"Dan
Ebberts is an amazing guy whose knowledge of Expressions in After
Effects is quickly making him a highly respected part of the Creative
Cow Team," says Creative Cow director, Kathlyn Lindeboom. "Even
some of the After Effects team themselves have written us to ask 'Where
on Earth did you find this guy, he's incredible!' We agree and we are
very proud that Dan has made Creative Cow his online home and that he
has joined our leadership team in the After Effects forum. He brings an
area of expertise to the team that gives Cow members a look at an area
that is oftentimes very threatening to many users. Dan helps simplify
it and in unlocking the processes, he gives users a look at the
possibilities."
About
himself, Dan says: "I’m a self-professed computer geek and motion
graphics junkie. I’ve been writing computer programs (C, Pascal,
assembler) for 30 years. Six years ago I got my first PC and I started
doing non-linear editing for my company’s safety videos. Then I
discovered After Effects. It was love at first sight."
How has all this new technology changed Dan's world? He says: "Nowadays
I spend a lot of my free time just making movies for my own amazement.
I’d like to make the switch to motion graphics as a profession but the
damn power company just keeps paying me too much to write code…" Go
figure.
Dan has a new website. Click the banner below to learn "all things expressions and scripting"
In this tutorial, Dan Ebberts demonstrates a method of generating motion that is random in both time and space and allows you to quickly assemble a composition with a pleasantly fluid, chaotic movement. Using this particle generator, we'll look at how you might create explosions, smoke, a fire blast, falling snow, and even a liquid-like flow.
The After Effects expression language has a seldom-used random number generator that is really quite a gem. Dan Ebberts says "seldom-used" because he doesn't believe he's ever seen it used in a single expression he's seen posted on the internet. It's not the easiest command to understand and the documentation is pretty sparse but once you get past that it's very cool
With After Effects 6.0, Adobe has introduced some wonderful new functionality to the world of expressions. Most of this is the result of spectacular new features that have been added to After Effects that were not necessarily aimed at expressions but nonetheless dramatically increase the power available to the expression writer. There have also been a few changes and enhancements to the expression language itself.
With version 5.5 of After Effects, Adobe added the wonderful world of the powerful new Expression Controls. In this tutorial, Dan Ebberts looks at several different ways that expression controls can be useful in your projects.
In after Effects 5.5, Adobe has added the capability for expressions to access keyframe and marker data. In this tutorial, Dan Ebberts will focus on how to use this new capability to synchronize an animation to an audio track using layer markers and expressions.
In this tutorial, Dan Ebberts demonstrates a method of generating motion that is random in both time and space and allows you to quickly assemble a composition with a pleasantly fluid, chaotic movement.
With version 5.5 of After Effects, Adobe has included some new keyframe-looping expressions that can be very useful for cyclic animation and layer-looping. In this tutorial, Dan Ebberts walks us through the basics of how to set up and use these expressions and then we'll use one to loop a walk-cycle as you might do in a simple character animation.
Dan Ebberts demonstrates setting up an animation of a piston, crank, and wheel using parenting and expressions so that we only have to keyframe one of the pieces and the others follow along.
