After Effect Tutorial 4

After Effects Tutorial | Reflection Plug-In

Melanie Lerner | November 25, 2010

http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorial/reflection_plug-in/

In Andrew Kramer’s tutorial he shows an easy way to use reflections within an animation piece (while After Effects comes with a built in reflection preset there are some limitations to it, which is why he uses a plug-in feature instead). He starts off by installing a plug-in titled VCReflect.aex (free feature of VideoCopilot), which can be downloaded, copied, and pasted into your own directory. With a new composition and image in place he begins by going to effect – videocopilotvc – reflect. Once this is in place you can go onto to change the reflection from After Effects’ default settings by altering the floor position (where the reflection starts), the reflection distance (how long the reflection goes on from the main source image), and by turning down the opacity and changing the blur amount so that the reflection looks as believable as possible. A falloff blur is one that gets stronger as the reflection extends away from the floor/beginning position (as compared to a simple directional blur). An advantage to this plug in is that it renders fairly quickly and easily.

While the first example Kramer showed involved an image that had a straight horizontal base, the next one rests on a diagonal. To accommodate for this he rotated the angle of reflection so that it lined up with the diagonal base of the image. However, even after a rotation the reflection looks awkward because reflections are supposed to appear to bend. Therefore, Kramer further adjusted the skew so that the reflection looks less forced. Another point he brought up was to consider moving the reflection behind the original image so that the image itself doesn’t get cut off.

The third example Kramer demonstrated showed how to create a reflection in 3-D space using text, which yields different but interesting results than from adding a reflection to a mere image. The reason is that After Effects separates the text and reflection layers so that if you move one the other one doesn’t follow suit. To fix this, he suggested you precompose the layer (making sure all of its attributes are attached). Consequently, the two layers should then link together. He suggested adding a camera into the mix as well and playing with light and texture to make the work look more dynamic and dramatic.

The final example Kramer illustrated in this particular tutorial was how to customize effects on a reflection. First change the blend style to reflection only. Then you can go to effect – stylize – scatter. With the title selected you can go to effect – channel – cc composite to do some pretty interesting things as well (just have to make sure RGB box is unchecked so that the title appears on screen). This feature allows for the reflection to have noise/texture to rather than just its basic sheen. If there is a solid color layer in between the text layer and the reflection layer, a simple adjustment layer will separate the two so that they A) render in the proper order and B) don’t get cut off by the solid color.

While there are definitely many options for as how to go about customizing a reflection, knowing the basic steps will give me a starting point from which to branch out from. I find this plug-in will be a handy tool to have when animating and give an extra layer of depth and dimension to my work.