Blog/News
Stipple - Image Stippling in After Effects
I'm very excited to announce Stipple, our upcoming new plug-in for Adobe After Effects. It let's AE users create temporally coherent Image Stippling patterns driven by footage using a physics simulation. It's a lot of fun!
Update: Stipple is available for sale now. Check it out!
Continue Reading ›Fast Bokeh Pro for OpenFX Now Available
We're very excited to announce the availability of Fast Bokeh OpenFX for OpenFX host applications like Black Magic Design Fusion Studio. All the features are identical to the After Effects version except some UI related changes/limitations. Fast Bokeh v2 has the following new features.
- Custom Iris Shapes
- Zone Control
- GPU Acceleration using Metal/Compute.
If you have any issues/feedback, please do contact us.
After Effects CC 2022 - Multi Frame Rendering Update
We don't normally write a blog post for every new update of AE, but this is a special one. A brand new version of After Effects is out (CC 2022 or just v22) and it has a killer new feature called Multi Frame Rendering (MFR). It is one of those features that make you go "uh interesting" when you read about it - but once you start using it there is no way you can ever go back to a version without it.
We're glad to say that all our products (except Buena Depth Cue) support the new MFR feature in AE. So make sure you download the latest versions and enjoy with with CC 2022! Also huge congrats to the AE team and kudos to them for working with third party plug-in developers from day one.
Download
Feel free to contact us if you have further questions.
Introducing Fast Bokeh OpenFX Beta
We're very excited to announce Fast Bokeh beta for OpenFX host applications like Black Magic Design Fusion Studio. It's an open beta so everyone can download, try it out. If you have any feedback, please do contact us.
Continue Reading ›Introducing Fast Bokeh Pro v2.0
Image Credit: Nicola Destefanis
We're very excited to announce a major update to Fast Bokeh with some amazing new functionality. Fast Bokeh v2 has the following new features.
- Custom Iris Shapes
- Zone Control
- GPU Acceleration using Metal/Compute.
Export SVG Vectors From Aura To Adobe Illustrator
We're very excited to kick things off in the new year with an important update to Aura for After Effects, which finally lets you export SVG files from Aura. SVG is a resolution independent vector file format and can be opened in Adobe Illustrator. This lets you work in AE using Aura at a much lower resolution and export them in vector format, which are very useful for print projects.
Continue Reading ›Fast Bokeh Pro - Polygonal & Anamorphic Iris, Highlights and More!
I'm very excited to announce a HUGE update to Fast Bokeh Pro for After Effects, which adds the following new features.
So What's New?
Polygonal Iris Shapes: This is the most requested feature by a long shot. Finally this update adds polygonal aperture shapes. You can set polygon shapes starting from a Triangle, Pentagon, Hexagon to all the way upto a 18-side polygon. Also adjust the curvature of these polygonal shapes to give them a more natural look.
HQ Rendering Option: Render at a much higher quality sampling if needed. Even at the highest quality setting, Fast Bokeh Pro renders really fast.
Highlights Adjustment w/ Brightness and Saturation: Tweak the highlights of the image to exaggerate Bokeh effects and get more cinematic results.
Anamorphic Bokeh: Set the aspect ratio of the Iris shapes to simulate an expensive Anamorphic Lens aperture.
Linear Color Working Space: If you are not already working in linear color space, this feature allows the plug-in to create the bokeh in a linear color space internally irrespective of project settings. Very useful in photorealistic compositing.
Performance Improvements: Major performance improvements for Spherical aperture rendering.
Even with the addition of these new features Fast Bokeh still satisfies the following requirements.
- Very fast and blur radius independent.
- Handles edges properly.
Important Note: Non-Pro features continue to be free. 'Pro' features and require the plug-in to be registered with a license key. If the plug-in isn't registered and you're using the 'Pro' features, a watermark is rendered. If you're not using 'Pro' features a watermark is NOT rendered.
