Happy Star Wars day! To celebrate our love for Star Wars we are giving away a sweet collection of 3D models that we built so you can learn to create your own visual effects! Our goal is to show you tips for Lighting, Rigging and animating so you can learn to create exciting visual FX too!

These are not just some piece of junk models, these models are HD quality with detailed 4K textures! Plus they render fast inside Element 3D! How fast? Fast enough for you!

We had a blast creating this collection and we hope you will have fun playing with these models too!

Just to be clear, we do not mean to imply any Star Wars endorsement or sponsorship, Star Wars was a huge inspiration to my visual FX education and we know it has inspired many others to learn about visual FX.

Note: All scenes rendered inside Element 3D V2!

Need Light Sabers or laser blasts? Use our Free Saber plug-in!

Included Models: OBJ with DDS Textures and optional JPG files!

*Some of the names included on this page are registered trademarks of Lucasfilm.

DOWNLOAD STAR WARS MODEL PACK! (Place in Video Copilot model folder)

DOWNLOAD model pack

Alternate Textures Files: Download JPG Map files

Need some LightSabers or Laser blasts? Use our Free Saber plug-in!

If you are going to be at NAB today or tomorrow, join me at the Adobe booth at 2PM!

I’ll be talking about some things I learned while working on Star Wars: The Force Awakens helping to make Holograms, Graphics and Titles!

Be sure to follow us on Twittter for updates throughout the week!

I had a great time working on the film and working with this awesome and talented team! SHOUT Out to: Jayse, Navarro, Ryan, Brandon, Brian, Seth and Dustin! Never met a nicer, funnier, creative group of artists!

Some cool news to announce! We have just finished recording a horrifying new blog show with a frightening theme! But more on that next week!

Another exciting development is a a new workflow plug-in for After Effects! Coming this week!

Now, this plug-in doesn’t make light sabers or energy fx, it might not even change your life, but this utility we developed will speed up your AE work flow! Embarrassingly enough, the development began last year when I started working on Intercept! And while I am still finishing the VFX for my short, this new plug-in is done and so we’re going to release it! Is that progress!? I DON’T KNOW!!

The good news is we’re jamming on a lot of projects behind the scenes, but this year has been a very humbling and rejuvenating experience for me. And it is simply managing ideas and execution. How do we continue to push ourselves creatively and build better consistency… I don’t know if we have it all figured out, but at least we are asking the right questions now!

For example : Here was my thought process on the Saber plug-in:

1. Man, my short film is taking way too long I need to release something cool now that I’m back from Star Wars!
2. Let’s release the Saber plug-in. That thing is pretty cool!
3. I haven’t posted cool stuff in a while though, This plug-in needs to be sweet!
4. I Should make a trailer too! How long will that take?
5. S#!T The plug-in is just not good enough yet and it comes out in two days!
6. Let’s add more features! Let’s add displacement noise and presets! We can make it!
7. Crap! We’re late! Now this thing really has to be amazing! Let’s add text outlines and mask shapes too!
8. What have we done!

Being late because of high expectations makes my expectations higher. A dangerous loop.

So you can see the real challenge is I want to make awesome stuff but it’s easy to underestimate how much time it takes to pull it off! (Cough Cough, Intercept!)

This year we added some fantastic new people to the VC Team and I’m able to get everyone more involved in our shows and do more simultaneous projects that are spread out over time so there are things always in development and more people can be involved in finishing projects.

I think at the end of the day, walking around with a Video Copilot apron has really helped my focus!

Office is on fire now!

A photo posted by Video Copilot (@andrewkramer) on Sep 28, 2016 at 12:42pm PDT

Over the past year I had the opportunity to work on Star Wars, 10 Cloverfield Lane and more recently Star Trek Beyond (not titles this time).  Whew! Now that I am focusing on Video Copilot Full-Time (YAY!!) I’ve noticed something different.

It started with Saber. (Our free Energy Beam plug-in)
It was my first thing after getting out from underneath the visual effects tsunami of working on features. It started as a simple plug-in that would kick things off again. But while working on the promo video with my release date set, something seemed off.

The plug-in wasn’t good enough!

It was OK but not up to the Video Copilot standards. After-all, it’s been so long since I had done something new, I wanted it to be REALLY COOL! But it needed more work.

Not really an ideal way to approach a hard deadline.

As I worked on the promo video to show off what the plug-in could do,  I would say to myself: “We need better noise options”, “We need control over masking and glow order?”, “What if you could use Text Layers too!?”, “I need to create a specific look and we need to add distortion!”, “We need a preset manager!”

I love making software, so even though we were running out of time, we needed these features! This was the ultimate stress test because we were adding and testing features under a lot of pressure and I must admit, it can be helpful.

In the end our plug-in was 2 weeks late. Every missed day was excruciating. Knowing how much work needed to get done and hoping it will be worth it.

After-all some of the BEST FEATURES were added in, days before we released it.  And while I’m personally very proud of our Saber plug-in, I knew we needed to do better, but I didn’t fully understand what I was up against.

Afterwards, I figured out what had changed.

When you work on a movie, there are supervisors  and Directors and everything you do is projected on a big screen! The bar is set high! Every pixel is analyzed and scrutinized. You learn quickly, that EVERY DETAIL MATTERS!

Once you develop an eye for certain details, it is very hard to settle or to ignore them. So somehow the better you get at something, the longer it takes. What?!

Now I’ve got to do a better job at accounting for the extra work needed to reach these high standards and even hire some additional compositors to help with projects so I can keep the ideas rolling out and back to reliable release schedules. I have too many crazy ideas!

So yeah… in regards to the upcoming Video Copilot show… it may have got a little too ambitious… But with some better planning in the future, I know we can get back to our A-game!

I’m very excited about the show, we worked really hard on it and we are putting the finishing touches on it this weekend! Until then!

NOTE:
Just for contrast: Element 3D V2 doesn’t have a promo video and Saber has a promo with 35 fx shots. And it’s a free plug-in. I’d say it might actually be a curse!