Pixels, Voxels, Fractals and Qubes

More plug-ins adding 3D-ish features in After Effects is an interesting development, but it raises one problem for many users: Where the fuck do you actually get those OBJ meshes from? Now for me as a long time 3D artist obviously this is not a problem – fire up Cinema 4D, modo or Lightwave, slap together a few polygons, export them and off you go. That’s all fine and dandy, but naturally if you just spent your precious money on a plug-in, you may not want to shell out more money for a 3D program. So what are the alternatives? Within the Adobe suites, of course Photoshop Extended‘s 3D features come to mind, in particular Repoussé and the height map displacement. It’s not particularly controllable nor producing particularly clean geometry, but as a start for just trying out things it’s perhaps okay. Next to that is of course Blender, the free 3D program. If you’re willing to learn it at least a tiny bit, this will greatly expand your potential. Come to think of it, it even has a node-based compositing tree and will soon have a 3D camera tracker/ matchmoving tool which might also come in handy in your work (there are also scripts for exporting data to After Effects). If you are mostly interested in creating more procedural structures for background designs and add another level of fractalism beneath e.g. Form‘s own, Structure Synth would be an interesting place to start. If you’re more into greenery, you could try the legendary Ivy Generator or Arbaro. All of these tools are free and provide easy and instant ways to create something based on their example projects, which should get you started quickly. Just keep in mind that most of them are not actively maintained since they are hobbyist or research projects and haven’t been updated in a while, so they may not work on every computer. A tool I stumbled upon just today because it was linked from a forum is Qubicle Constructor. It’s pretty well thought out and reminds me very much of the pixel-by-pixel drawing I used to do a few years ago when creating icons. It’s actually quite fun for a while, but of course you cannot make every project look like old console games or a certain Danish toy and the version that actually spits out usable geometry is the paid one. Lastly, you can of course buy models of any kind on sites like Turbosquid and can also find a few free samples sprinkled in there…