Introducing Fast Bokeh Pro For After Effects
A few months ago, we released Fast Bokeh for After Effects, which became very popular. With that popularity came a lot of feedback, feature requests and most importantly support emails. Quite a lot of users found it very useful and requested more convenience features like easier focus point selection and higher quality aperture blur. In order to develop those new features and also provide support to users we decided to make Fast Bokeh a fully featured paid plug-in. So we're excited to announce Fast Bokeh Pro! Please note that the existing features will continue to be free and only the new features require a license key registration.
So What's New in Pro?
Spherical Bokeh Blur: While the Gaussian Bokeh Blur is pretty good and super fast, Spherical Bokeh Blur is far more realistic and visually appealing. Also, the new Spherical Bokeh Blur is almost as performant as the Gaussian one while providing beautiful results.
Focus Point Param: Instead of manually entering focus depth values, users can now use a point parameter to click the region directly.
Even with the addition of these new features Fast Bokeh still satisfies the following requirements.
- Very fast and blur radius independent.
- Handles edges properly.
The new Spherical Aperture Bokeh Blur is also radius independent and only dependent on the image size, NOT the amount of blur being applied.
Next, all the edges are handled as expected within reasonable limits i.e. pixels are spread out of the object boundaries like a real DoF filter should and no hard edges and halos.
The UI is very simple and only has a few params and they're straightforward.
Important Note: Non-Pro features continue to be free. 'Pro' features and require the plug-in to be registered with a license key. If the plug-in isn't registered and you're using the 'Pro' features, a watermark is rendered. If you're not using 'Pro' features a watermark is NOT rendered.
Aura v1.1 - Dots & Color Maps
Aura v1.1 is available for download now and this update mainly adds two new features. Dots Render Mode and support for Color Maps. Even though one of the main goals of Aura was to avoid drawing points all over the place, after the release the most popular feature request by far had been to add support for rendering the waves as 'Dots'.
The Color Maps feature enables you to use a custom layer to drive the colors of the waves instead of using a Color Gradient. This also enables the user to animate the Color layer maps over time and create interesting visuals.
There is also a new Gradient Position setting that allows you to set the position of the gradient based on the absolute age of each wave or relative to the ages of all waves currently being rendered.
This is a free update to all existing users, so head on to the product page download the new version and try it out yourself!
Fast Bokeh For After Effects
Ever since I rendered out the first depth map in a 3D modeling program, I always wanted to have a quick DoF blur filter that can be added later in a compositing program like AE that looks decent. There are many lens blurring plug-ins out there for After Effects, some of them produce custom aperture shapes along with many bells and whistles. Even AE comes out of the box with a few. But none of them really satisfy all the three following requirements.
- Very fast and blur radius independent.
- Handles edges properly.
- Gaussian blur equivalent quality.
The ones that produce high quality bokeh are really slow and get bogged down once the blur radius gets more than a few pixels. Other plug-ins while reasonably fast, fail to handle edges properly and produce nasty hard edge artifacts.
Fast Bokeh satisfies all the three above requirements. First off, the performance of the plug-in is only dependent on the image size, NOT the amount of blur being applied.
Next, all the edges are handled as expected within reasonable limits i.e. pixels are spread out of the object boundaries like a real DoF filter should and no hard edges and halos.
Lastly, the quality is equivalent to a nice Gaussian-like fast blur without any complicated aperture shapes and bokeh settings. The UI is very simple and only has a few params and they're straightforward.
Best feature of all, it's free!
Introducing Aura for After Effects
I'm very excited to announce the release of a new plug-in for After Effects called Aura. Aura is a re-imagination of the classic Radiowaves plug-in in After Effects. It is like a procedural particle system but instead of rendering small points/sprites all over the place it creates these vector like shapes that change over time much like the Radiowaves plug-in. It’s very simple yet a lot of fun to play around.
Continue Reading ›OBJ Sequence Exporter For Cinema 4D R20
Good news! OBJ Sequence Exporter for Cinema4D is now updated to v2.0 and now works with R20. Not only that it exports all attributes of OBJ files now including Normals, Texture Coordinates and even MTL files. Even better it still remains free!
This new version requires Cinema 4D R17 and up. For R17 users, make sure you're running the latest version (R17.055). It should work out of the box for R18,R19 and R20 versions. If you want the older 1.0 version, contact us.
