3D Assistants

CATEGORIES: Product Reviews, Software | Rod Harlan | October 17, 2008

Keyframe assistants that manage your 3D layers

I love the look of 3D layers and traveling through an animation in 3D space but as a motion graphics animator, I hate spending time animating the position and orientation of all those layers to get the right 3D look. So here’s my secret! 3D Assistants from Digital Anarchy—a collection of 16 After Effects keyframe assistants for arranging and managing layers in 3D space. This allows you to create layer clusters in the shape of cubes, tunnels, circles, spheres—all from your own layers of graphics, photos, and video clips.

Using the assistants, you can easily turn 10 layers into 100 (or more) replicated layers and work them all within After Effects 3D space. You can make a 3D wall of video clips in a matter of minutes and, because these are keyframe assistants (not filters), there’s no additional render time. You can arrange, re-arrange, re-position, and re-arrange again: If you don’t like one configuration, change a few parameters and re-adjust the layers. Or press Undo to go back to your original layout. You can even use an After Effects 3D camera to fly around the layers that 3D Assistants has positioned. While you can’t make the Assistants work directly on Camera or Light layers, they work on Text layers for some very cool effects. The Digital Anarchy website provides several great tutorials for working with 3D Assistants, including project files and support material.

For tackling the tedious process of managing 3D layers in After Effects, I can’t recommend 3D Assistants enough!—Rod Harlan

PRICE: $199
FROM: Digital Anarchy
WEB: www.digitalanarchy.com
RATING: 5

LAYERS VERDICT
HOT Manages hundreds of 3D layers with ease
NOT Mac upgrade to CS3 is $25, Win is free

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