by Tami Stodghill, press relations XChange UK

Those of you who want to produce remarkable work for, effectively, any type of media have either discovered the “magic” of After Effects, or are pondering whether you are ready to make the move. With the diversity in today’s media, perhaps your pondering should be short-lived.

You might be astounded by what you can do once you enter the world of Adobe After Effects users. Phenomenal videos with effects using the key frame-based motion control features could leave you amazed at your talent, and lift you to a new level in design. And as if the features weren’t enough, After Effects boasts an intuitive, layer-based method to compositing that expands that new world as quickly as your imagination can process new ideas to implement.

A lot of After Effects’ potential lays in its substantial use of Plug-ins. Those of you who use Photoshop, Illustrator, or even InDesign, are familiar with Plug-ins, and After Effects definitely takes advantage of that same extensible technology. Your biggest hurdle may be in deciding what plug-ins in which to invest.

Basically, After Effects utilizes a structure of layers (in the same way as Photoshop), that operate on a timeline. Using images (still) and footage such as video clips, composites are created and can be used to create DVDs and even to produce animated web images and Flash videos.

This being said, let's take a look at a Plug-in that adds amazing capabilities to those of you who reside in the After Effects world. Developed by Zaxwerks, 3D Invigorator Pro 4.0 adds a new dimension to the After Effects world that will leave you hard pressed to deny the variety of options. 3D Invigorator Pro 4.0 adds many new capabilities that appeal to the artistic side of graphics design, as well as adding new tools that appeal to the motion graphic artist whose job it is to create large numbers of graphics on impossible deadlines.

To begin with, a new file format has been added for importing and exporting three-dimensional objects. The new Invigorator object format enables you to set up three-dimensional logos, titles and text, color them, apply the materials, maps and object settings, and then save them into files which you can reuse over and over in all your other Invigorator projects. This is a huge time saver for those of you with repetitive work. 


Instead of having to start in Adobe Illustrator, 3D Invigorator Pro’s three-dimensional text engine can use PostScript Type 1 and TrueType fonts to directly create three-dimensional models using any of the 100 edge bevels included with the program. Every letter can have its own font, size, kerning, tracking, baseline shift, horizontal and vertical scale, color, bevel, position, and depth. You also have the ability to change the text at any phase of your production process and retain the color, modeling, and animation.

What does this mean? Well, after the first version of a promo is created, countless other versions can be created by simply changing the text. The new three-dimensional text will retain the same coloring, text attributes, beveling, texture map placement, and even the animation data. This is a gift when many changes or even extra versions are needed.

3D Invigorator Pro has what can only be called a really cool three-dimensional primitives feature. One button provides you with spheres, cubes, planes, and cylinders with control over smoothness and size as well as a control for the shading of the facets so you can create shapes that look like they have been cut or polished.

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