3D Ocean

Today I finished creating a 3 dimensional ocean. It began by importing in a picture of a sunset. Next I duplicated the picture and rotated it around. Once it was rotated, I had to blend the two pictures together using different effects. On the bottom layer, it was necessary to create a displacement map. The problem with the map was that it creating blank black areas on the image once having added a camera and key frames to move forward into the ocean. In order to fix the problem I decided to just zoom further into the picture. Unfortunately this made it look worse but I had no other choice, mostly because even in the tutorial, that's what they did as well. To make the water area look more realistic, I had to put a tint and a curve effect on it. This made it darker and differentiated the ocean from the sky a lot better. Overall, the ocean was really fun to make. It was inspired by the show "The Deadliest Catch" although it is a lot more beautiful and peaceful.

Today I was inspired by one of the tutorials I've seen called "The Ring" which teaches you how to build a silver ring in After Effects with a particle wipe and use valueAtTime expression to automate it over time. But instead of that I decided to use an Ellipse effect to create a thick purple ring. Once that was done I added a strong glow to it to enhance the ring, also against a black background. Following these steps, I added a strobe light effect and set it to be very random. Basically the whole thing looks like one seizure right now but I'm planning on adding more next day. Before I completed all that, I added some text into my swirl project and put a Twirl Effect on it which makes it look a lot more loopy which is what I was going for. Overall it was interesting to explore some of the other effects on my own and not just follow what a tutorial tells me to do.  

Today I attempted to create a CC Ball effect but I continued to have trouble with the timings of the different sections. Next class I am going to keep trying to get it right and if I don't I have another effect in mind that I want to try. On another note, I finished the swirl I began making last class by adding a nicer colour to it rather than it just be black and brown. Overall, today wasn't a very successful class and I hope that next time is different. After Effects so far has been really fun especially to play around with and make my own thing.

After Effects Time

I've begun using After Effects by creating a particle explosion. It took several days but it ended up very rewarding. There were a lot of different effects and layers used in the tutorial I followed but it was never confusing so I really think I'm starting to get the hang of it. I of course switched some things around from the actual tutorial to make it more my own, such as the colours, sizes of different particles and titles. After completing this tutorial I'm already onto my next one which is a spinning orb with a title in the middle. I can't seem to do it the way the creator has therefore I'm just going to go my own way with it. I plan on playing around with my different effects this time to manipulate the beginning portion of the tutorial.