Also just to reiterate, this exporter is designed to work with Plexus and will always be supported for that purpose. If you want to use it with other plug-ins/applications you're free to do so. We cannot provide support for OBJ related issues in other applications. Only Plexus is officially supported.
Plexus Illustrations & Wallpapers
I'm always fascinated whenever artists use Plexus for a print project or something unrelated to video. Today, I had the pleasure of adding two such beautiful projects to the gallery. Let's take a look at them.
Continue Reading ›Color Wiggle - Now Available For Free!
Color Wiggle is a Utility plug-in that let's you wiggle between colors easily. Just set the colors you want to wiggle between and adjust the wiggle params. The plug-in automatically wiggles between those colors and also produces a 'color-out' parameter so you can link it to other effects. You can also loop the wiggle values. For more info, checkout the product page.
Color Wiggle is no longer a paid product and now available for free!
Comp Screenshot - Utility Plug-in for After Effects
Comp Screenshot is a nifty utility plug-in that does only one thing. It takes a screenshot of the active composition and saves it as a PNG on the Desktop. Best of all, it's a free download.
Often times, I find myself taking screenshots when I'm working and wished there is an easier way to quickly create a PNG file without having to align the scissor tool properly to the composition in After Effects. I know you can always render out a file using the Render Queue, but this saves so much time and more intuitive.
Adobe CC 2017 Compatibility [Updated]
Adobe Creative Cloud 2017 edition is out for a few months already and all our plug-ins are fully compatible. You can download the latest installers from here.
» Plexus 3 Installer (Win/Mac)
» TV Distortion Bundle Installer (Win/Mac)
» Buena Depth Cue Installer (Win/Mac)
Legacy versions, such as Plexus 2 are NOT compatible with CC 2017 and above anymore due to API changes. After Effects has been going major API changes in recent versions and it's no longer possible to maintain older legacy versions of Plexus.
Hence, we strongly recommend you to upgrade to Plexus 3 which is designed from the ground up for AE's new architecture and also utilize all the new APIs introduced in After Effects to get much better performance.
If you're a Plexus v2/Plexus v1 user and want to upgrade to Plexus 3, make sure to checkout the discounted upgrade pricing.
Update
A few users emailed us asking a few questions as to why Plexus 2 is no longer supported, so here is some more info.
Plexus 2 was released when AE was still at CS5.5. (2012). It was supported through CS5.5, CS6, CC, CC 2014, CC 2015, CC 2015.3 for more than four years. Starting CC 2015 AE APIs started changing significantly and it’s no longer possible to maintain two versions of the same plug-in. Like any software, in comes the new - out goes the old. If one is still reluctant to upgrade they can always install an older version of AE and install Plexus 2 which is definitely not recommended.
Please note that we still sell perpetual licenses and try to convince our users to upgrade with new features instead of forcing subscriptions.
Updated: Sep 12 2018
Plexus 3 is Available Now!
The wait is over! Plexus 3 is available for purchase now. If you want to see the new features, check out the announcement or head over to the product page to download it now!
Continue Reading ›Introducing Plexus 3
I'm very excited to announce a brand new major version of Plexus. Plexus was designed to bring generative art closer to a non-linear motion graphics application like Adobe After Effects and this major new version bridges the gap further with some exciting new tools and enhancements. So what's new in Plexus 3?
Continue Reading ›Plexus OBJ Sequence Exporter For Cinema 4D Is Available For Free!
Good news! Plexus OBJ Sequence Exporter for Cinema4D is now a free download for everyone. When Plexus was released with support for OBJ File Sequences, I've decided to create this simple utility to help users export OBJ sequences from Cinema 4D into Plexus. Later on, many users were using it to export OBJ Sequences to other programs and plug-ins.
But, OBJ files are tricky in the sense that their implementations are arbitrary. They're just text files with little standardization and cause numerous compatibility issues among multiple programs. Each program has it's own way of interpreting OBJ files and there is no way to support them all. For example, a valid OBJ file in Plexus might be invalid in Form and partially valid in Element and totally useless in some other application. I've been getting numerous support issues related to other programs' interpretation of OBJ file sequences and it is not possible for me to address them.
