Animate a Stylised Musical Motion Graphic with Maya and After Effects
Tutorial Details
- Program: Maya, After Effects
- Difficulty: Intermediate
- Completion Time: 1 hour
When creating motion graphics to music, an often overlooked detail that really helps in bringing everything to life is synchronicity. When your visuals are correctly timed, however, it can not only feel like your visuals are moving to the music, but being driven by it.
In this tutorial, you will follow Jostein Fennekasa as he demonstrates a very useful way to map out your music using After Effects. He then will then model, animate, and render the 3d scene, all the while timing it to the music in Maya, and finally bring it all back into after effects to add to that last bit of artistic flare!
Final Effect Preview
Video 1
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Video 2
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Video 3
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Note: click the ‘Monitor’ icon to view tutorial in full-screen HD.
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By Jostein Finnekasa
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Waou..Great Result !
Well, it looks nice because it is Maya tut, but not really worth it to follow,
I,m sorry
Not worth it for you perhaps, but I have watched it myself, and I’m certain that there is much that many Maya users out there could gain from this.
Yeah, it was really helpful for me.
Wazuup, I have one question? Why is the Fumex tutorial not appear on the site?? (sorry for the bad English)
Great tut. First seeing the DisplaceD plugin in action was quite interesting.
Simple (and probably stupid) question though…for the speaker you created a polygon primitive right? Pressing 1-3 on the keyboard usually sets the smoothness of subDivs, not polys. What changed? Is it a new feature in 2010? Hotkey change? Different setting?
I know, silly question, but it’s been bugging me. Thanks!
Hi ChuckD
Thanks for your feedback. The polygon smooth is something that was added in Maya 2009
Jostein
Finally a maya + after effects tut. Thanks!!!
lolll are you kidding!!! THAT’S EXACLY WHAT I WANTED!!! thaaaaaaks a LOOOOOT
Hey, result looks great.. just wondering what people could use this for.. is it meant for music/mtv clips, or more like Intro-movies for webpages? Because I have no clue :p
You aren’t suppose to use that effect for anything. You are suppose to take the technique and reapply it to your own work.
How about…inspiration:)
lol, Justice song.
nice tut
great work ..thx for the tut .. any more maya and after effect tut is much more appreciated …
thx again
Maya and After Effects?!!
Oh yeah!!!
NICE tut. question….whats the song called?
Great tut, but I can’t get the file1 (with all the tif images form after effects) over to displaceD. I’m on a mac, should i hold down any key to do this?
- This is done in Video 1 (11:27 )
Whats the name of the song?
-Matthias
Thanks so much for your comments guys! I really appreciate it.
This tutorial is more about picking up different techniques and tips and tricks so it is a bit different than the specific tutorials. Next time I may get more specific and narrow down the theme but I still think this tutorial includes a lot of very useful information.
Oh, and by the way. The track is “Jutice – Phantom part II” and it gets even better than the intro part I used. Amazing tune, so BUY it on iTunes or something
Jostein
hi guys, where exactly, to which folders i have to copy the plugin/3 files/ ???
thx a lot for help…
Sorry about the late reply but the plugin file (displaceD.mll) goes into:
\program files\autodesk\maya\bin\plugin
and the script files (.mel) can be put in:
\user\documets\maya\scripts
ahhh… Justice – Genesis!!!!! FULL MATEEEEEE!!!!
Thanks a lot, that was really awesome. I’d love to see more stuff in that direction in the future
for a dj set its a very good effect. Thanks for sharing.
great tutorial!! do you have other tutorial using maya and after effects?
I really admire your lesson, that night will be fun for me….thanks dude
God I love this song
!
Wonderful tut! Now make one for 3ds or c4d :p!
You have a very good pacing to the tutorial – mentioning relevant information such as good DOF generators and ways to save on time.
Great work, much appreciated and look forward to more.
Kevin
Great tutorial!!!
I’m Japanese. I haven’t been able to find such a good tutorial here.
Btw I have one question that might not be good for you. However i must ask it coz I haven’t been able to creating with your tutorial.
My question is how to put displaceD into Maya. Every time I try to do, “cannot find procedure ” shows up. Now I have no idea how to solve this problem.
Plz plz help me!!!!Here no japanese site can helps me~!!!
Hey Takuya.
Sorry for the late reply mate but the way to do it is tu put the plugin files (.mel) into a script folder (i.e. user/documents/maya/scripts). Remember not to include sub folders so just add the mel files straight into the script folder.
Then put the plugin file (.mll) into the plugin directory (i.e. C;Program Files/Autodesk/Maya2010/bin/plug-ins) also here remember not to include sub folder. Hope this helps man…and hope you’ll find ever see my reply
Great tutorial, although I am faced with a problem I do not know how to resolve.
Here’s my problem. Both AE and Maya files are set at 24fps, and I have 839 frames in total. When in Maya, everything is fine, audio syncs to animation perfectly, and when rendered out I get 839 images. Fine. Although when I import this rendered out sequence, AE seems to shorten it down to 671, therefore the synchronisation is totally out. Have tried rendering with tif instead of openexr and also adjusted the time stretch in AE but I can’t get it to perfectly sync.
Hmm..did you make sure your AE comp is set to 24 fps (composition settings) and nade sure to interpret the import to 24 fps (right click on sequence in AE, choose interpret footage and make sure the import framerate is set to 24 fps as well. Sorry about the late reply man.
No worries on the late reply.
Yeah it was the interpret footage part that fixed it. I missed it out the first time of trying this tut because I thought I had everything set up properly. Pretty annoying that it imports stuff at a different frame-rate even though you set it to a specific one.
Hats off to you for this tutorial man, should have followed all of it before trying to be a smart arse plonker, haha. Cheers. A.
Takuya… You have to drop it into the appropriate folder in your Maya directory. Then you go to maya and initialize the plugin from the plugin settings in Maya.
GR8…REALLY GR8…..
Did anybody have problems with the plug in? I am using a MAC with maya 2008 ext2 and there is NO .mll and not .mel, just .bundle . I put that where It should go but when I open up maya i get a message saying
// Error: Cannot find procedure “displaceDCreateUI”. If I do need to put a .mll and a .mel file in the right places..WHERE do I get those? anybody!
Having the same problem as robin cant get file 1 to transfer without it dragging all over. im new to maya and after effects was wondering if i could get a reply asap. I have tried this on pc and mac with same result. i assume i have to press and hold a key to allow this action.
“Robin says:
December 18, 2009 at 9:57 am
Great tut, but I can’t get the file1 (with all the tif images form after effects) over to displaceD. I’m on a mac, should i hold down any key to do this?
- This is done in Video 1 (11:27 )”
Anyone fancy giving me a solution?
Nice tutorial, I need to get into after effects more, but you can generate a similar sound driven animation without AE.
For those people that are having problems with generating the keys in Maya, I would recommend using Audiowave plugin for maya, which is part of the Maya Bonustools.
Using Audiowave also means you don’t need to have After Effects simply to generate the sound keys.
I’m in the process of doing a tutorial for this, in the meantime if you need urgent help contact me through my site vfxforge com.
nice and descriptive
when in maya with movie clip one and you implement displaceD i cannot get it to work.
you make a new plane and you drag the file to the color.
that doesn’t work for me the plane doesn’t move.
i’m on maya 2011
plzzzz help me
i’v done it like 20 times over and i cannot get my plane to move.
the problem i think is with getting file1 to the color. it doesn’t work for my somehow.
can someone help me please?
after applying cluster when i scrub time line cluster moves out of his position ……plz help