Creative Communities of the World Forums

The peer to peer support community for media production professionals.

Activity Forums Zaxwerks New to Zaxwerks

  • New to Zaxwerks

    Posted by Doug on April 20, 2005 at 10:42 pm

    Hi Folks –

    I am new to Zaxwerks Invig Classic and was looking for some advice. I am on a short deadline (aren’t we all), and want to create something relatively easy, but also impressive.

    I don’t want to be a pain to anybody just yet ;-), but I am wondering if anybody knows of some good sites to provide lots of ideas, tips and tricks, or step-by-step instructions for creating some nice 3D text that moves across the screen relatively close to the camera, and then ultimately have the camera pull back to see the full text.

    I have AE 6.5, and I have gotten my feet wet with AE, but I am no master yet. But I know enough of the ideas to be dangerous.

    I would like to get a few questions answered:

    1) Once the image(text) from Illustrator is brought into the Zaxwerks plug-in, I know it’s rendered immediately, but is all the motion controlled and keyframes done in AE? Does the lighting that’s controlled in Invig, get pulled into AE?

    2) Does the 3D box need to be checked in AE to take advantage of the motion within Invig?

    3) Do you create the background in Invig or is that created in AE?

    I know these questions might seem simple, but I am looking for some basic directions as opposed to reading a 386 page manual.

    Thanks.

    Doug

    Doug replied 19 years, 10 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
  • 2 Replies
  • Jon Okerstrom

    April 22, 2005 at 5:13 am

    Hi Doug,

    You asked:

    >>1) Once the image(text) from Illustrator is brought into the Zaxwerks plug-in, I know it’s rendered immediately, but is all the motion controlled and keyframes done in AE?

    Yes. Using the Invigorator plug-in controls, you assign your letter objects to sets. You keyframe the movement of those sets as well as the camera. You can do this in the AE timeline or in the Effect Control panel. Zax did a wonderful quicktime tutorial for Invigorator Classic. Have you seen that?

    >>Does the lighting that’s controlled in Invig, get pulled into AE?

    Invigorator’s lights affect only objects in the Invigorator layer. Using comp lights and camera is an option in the Pro version.

    2) Does the 3D box need to be checked in AE to take advantage of the motion within Invig?

    No. The Invigorator layer should normally be left a 2D layer, if you’re using Classic.

    3) Do you create the background in Invig or is that created in AE?

    It depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. You can use Invig to create background elements. However, the beauty of using After Effects is your ability to create complex, multi-layered backgrounds, to which you can add Invigorator objects and motion.

    As for the manual, I would encourage you to give it a go, even if you just do the first part. Following along will help you get up to speed very quickly. Watching Zax’s video, if you have it, is an even faster way to get your head around the basic concepts.

    Does this help?

    Jon

  • Doug

    April 22, 2005 at 4:06 pm

    Hi Jon –

    Thank you very much. I actually wrapped my head around a project yesterday and had some fun figuring out how pretty much everything works.

    Ran into some beginner problems, figuring out when to use the different cameras, the effects of certain values, and so forth. Had some fun with that.

    Actually called tech support to see if I was doing something wrong… but no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t achieve the look I was trying to obtain for a 2 second transition, but I worked around it.

    Thank you for your assistance!

    I will probably be back in the future when I come across more stumping scenarios.

    Thanks.

    Doug

We use anonymous cookies to give you the best experience we can.
Our Privacy policy | GDPR Policy