In conclusion, this exporter is designed to work with Plexus and will always be supported for that purpose. If you want to use it with other plug-ins/applications you're free to do so. If it doesn't work with other plug-ins/applications please contact the publisher of that program for a solution. But, if you're facing issues with OBJ sequences in Plexus, please do let us know.
Adobe CC 2015 Compatible Installers [Updated]
Adobe announced the release of Creative Cloud 2015 and it'll be gradually rolled out to users. I recommend caution when upgrading to new software and if you're working on a project, it's better to hold off on the upgrade for a while. See Todd Kopriva's post to keep previous versions of AE installed when installing CC 2015.
You need to re-install most if not all of the 3rd party plug-ins because of the changes to the rendering architecture introduced in 13.5 version of AE. Here are the download links to the latest version of our products which are compatible with CC 2015.
Please note, SVG Export in Plexus is currently disabled in CC 2015. We're working with Adobe to implement it for the new architecture.
Update: SVG Export functionality has been restored in Adobe CC 2015. To get that functionality please download the latest version of Plexus.
Plexus Installers: Download.
TV Distortion Bundle Installers: Download.
Installers for Buena Depth Cue are coming soon.
If you're facing issues please do let us know.
Plexus and Cinema4D Integration Tutorials from NAB
NAB 2015 was a lot of fun and we had an opportunity to present some great new stuff created using Plexus. Simon Bronson demoed integration between Plexus and Cinema 4D to create some amazing results. The following tutorials explain the process in great detail.
Continue Reading ›Interview - Simon Bronson, Mograph Designer
Simon Bronson is a talented Motion Graphics Designer, who is currently the Head of Design at Method Studios in Melbourne, Australia. I have had the pleasure of knowing Simon personally for a few years and he has been involved in the development and testing of many of our products. In fact, his early experiments using Plexus are still featured in our gallery. I had the opportunity to talk to him about his work and design in general.
Continue Reading ›The Most Important Feature of AE Next
Adobe announced all new After Effects 13.5 version with a bunch of new features, utilities and cool gizmos. It now has a Character Animator, a detailed face tracker and a bunch of other improvements. If you want to know more about it, checkout Todd's blogpost explaining them in more detail. Buried in that post, there is an important announcement, Changes to Rendering Architecture for Interactive Performance Improvements. Apparently, it improves the experience so much that there'll be no more delays or beachballs during rendering! That sounds too good to be true. So I've downloaded the beta and noticed that they added a lot of new APIs and made significant changes to their rendering architecture. So I guess, 3rd party developers need to re-engineer their ground breaking & sometimes patented plug-ins to take advantage of the new APIs to really provide seamless user experience. Right? Well true, but not really. It interacts faster even if the plug-ins don't use any new APIs. I can write all the technical minutiae and bore you to death, but instead I'll explain it using a simple example.
Continue Reading ›ALPHAPLEX - Abstract Typeface created using Plexus
It's always fascinating to learn about new cool things users create with Plexus! James Ramirez and Heather Brantman liked working with Plexus so much, that they've decided it would be really cool to have some of the text animations as an actual font. The result is this cool abstract typeface called ALPHAPLEX. Best of all, they're sharing it with everyone for free!
Continue Reading ›David Bowie - LOVE IS LOST
Another exciting new piece that uses Plexus extensively - David Bowie's LOVE IS LOST (Steve Reich Mix). Harry aka Denial of Service is one of the artists involved in that production and it is quite extraordinary!
Continue Reading ›Star Sports Rebranding (Updated)
As a huge cricket fan, I'm very thrilled to see these new Idents created for Star Sports rebranding in India by VentureThree, London. Looks like they've used Plexus extensively and the design looks very slick. The animations are smooth and overall it's a brilliant piece of video. Unfortunately, I couldn't get it to embed here, but make sure to watch both the videos.
Update: We now have more details on the project. Apparently, much of the Plexus work was done by Capacity in Los Angeles. Most of the Plexus animations were driven by Thinking Particles exported out of Cinema4D, as tweeted by Brett Morris, (the developer of Movietype) who worked on the project extensively.
