Newton for After Effects

Newton is an awesome plugin for After Effects that simulates 2D physics. As someone who has worked with 3D programs such as Cinema 4D where simulating physics is very smoothly built in and advance, this plugin is a great crossover. Instead of key-framing a ball bouncing for example and trying to make it look as real as possible, Newton allows you to tweak real world physics properties of your objects and simulate real physics. It is great for having things that react to gravity such as objects falling. You can set objects as static and all objects will collide with each other automatically, which is very handy. The plugin has tons of possibilities, which I look forward to exploring, and I have been using some on my third project.

The program is $250 but you can get a free trial and try it for yourself. Here is the website, and here is where you can download it. I highly recommend you check it out.

Motion Graphics and Science

Yes, this blogpost also talks about particle systems! Can't help it!

Motion graphics and animation are used for a bunch of different things outside of the entertainment or media industry. One of theses uses is science. Motion graphics are often used to explain scientific processes, mechanism, and body tissues - all in great detail.

This video below is a unique combination of art, science, and of course motion graphics. The video shows an incredibly dense yet invisible world of the cytoplasm in biological cells. All the tiny molecules, minerals, ions, etc. in the body can be seen in a fluid dance-like motion. These cytoplasmic playgrounds are reimagined using dynamic particle systems that play out and evolve differently each time, mimicking stochastic processes in nature.

The creator of this video, Markos Kay, has a great Vimeo channel with incredible motion graphics stuff where he combines art and science. Do check it out.

Motion graphics and animation are in many ways a science. I found this really amazing article that talks about the physics behind animation films and how incredibly complex it is. The article also mentions how hundreds of scientists from academia, NASA, other physicists, and engineers have left their careers to go work in the profitable movie industry because it offers so much exploration of scientific concepts. 

Interstellar's Black Hole

Last night I watched Interstellar for the first time. I was blown away by the amazing depiction of space, the black hole, and the worm hole in the film. It's no surprise that the film was the winner of the 2015 Oscar for Visual Effects.

It took the VFX team hundreds of hours of tedious work to produce such a stunning product. Black holes have such a strong gravity field that light literally cannot escape them, and light that is surrounding black holes is bent and distorted. Filmmakers often use a technique called ray tracing to render light and reflections in images. "Ray-tracing software makes the generally reasonable assumption that light is traveling along straight paths." Generating the proper light effect as VFX was a difficult task for the team. Eugenie von Tunzelmann, a CG supervisor at Double Negative said this about their work, "We had to write a completely new renderer." Some frames took over 100 hours to render with such complex light systems in place. However, it was all worth it in the end. The visual effects alone are worth the money to see this movie. See the full article by Adam Rogers, from Wired, here.