Animation

training

To stay fresh and avoid getting into a rut, we are always learning new animation techniques and new apps. This page serves a few purposes. At its core, this section is used to chronicle the latest techniques we are developing. It's also useful for freelancers who are interested in working with us to understand how we do things so that they can integrate into our pipeline when we need to expand on larger projects. Lastly, and either most importantly or least importantly (depending on who you ask at our studio) it's a chance to do some goofy voices and jokes in the intros.

Liquid text | After Effects

Main Topics

  • Turbulent Displace
  • Fractal Noise
  • Basic Expressions
  • Set Matte
  • CC Plastic
  • CC Flo Motion

This is a fun effect that can be used to create stylized liquid text with a 3d look. It's as close as we have been able come to creating fluid simulation without using a dedicated 3D app. For anyone making a scary movie this would be great for opening titles. With some minor adjustments this effect could also create a water text look by adjusting color and blend modes along with using a copy of the text animation as a displacement map on a still or video background layer.

Electric text | After Effects

Main Topics

  • Turbulent Displace
  • Basic Expressions
  • Set Matte
  • Advanced Lightning

This is a great effect for adding a little extra bit of spark to your titles. The highly detailed and fast moving electricity effect looks great at 60 fps, but lower frame rates work well too. Using the Advanced Lightning effect adds another level of detail and interest. Plus, at the end of this tutorial you can see how to apply this effect to graphics or logos.

Psychedelic text | cavalry

Main Topics

  • Duplicator
  • Color Array
  • Stagger
  • Bevel

We definitely had a lot of fun with the beta version of the promising new vector based 2D animation app Cavalry. First impressions are good and looking forward to seeing how the app progresses. This tutorial shows how you can procedurally create many copies of a text object and add variation to those copies. As you add more variation things get quite wild.

Stylized text | cavalry

Main Topics

  • Outline
  • Gradient Shader
  • Duplicator

This was the first attempt at using Cavalry. There are a lot of different ways to stylize text in this app and the video below covers a few interesting techniques. One very interesting things is that everything here is vector and could be exported as an svg and edited in apps like Affinity Designer , Adobe Illustrator, or Inkscape.

Rubber Hose | cavalry

Main Topics

  • Rubber Hose Limb
  • Keyframe Animation
  • Graph Editor

Cavalry has some great tools for character animation. It has a rubber hose tool much like the Rubber Hose plug-in for After Effects. Normally this effect would be used on a character's limb, but it was fun experimenting with applying the effect onto text to give it a flexible cartoon style.

Arm Rig | cavalry

Main Topics

  • Rubber Hose Limb
  • Custom Stroke
  • Outline

In this tutorial you can see how to create a robot arm rig that is fairly easy to set up and quite enjoyable to animatable. The ability to create a clean hierarchy structure in the timeline is a huge bonus for setting up character rigs in Cavalry. It's nice to see that this app has an intuitive and user friendly approach to 2D character animation.

Blend Shape | cavalry

Main Topics

  • Add Divisions
  • Blend Shape

Blend shapes are common in 3D animation apps like Autodesk Maya, but this is the first time we've seen this ability in a 2D animation app. This tutorial shows how you can use blend shapes to quickly and easily deform text and create a dynamic title animation.

Trails | cavalry

Main Topics

  • Duplicator
  • Trails
  • Gradient Shader

The Trails effect is one of the most interesting effects in Cavalry. It's very unique to have this kind of effect in a motion design app and could be very useful for those wanting their work to stand out from the crowd. While this might seem like a processor intensive effect it actually renders quite quickly for the amount of detail you get.