Check it out - Start Sports Branding (Capacity.tv).
Star Sports ID Rebranding (Vimeo).
Star Power Ident (Vimeo).
Continue Reading ›Ducks, Dreams, Camera & Water
It has been a great week so far and many great new pieces using Plexus have been published online. Here are a few of them.
First off, Adam Blumert created an amazing infographic piece called Sleep and live which apparently, explores relationship between sleep and dreams. I couldn't understand the content, because it was in Polish, but Adam was quick enough to promise an English version soon. It's still a great piece to watch nonetheless.
Continue Reading ›Watch Dogs - Hide Trailer
Watch Dogs - Hide trailer was released recently and it makes great use of Plexus. Mattias Peresini aka Mattrunks worked on that trailer extensively. Make sure to check out the cool Ubisoft intro, in the beginning of the video.
Continue Reading ›Butterflies & Nature
Little Sines is a lovely illustrated animation by Matt Pitt that uses Plexus to create those abstract looking butterflies. I was very surprised when I first read they've used Plexus to create 'Butterflies'. I didn't even for once, think someone would create Butterflies using Plexus, but that just confirms that different people use the same set of tools to achieve very different results. It all depends on the artist, not the medium or tools.
Continue Reading ›Buena Depth Cue Is Now Available!
Buena Depth Cue is a collection of powerful plug-ins that allows AE artists to create visual depth in their projects with an innovative workflow and mimic Z-depth in a unique way. We've acquired this bundle from Digieffects, Inc. early this year and now we're very happy to make it available again.
So What's new? We've made all the plug-ins in the bundle compatible with Adobe After Effects CC and also slashed the price to half!. Now you can get all the six plug-ins in the bundle for just $99. If you purchase it in the next two weeks, you'll qualify for an additional 20% discount and get it for a sweet $79 only! Existing users, don't worry! We've got you covered. You can get this version for free if you are an existing customer.
Continue Reading ›We Steal Secrets-The Story of Wikileaks
Art of the Title published an extensive interview with Marc Smith, Sr Design Director at Frame Store New York who worked on the amazing title sequence for We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks. Marc shares their design process and also how they developed the visual aesthetic for the title sequence. He also mentions working with Plexus and how they've used it in their workflow alongside Cinema 4D. It's a remarkable interview that details various aspects of designing a title sequence and you should definitely check it out!
James Bond Visualized With Plexus
This is a repost of the Navarro Parker interview article that was published on Aescripts.
When a cutting-edge computer visualization of James Bond's head was necessary Navarro Parker and Bradley G Munkowitz (aka Gmunk) were called to do the task by MPC Los Angeles. MPC were commissioned to create the spot for Wieden + Kennedy in collaboration with RSA Films London. We were lucky enough to score an interview with Navarro about his process and life in general. Enjoy. And don't miss the awesome graphics breakdown from MPC at the end of the interview.
Continue Reading ›Art of Flight Title Sequence Interview
This is a repost of the Chris Murphy interview article that was published on Aescripts.
The Red Bull Media House and Brain Farm film "The Art of Flight" is a landmark achievement in action sports filmmaking (and filmmaking in general) and so it is only fitting that it has an equally impressive title sequence. We are extremely proud that Plexus helped play a part in it and it is why we are sharing it with you here. The design and productions of the title sequence was led by creative director Chris Murphy who was gracious enough to grant us an interview. Enjoy.
Continue Reading ›Hello Again!
Hello there, Welcome to the new Rowbyte website. It's certainly a step up from the bland 90s era HTML page. If you don't who we are, please check out our About page. Briefly, we make high-end graphics software plug-ins for Non-Linear Video applications like Adobe After Effects. Plexus our flagship 3D particle engine for After Effects is used in a wide variety of projects like TV intros and Feature films. Make sure to checkout our Gallery page which showcases artwork created by various artists around the world using Plexus and other Rowbyte products.
We're still tweaking a few things in our brand new website, so let us know if you spot something weird or abnormal. Meanwhile, you can always follow Rowbyte on Twitter or Facebook. If you're still old school like me, follow our RSS feed in your favorite news reader.
Thanks again and hope you enjoy our new website!