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After Effects Template: Pressured – Explosive Steampunk Logo Opener

November 9, 2016 by admin

For months now I’ve been wanting to do this After Effects template, but two massive factors have been getting in the way. The first one, of course, being the lack of time due to customers, since I do these in my own time, but the second was: Boy, those smoke simulation renders take bloody ages! And there is literally no way around it. No matter how you slice it. It’s like going to jail. You’ve got to do the time. And smoke sims take forever to render. So I finally decided to do the explosion via Trapcode Particular, which I wasn’t too happy about it, but at least I’d be able to release this After Effects template. So I did the whole explosion inside After Effects and it didn’t look too bad, so I decided to render this mechanical boiler ball of pressured madness in 3D and imported into AE and composited a test and it looked really good! I was genuinely happy with how it turned out, granted I could’t render the more realistic smoke sim in Blender like I wanted, but still looking good.

This After Effects template is a whole lot more flexible than it appears on the surface. Many of the elements such as the steam jets and the explosion are in fact separated in layers for a better control of the coloring. And while the explosion cannot be changed by means of the control panel, you can still do this manually, which is why several layers of the explosion were provided in this After Effects template instead of only one. The color of the lights and the logo and the background lights (which also affect the lens flares) CAN be changed via the control panel.
The music, is a modified version of Disaster Zone, from my own music library, which will ALSO be available as an independent stock music track in my store.

Hit the break to watch the template in action!

After Effects Credits Template: Dark Temple – A Pyramid’s Ancient Corridors

November 17, 2017October 22, 2016 by admin

Ancient Egypt has always been a subject that fascinated me deeply. The dark corridors of the great pyramid, full of mysticism and mystery… So why not make an After Effects credits template based on it? This is how Dark Temple came to be. And it wasn’t exactly a walk in the park either. Rendering this puppy took ages and I wasn’t even able to do so in its full capacity. Should I’ve done that, this render probably would’ve taken close to a month. And that’s largely due to the fact that the texture maps were massive and the model of the pyramid corridors was huge.
Now, putting this together as an After Effects credits template wasn’t an easy feat either. Many challenges had to be overcome and the biggest one was the fact that the sites that host my templates have a 4 gigabyte limit. This template, in its infancy was 6. So I had to optimize the ever-living daylights out of this thing while still maintaining it customizable and interactive, while still keeping the same quality.
Now, speaking of customization, you have up to 25 taglines/messages that you can change, plus you can change the color of the text, logo and runes on the walls, too. Now, you don’t HAVE to use taglines or text, you can put ANYTHING you want to in those placeholders.

The music for this After Effects credits template is an oldie but goodie in my personal library, called Apocalyptic Genesis, which is a salsa-electro fusion, which I thought would look fantastic here despite the fact that it doesn’t fit all too well with the whole Egyptian theme.

Hit the break to watch the template in action!

After Effects Template: Hammer Smash – Epic Thor’s Hammer Logo Opener

August 16, 2016 by admin

Regrets. We all have them. And one of my biggest regrets is not being able to make the Rage Hammer/God of Thunder After Effects templates epic enough at the time. And I wanted to, I really did. You see, each template I’ve ever made has a code-name in the beginning. Just before I decide on a catchy title to use. For example: “Jungle Temple” was “Agkor Wat”, “Life+Line” was “Ambulance”, “Calm Waters” was “Crystal Clear”, so on and so forth. Anyway, as it turns out, Rage Hammer’s code-name was “Hammer Smash” and I wanted to title it “Mjölnir” (in the end I went with “Rage Hammer” when I released that After Effects template). And incidentally, Hammer Smash’s code-name was “Mjolnir Mallet”, and yeah, I ended up calling it “Hammer Smash”. So it all comes full circle, you see. And the reason I didn’t make it as cool as I wanted to was because of time constraints. Because on top of modeling the hammer itself and texturing it, I also had to create the wall breaking and texture that as well, then make an additional smoke simulation for the hammer impact and in the end that would’ve resulted in a project lifetime way longer than I anticipated for this particular After Effects template so I decided to leave it at that for the time being. I kept going back to that project folder and studying it for some time until I finally decided to make it just the way I wanted. Now that the hammer was already made, I could create the break-away wall and an additional smoke simulation, to give this After Effects template the epicness and glory it deserves.

Now, in regards to technical challenges, surprisingly there weren’t many. It was very straight-forward since I already knew how to put it together after doing the first one and doing 3D metallic text in other templates, but there WERE aspects that I really wanted to add interactivity to and sadly couldn’t because the file-size of the final thing would’ve been jacked up too much like procedurally changing the lighting on the hammer (and the background lights that illuminate it) but I still ended up explaining how that can be achieved by hand in the readme, if you are knowledgeable enough in After Effects.

Hit the break to watch the template in action!