minning.de - Stefan Minning: CG Artist and Developer

Gen­er­a­tor is a sim­ple and free plug-​​in for Adobe After Effects which can be used to cre­ate nor­mal maps from alpha mattes, such as text and shape lay­ers.
It is based on some of the same algo­rithms as my more ver­sa­tile Celu­light plug-​​ins, but is com­par­a­tively sim­ple and offers none of the advanced cus­tomiza­tions its more feature-​​rich brother offers.

Gen­er­a­tor is designed to run in coop­er­a­tion with the free Nor­mal­ity re-​​lighting solu­tion to cre­ate shad­ing and light­ing effects for text and arbi­trary shapes with­out the need for pre-​​rendered 3D nor­mal passes.

Usage

When using Nor­mal­ity to add light­ing and shad­ing effects to motion graph­ics, some­times you’d wish there was a quick and easy way to cre­ate a nor­mal map from text or shapes instead of rely­ing on a com­plex 3D ren­derer… that’s where Gen­er­a­tor comes in!
Just drop this plug-​​in on your text, shape or any other layer with a clean alpha chan­nel and you will instantly see a nor­mal map based on the layer’s shape. Gen­er­a­tor is kept inten­tion­ally sim­ple with very few options and hence lit­tle room for error — in fact, there is only a sin­gle para­me­ter to adjust.

The auto­mat­i­cally gen­er­ated nor­mal map can be used by Nor­mal­ity to add shad­ing and light­ing effects even with­out a pre-​​rendered 3D nor­mal pass.
Note: Due to a bug in Nor­mal­ity, you must pre-​​compose your gen­er­ated nor­mal map before apply­ing Normality.

Down­load Gen­er­a­tor Beta 0.2

Down­load
Gen­er­a­tor for After Effects is a free down­load for Microsoft Windows.

Down­load Generator

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Gen­er­a­tor is a free After Effects plug-​​in for Microsoft Windows.

Dona­tions

Devel­op­ing free soft­ware costs time and money. If you appre­ci­ate my work and use it in pro­duc­tion, please donate.
I will be more inclined to release cool stuff in the future if I see that my work is appreciated.

Dona­tions

Devel­op­ing free soft­ware costs time and money. If you appre­ci­ate my work and use it in pro­duc­tion, please donate.
I will be more inclined to release cool stuff in the future if I see that my work is appreciated.

It’s been just a few months since I released Nor­mal­ity 3.0 for After Effects. Back then it was only known as a secret weapon in  the darker realms of the After Effects com­mu­nity.
Then Video Copi­lot came along and fea­tured Nor­mal­ity in their fan­tas­tic and in-​​depth tuto­r­ial, lead­ing to a mas­sive boost in the software’s pop­u­lar­ity and usage around the world.

Now, after sub­tract­ing the thou­sands of “ille­git­i­mate” down­loads dur­ing an attack on my site in Sep­tem­ber, I can proudly announce that Nor­mal­ity has offi­cially reached 50.000 downloads!

Nor­mal­ity Down­loads by OS

The chart shows  the dis­tri­b­u­tion between the Win­dows and OS X ver­sions, leav­ing the Mac all the way down at just 10%.

Nor­mal­ity Down­loads by Region

And, because I’m a fiend for sta­tis­tics, here’s the break­down by region. A cou­ple of sur­prises there in my opinion!

Any­way, this means there are (poten­tially) 50.000 users of my plug-​​in out there! I would def­i­nitely like to hear from you all about your expe­ri­ences with the soft­ware and the cool projects you are using it on.

Based on users’ requests I have added some new fea­tures to my free min­Mat­cap shader.

The lat­est ver­sion fea­tures sup­port for bump map­ping and lets the user choose between camera-​​space, object-​​space and world-​​space shad­ing. It is also pos­si­ble to off­set the tex­tur­ing and con­trol  the shad­ing of back­sided faces.

You can also use min­Mat­cap as light shader. This may be use­ful to get a lit­tle ambiance into a scene.