November 15 2009

Generator

,

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.

GeneratorGeneratorGeneratorGenerator

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.

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.

October 23 2009

Re: Normality's 50.000 Downloads

, ,

A quick follow-​​up to last week’s post about Nor­mal­ity reach­ing 50.000 down­loads: While I’m happy that the soft­ware is so pop­u­lar and that it is being put to good use in stu­dios around the world, what I’m not so thrilled with is the ratio of down­loads to donations.

So far only 13 (!) of the roughly 55.000 down­load­ers have con­tributed to say thanks and to sup­port con­tin­ued devel­op­ment of the soft­ware. Alas, that’s less than 0.1% of all down­load­ers.
Now I never expected to get rich by releas­ing a dona­tion­ware After Effects plug-​​in… but it would def­i­nitely be nice to at least be able to off­set my host­ing costs.

Main­tain­ing and sup­port­ing free soft­ware costs time and money that I am no longer able or will­ing to put in at this rate.

October 17 2009

Normality reaches 50.000 downloads

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

Google Chart

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

Google Chart

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.

June 25 2009

Normality 3 Update

,

I have updated my free After Effects plug-​​in Nor­mal­ity 3 and fixed a cou­ple of bugs relat­ing to blend modes.

There’s also one new fea­ture: I am includ­ing my men­tal ray shader min­Mat­cap directly in Nor­mal­ity, mak­ing it pos­si­ble to ren­der images like below in After Effects.

Red apple material preset

Red apple mate­r­ial preset

June 22 2009

minMatcap Update

,

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.

June 10 2009

Announcing Normality 3

, ,

After two long years of inter­nal use and con­tin­ued devel­op­ment I’m finally mak­ing a new ver­sion of my pop­u­lar Nor­mal­ity soft­ware pub­licly available.

Nor­mal­ity is a free plug-​​in for Adobe After Effects that uses nor­mal passes to accom­plish var­i­ous light­ing effects such as dif­fuse and spec­u­lar light­ing, toon shad­ing, reflec­tions and refrac­tions and more in real-​​time directly in After Effects.

In the mean­time the soft­ware has matured while being in con­stant devel­op­ment and see­ing heavy use over at Stu­dio Lam­pion and a cou­ple of other pro­duc­tion houses, but I’ve been hold­ing back on the pub­lic release for var­i­ous reasons.

Mac OS X Support

And now, thanks to kind and gen­er­ous dona­tions from Christo­pher Wiedswang and James Red­mond, there’s finally a ver­sion for Mac OS X as well as Win­dows!

What’s New

Nor­mal­ity 3 inte­grates all pre­vi­ously sep­a­rate effects into a sin­gle plug-​​in to reduce clut­ter and the over­head of run­ning sev­eral instances of the soft­ware at the same time.

Then there’s the new Nor­mal­ity 3 User Guide which should get you started with the in’s and out’s of the soft­ware and its numer­ous func­tions.
Other new fea­tures include full floating-​​point (32-​​bit) sup­port, toon shad­ing, rim light­ing and sup­port for depth passes besides the oblig­a­tory nor­mal pass.

Please head over to down­load the free Nor­mal­ity 3 and let me know how it’s work­ing for you.

1 2 3