This article originally appeared in DP 04 : 2019.

At Video Copilot Live in Berlin, Andrew Kramer showed in a sneak preview how volumes can be illuminated in real time and manipulated with masks – and we got to know his two German programmers there.

As the new Nebula 3D plug-in is in the starting blocks, we asked the developers for a chat – as I write this article, the beta phase is just beginning and the stress is only just starting for the guys. We hope that there aren’t too many bugs to iron out and are very excited about the real-time cloud spinner. But who is behind Nebula?

Thomas Obermaier (www. instagram.com/thomas_obermaier) is the coder from the Allgäu region. He had been working with Andrew for eight years before they met in person for the first time at the event in Berlin. He is responsible for the programme code, specialises in render engines and is now a consultant for rendering projects, among other things. For Video Copilot, he has worked on Optical Flares and Element 3D, among others. He has the best ideas when he’s out walking his dog.

Fabian Buckreus(www.instagram.com/fabianbuckreus) from near Dortmund is responsible for content. He has developed some of the content for the Video Copilot library – for example Shockwave. He has generated huge amounts of VDB sequences for the new plug-in. When he’s not working for Andrew, he’s often freelancing on cinema productions as a specialist in particle effects, destruction and simulation, such as “Star Trek – Into Darkness”, “Transformers 4”, “San Andreas” and “Cosmos – A Spacetime Odyssey”. His tools are mainly 3ds Max, Thinking Particles, FumeFX, PhoenixFD and Houdini. And he does all the particle simulations for Video Copilot.

DP: How did you come up with the idea for Nebula 3D?

Thomas Obermaier: We were experimenting with lights and I said to Andrew: “I’ve tested this once, let’s add another volume.” He thought that was a cool idea and I tried it out. And then suddenly I had an extremely cool volume in After Effects that looked spectacular and could be moved in real time.

DP: Fabian, what was your reaction back then?

Fabian Buckreus: I think I fell off my chair, if I remember correctly.

DP: And what were the hurdles during the first tests?

Thomas Obermaier: In the beginning, when you turned the quality up extremely high, it became slow. Andrew said to me: “Thomas, that’s pretty cool, but can’t it go any faster?” After about 3 days of sitting quietly in my little room, I had an idea and thought: “Oh, that really works.” Then I showed it to Andrew and he said, “That was actually just a joke, that you should do it faster.” Anyway, now we can render high-resolution volumes in real time.

Fabian Buckreus: In the beginning,we still had problems with aliasing at the edges and we solved each problem in turn – now it’s perfect. I’ve always done the volumes for Video Copilot, but sometimes it took two weeks to render a volume. And now it works in real time.

DP: But what’s behind it all?

Thomas Obermaier: It ‘s a completely independent renderer that can also render atmospheric things like volumetric lights with noise, for example, as with cigarette smoke in the air. And it can import OpenVDB data, which can be rendered with all shading options such as lights, density changes, scattering and occlusion. The cool thing is that the lights also cast shadows in the volume. For example, you take an Element3D scene and place the Nebula layer over it. Then you have all your lights directly in there as volumetric lights. You want an aeroplane to fly through a cloud. Or a car is burning in a city scene and all of this is also “occluded” correctly – we don’t cache anything. You put in the volume and a light with it. Then you can rotate and scale it in real time with the camera and don’t have to wait forever. Normally, it takes some time to render such a volume. But since here, as in Element3D, it is rendered on the GPU, it can be done almost in real time.

The atmospheric lights don’t consume a lot of memory either, but a volume like this can be quite memory-intensive. In the feature film area, you sometimes have volumes of 40 Gbytes. Which of course we do: We optimise it internally, and because we don’t cache, we don’t have to outsource so much additional data. We always recalculate the lights to avoid caching and to utilise the graphics card memory as optimally as possible. A lot of work has also gone into making this really work. I have a GTX 980 graphics card in my computer (which is consumer level from 3 years ago) and deliberately not a Titan card, because it’s important to me that I develop this on a normal graphics card. It should render quickly for everyone.

DP: The plug-in will be ready in one of the next issues and we can test it and do a workshop?

Fabian & Thomas: Definitely ! The beta already looks very good, and it will be ready soon!

The post The Video Copilot programmers from Germany first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

On January 6th, 2005, Andrew Kramer posted his first tutorial about Basic Sky Replacement. Since then he has recorded many great tutorials about VFX and motion design in After Effects. The current one is number 169 about Crossfire Particle FX. As his tutorials are showing useful tricks and workflows and have a self-deprecating humor, they became very popular.
After a while he started to develop presets, scripts and plug-ins. With his Element 3D plug-in, realtime GPU rendering of 3D objects in After Effects became possible. That caught the attention of J. J. Abrams, and in 2013 Andrew was the main title designer for “Star Trek: Into Darkness” and in 2015 he worked on some VFX for “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”.

Video Copilot LIVE?!

The idea was born when Andrew met with Maxime Hacquard from the Motion Designers Community in LA to talk about a presentation in London. Andrew decided that, if he would come to Europe, he wanted to do more shows, and organized four events. Every show was a little bit different and even the thousands of visitors did not really know what to expect.
The first presentation in Berlin was Moritz Schwind from Entagma talking about Houdi­ni. Then came several motion graphics artists, showing some of their work. Andrew of course performed some live tutorials about creating the motion graphics for the shows and other exciting stuff. After his presentation of the new secret plug-in (more on that in the next issue) there were some prizes to win and an after party. In the end it was all about community and working together in the motion graphics and VFX industry.

