Digital Anarchy, a leading provider of cost-effective special effects software for Adobe, Apple and Discreet products, has released the Anarchy Toolbox for After Effects. Anarchy Toolbox is a set of nine tools for creating a wide variety of sophisticated effects, including creative blurs, beautiful glows, controlled distortions, seamlessly tiled images, warped graphics and utilities.
Many of Anarchy Toolbox's new filters make use of grayscale images and paths to achieve added effects and increased flexibility. Using these outside sources to control the effects allows users to easily work with other motion graphic elements or animation sequences, resulting in
seamlessly composited effects with minimum effort.
"Using grayscale images and paths to control effects is a powerful, but underused method," said Jim Tierney, president/founder of Digital Anarchy. "Adding this type of functionality to Anarchy Toolbox greatly expands the possibilities of the filters, and gives designers a whole new level of control and flexibility."
The Anarchy Toolbox is available now for a special introductory price of $129. The plug-in set is compatible with Adobe After Effects 4.1 and higher.
Nine Creative Tools
1- Anarchist Edge produces glowing, painterly edge effects. It finds areas of contrasting colors and creates lines along the borders of those areas. The controls combined with the built-in transfer modes allow for the creation of many light and paint effects.
2- Designer Blur is a new way of creating blurs. It creates a blur effect using a pre-defined or user definable shape. As the underlying image blurs, the pixels takes on the 'blur kernel' shape, which then blends with the other shapes around it. This produces a variety of effects that range from subtle, painterly effects to abstract blends of shape and color.
3- Path Distort allows you to distort an image in the shape of a Bezier path. The image will warp and bend to follow the shape of the path as the image moves along it or the Bezier path is animated. This provides an easy, quick way of creating all sorts of distortions that would be difficult to achieve otherwise.
4- Gradient Path allows you to wrap a gradient around a Bezier path. You can easily create glows and custom color and light effects around masks, improved control for using mattes, backgrounds based on mask shapes, and custom grayscale maps for other filters (e.g. Digital Anarchy's new Designer Blur).
5- Noise Complex is a noise filter with a variable frame rate, and a compound effect can be created using grayscale images to control the amount of noise. Another powerful use for this filter is as a source layer for other effects that need a random but controllable input.
6- Smooth Tiler seamlessly tiles images that were not designed to seamlessly tile. Many controls are provided for blending the original with itself, producing a seamless repeating pattern. The blend controls also offer ways to create interesting kaleidoscope effects.
7- ReSizer provides a dozen different algorithms for intelligently resizing footage and images, so you are no longer limited to Draft and Best Quality when scaling up an image or footage. Use the different re-sampling methods to find the cleanest way to scale images.
8- Advanced Displacement Map gives you unlimited flexibility for creating displacement effects. You can combine up to three different grayscale maps to create distortions or stunning natural effects. The filter offers you a great deal of control over the maps allowing you to blur, scale, adjust the contrast and combine them. There are also a variety of ways to deal with edges, which quite often result in artifacts when creating displacement effects.
9- Color Sampler allows you to sample an image or footage and returns the color of the pixels at the sample location. This provides an easy way of using expressions to control other parameters based on an image's color.
Digital Anarchy (
www.digitalanarchy.com ) is a privately owned company based in San Francisco, California, devoted to creating high-end and high quality software products for broadcast designers in television and film. These products solve a wide range of problems that face designers, from creating text effects and background elements to the addition of lighting effects in 2D compositing applications.
