. Then by animating the values of the orbit preset as well as the scale and rotation of the Null Objects, you can come up with some fun stuff. I also set the layers “Auto-Orient Towards Camera” so they would not turn into flat paper and collapse the universe.
Now if it still doesn’t look good… just add some lens flares and take the rest of the day off! That’s what I did, CYA