DP: We heard that you are in Europe for the first time?
Andrew Kramer: I love it and I hope I can come back and spend some more time in each of the cities. You know, in Paris we had a couple of days in between the shows and I have just seen a lot of cool things that I’d like to do. And of course some really great restaurants I have got to hit!

DP: So, when we are looking towards the near future: What do you think will After Effects be in 2025?
Andrew Kramer: That’s not that far in the future. I think After Effects will continue to sort of grow around its community. Maybe more towards realtime content, maybe some more 3D-stuff. I know that the thing that really drives After Effects is the sort of community. Therefore I’m sure there’s going to be more amazing tools and scripts and content and hopefully it will just make its way into a faster and more robust package.

DP: And is Element 3D developing further alongside AE, or do you plan something new?
Andrew Kramer: We are working on the next version of Element 3D (version 3) and it’s got a lot of major changes. I think we have been able to do some really innovative things, which will hopefully change the way that you use Element 3D. Maybe I could give you one little hint as to what that is: The new version has a node editor and a timeline, so maybe that will give you a little bit of a sense of where we are going.

DP: That sounds great. So, Google Earth Studio could have a bridge into Element 3D with its huge system of coordinates?
Andrew Kramer: I’m not sure if you can import the entire earth into Element 3D, but we will work on it. I think the solution would probably be some kind of data set management loading and unloading to be able to get it to work. I guess my feeling is that if they continue to develop their product and make it easier to work with in After Effects or another camera system, there are some interesting opportunities. Obviously you know that we did a tutorial (a long time ago) called „Earth Zoom“ and it was more of a 2D effect and I’m sure it would look great even in 3D.

DP: What’s your take on Cinema 4D and its Houdini Engine as a bridge into After Effects?
Andrew Kramer: So, this year I’ve been diving into Cinema 4D in a big way. We have been working on a new project for a big production company and we are doing an animated, very elaborate title sequence animation using Cinema 4D with Redshift and Octane. I’ve been diving in deep, but the cool thing is that even some of our tools have been critical to marrying those two concepts.
While we’ve been comping in AE, some hero shots of certain 3D models are actually rendered in Ele­ment 3D and sent to the C4D renderer when it’s extracted – using Cineware for camera and lights. So for us, it’s been really cool to see where Element 3D fits into the pipeline with Cinema 4D, because you can do so much more, with so many possibilities for ray-tra­cers and all the other great renders. So to get to that quality, we definitely wanted to jump into C4D, but in order to finish the work and make it look good, we used Element 3D for a lot of small details and post-processing 3D effects.

DP: Do you have any tools that you use that the community might not know?
Andrew Kramer: I think one thing is to invest in a really good time management system. We use Asana (asana.com) for goal management and it’s nice to have a schedule of things you want to accomplish. Some of you may know that this has always been a big challenge for me. I’ve been forcing myself to understand what exactly happens throughout the week, so that I can better get all the things done.

DP: You are also an editor?
Andrew Kramer: I’ve been using Premiere Pro for a lot of our projects. And one thing that I sort of inadver-tently stumbled into is pancake editing. That means you stack timelines on top of timelines and they work like realtime bins, so you can scrub through each of the timelines and your screen will switch to that timeline. It’s easier to find takes, experiment with edits and not feel like you have to constantly switch back and forth between projects. We’ve been having a lot of fun with Premiere, and of course it’s great, because we can then take those shots and just jump over to After Effects to do some visual effects like blending together two different takes or just creating a better timed performance. So I think doing a little bit of VFX makes Premiere an even more robust tool.

DP: If you look at all the people you’ve been meeting on this tour – as well as the comments on the Video Copilot tutorials: What would you recommend as a balanced tutorial diet? And which tutorials are you watching yourself?
Andrew Kramer: I think if you are into creating video or motion design, the only real way to learn is to go out and create something. So, having an understanding of the tools is helpful to see what’s even possible, and a tutorial can show you that. This isn’t difficult.
It’s really a matter of finding that balance between what’s possible and what your limitations are with your own skillset – making sure that it doesn’t get in the way of what you want to create. And the only real way to learn that is to get out there and make stuff.
And of course check out videocopilot.net, and if you want some really great tutorials, check out postproduction-tutorials.net
(laughs).

The post Video Copilot live on Tour – Talking with Andrew Kramer first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Nils Calles.

The included models are .objs with DDS textures and optional .jpg files:

• Tie Fighter
• Imperial Corridor Pieces
• Luke Lightsaber
• Obi-Wan Lightsaber
• Darth Vader Lightsaber
• R2-D2
• BB-8
• X-Wing
• Tatooine Water Vaporator

You can download the package from Video Copilot here. It is 417 MB in size.

In keeping with this, we are currently running a prize draw for the film “The Force Awakens”. If you send us the correct solution by 11 May, you might soon be able to call the film your own in your home cinema!

The post Free “Star Wars” 3D model pack! first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Mirja Fürst.

In the first step, Andrew Kramer sprayed a NERF Gun with black paint and then created various shooting effects using various AE plug-ins and design elements from ShockWave. Sound effects were added using MotionPulse Sound FX.

And, wouldn’t Andrew Kramer look good as an action actor?

You can find all further information about Video Copilot here.

The post Sci-fi weapons video from Video Copilot first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Mirja Fürst.