• Adobe After Effects

  Shine – Basic “Do”s and “Don’t”s???

  Posted by Terry Coolidge on July 24, 2007 at 11:48 pm

  (I originally posted this in the Trapcode forum, but there’s more traffic over here…)

  I’m a fairly experienced AE user, and I feel like I have a handle on how to make things look classy, elegant, and professional, and how to avoid making things look cheap and cheesy.

  I’m curious if there are any good “rule of thumb” type tips that can help Shine usage avoid looking like “he simply just slapped a plug-in on that.” I’ve seen Shine-type effects that look really cool, and other uses where it has looked painfully amateurish. What would you all recommend? Does it have to do primarily with the speed of the source point (fast vs. slow)? Ray length? I know that I will want to play with more than one parameter, but are there some properties that should be left alone while others really need to be animated? I haven’t studied the good and the bad to figure out where the separation is, but I’d be curious to know if there is any advice that would help get me going in a good direction right off the bad.

  Thanks in advance.

  Sean Emer replied 18 years, 9 months ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Steve Roberts

  July 25, 2007 at 12:07 am

  Add one or more additional effects to the stack:

  – blur
  – displacement map
  – glow
  – turbulent displace
  – colorama
  – levels

  Try shortening the ray length, and raise the boost as well. Animate these (and opacity, maybe) so the thing grows, blooms, warps, and so on.

  Good effects are almost always a combination of effects.
• 

  Sean Emer

  July 25, 2007 at 1:20 am

  you can get some neat smoke effects from the shine plugin if you break up the rays using a fractal effect and then sweep the source point through it.

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