Download The New Cube Dance Custom Effect – AE Premium
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Download The New Cube Dance Custom Effect – AE Premium

on Aug 17th 2010 with 20 comments
Tutorial Details
  • Requirements: After Effects, Photoshop, and the Cube Dance Custom Effect available to Premium Members
  • Difficulty: Advanced
  • Run Time: 28:22 min
Download Source Files

Final Product What You'll Be Creating

In its simplest form Cube Dance creates cubes without you having to manually align 3D layers. This of course can be pretty useful, however, by animating a few properties, such as offset and rotation, you can choreograph very intricate movements and even create unique geometric shapes. This tutorial acts an introduction and we’ll look at installing the effect, how each of the effect properties work, and how you might set-up an animation. I hope you enjoy it!

This is a Premium Tutorial. To view and get the Custom Effect you must Join Premium.

Once you’ve joined, log-in to the Premium Dashboard with your username and password to immediately access your Premium Content. Navigate to AE Premium via ‘Premium Categories’ in the sidebar. You’ll be able to grab the tutorial videos, project files and assets in the members’ area.

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By day I am the Digital Creative Director of an advertising agency in London. By night, I am an After Effects and motion graphics fanatic, you can check out my work at brickontheegg.com. Oh, and I also like making things out of spaghetti.  

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  • http://www.chrisjoyceportfolio.co.uk Chris Joyce

    A great way to speed things up. Thanks.

  • http://www.vfxrider.com Chandan Kumar

    Brilliant!

  • http://aepal.com Murat Erozturk

    Fantastic stuff m8! Presets like this make a world of difference while on the job plus it looks great!

  • http://www.youtube.com/ianhpiratao IANH – BR

    Wonderful Job!

  • cunctus69

    Pure awesome goodness!

  • http://www.pixelthemes.com/ Rajeshkannan

    Genius work

  • http://visualfxtuts.com Topher Welsh

    Holy cow… this looks amazing.. now those people that complain about Premium memberships can’t say anything! This is really great man!

  • G-Phi

    Wow! Great custom effect Scott. Thanks for spending the time to come up with this effect and thanks for making it available to the public.

  • frankyframe

    wow!!! great :)

  • Adam

    This is probably one of the best premium tutorials. Amazing outcome.

  • G-Phi

    Hello Scott. I’m running AE CS3 on a mac and every time I drag the #”(6)” preset onto all the cube side layers I get this warning:

    After Effects warning: invalid numeric result
    (divide by zero?)
    Expression disabled.

    Error occurred at line 0
    Comp: ‘Cube Dance’
    Layer: 3 (‘front’)
    Property: ‘Amount to Tint’

    I set each of the “Amount to tint values” to “0″ for each side which allows me to see the JPEG file sides of the cube itself but when I click on the Cube Null and twirl down the “Axis hints” arrow and click on the “show hints” checkbox. The sides/jpeg of the images don’t change to colored sides as in your video.

    The only way I can get them to show the colored sides is to go back into each side and change the “Amount to Tint” value back to 100% manually.

    Somewhow the expression is disabled. I triple checked to make sure I copied and pasted everything correctly from the xmlCode txt file that you provided and that I put it in the correct place but I still get the same results.

    How can I correct this?

    Thank you.

    G-Phi

    • http://www.brickontheegg.com Scott Bedford
      Author

      Hi G-Phi, I especially tested the custom effect in AE CS3 on my MacBook Pro and it worked fine, so I’m sorry you are having problems with it. I’ll try and look in to it. Cheers Scott

  • Nick

    Great tutorial and custom effect; will you be doing a follow-up tutorial on the buildings you made in the latter part of your teaser video?

    Thanks!

  • Kemet

    I love it….I thout about something like this pretty long time and this is absolutely briliant….

  • http://www.bartekskorupa.com Bartek Skorupa

    Just to let you know how you could prevent those expressions from being easily broken.
    There is something called “trying” in expressions. You can set the value if the expression returns an error:

    Syntax:

    try{ your expression that can return an error }
    catch(error)
    { value that should appear in case of an error }

    Example:

    try{
    a=0;
    value/a
    }catch(error){
    50
    }

    This gives you the value of 50, because you can’t divide by 0. The expression you try returns an error so the value is set to 50.

    • http://www.brickontheegg.com Scott Bedford
      Author

      Hi Bartek, This is a great tip, thanks. I’ll have a look at implementing it when I get a moment. Cheers Scott

  • http://www.brickontheegg.com Scott Bedford
    Author

    Thanks for the positive feedback. What’s your view on creating a short follow-up tutorial that looks at creating the more complex 3D shape and perhaps the cityscape – would this be useful? Let me know your thoughts. Cheers Scott

  • David

    I cannot get all 7 effects to show in the Effects & Presets window. It shows 1 and 6 like the tutorial states, but when I toggle the folder arrow closed and open, it still doesn’t show them. Anyone have the same issue? I’m running this on a Mac.

  • Ben

    Hey Scott… Love this tool. I actually joined tuts just to get it… saved me LOTS of time. I’d love to see the other ways you’ve used this preset, especially with multiple cubes. I hope you finish the second “tutorial” on it real soon. You may have even inspired me to try to create some extensions for it, once I learn how :)

    Thanks again…

  • Leao

    Hi, I have premium membership and have downloaded the preset from this page but where has the tutorial disappeared to? Does it teach how to create the bouncing buildings featured in the above preview? Leao