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5 Tricks for Enhancing Your Motion Graphic Projects - envato.com coupon
Motion Graphics isn’t a skill that you can master overnight. From animation to color theory, it takes years to learn all of the various disciplines necessary for becoming a great MoGraph artists. However, there are a few tricks that you can use at the beginning of your Motion Graphic career that can help give your projects a creative edge.
In the following post we put together a list of our favorite tips for enhancing your Motion Graphic projects. Hopefully all of these tips can help you become better MoGraph artists in the future.
1. Pick a Color Palette
It can be easy to choose a color palette simply because it ‘looks nice’, but in reality color is just as important as the animation itself. Color has the power to dramatically change the overall tone of your composition. Instead of trying to create colors from scratch try using a color palette generator like Coolors.co.
By using a professional color palette you can guarantee that all of your colors work well together and give your video visual cohesiveness.
2. Ease Your Keyframes
By default the keyframes in After Effects are very harsh. Essentially everything moves at a very constant rate. This can lead to some very harsh stops and starts that look very stiff and non-organic.
If you want to make your animations more smooth, try using a graph editor to custom ease your projects. In the editor you will see a visual representation of the movement in your scene. By default it will look like a linear graph, but the goal of easing is to create curves that will actual lead to smooth movements.
There are even a few tools out there that can help you ease your keyframes with… ease. One of my favorites is Flow. Flow is a simple After Effects tool that allows you to quickly add easing to your selected keyframes. It can literally save you dozens of hours on each project. Here’s a demo of Flow in-action:
3. Create Storyboards
In an age of video tutorials it can be easy to think that all you need is some inspiration and technical knowledge and a great Motion Graphic project will just flow out. This is usually not the case. Instead it is super important to start every Motion Graphic project by creating some storyboards so that you can visualize the key points in your project.
Example Motion Design Storyboard
Just start by sketching out your key design elements on pen and paper. Once you have a rough idea of what you are looking for, start putting together some frames in Photoshop or Affinity. This is where a great sense of design will come into play. If you want to learn how to create better storyboards, go check out the Design Bootcamp at School of Motion.
After you get a few boards created you can download a music track and put together a rough animatic. This will help you visualize what the final composition will look like without investing too much time on animating project.
4. Edit in a Video Editing Application, Not After Effects
There is a really bad habit among Motion Graphic artists to edit their projects in After Effects. This is probably because video editing applications like Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro can seem scary if you’re not already used to editing with them. However, After Effects is a compositing software, not a video editing application. You will inevitably run into problems with sound design and playback which will result in a lot of wasted time.
Instead make it a goal to compile your Motion Graphic projects in a video editing application. While it may take you a little while to learn, you will inevitably save hundreds if not thousands of hours over the course of your career.
This tutorial from Kriscoart shows you how to start editing in Premiere in literally 20 minutes.
5. Gather Inspiration Before You Start
Whether you know it or not you are always drawing creative ideas from inspiration sources all around you. So instead of relying on creativity to magically spark from within, go out and find some inspiration at the beginning of your Motion Graphics project. There is likely hundreds of great Motion Graphics videos out there with the same tone and style as what you are going for.
One great place to look is VideoHive. Scan through the pages of the After Effects projects and find a sequence that you like. You can even download the template and dissect the project files to get a better idea at how a professional puts their project together.
Flash.FX a super popular template on VideoHive
There are also tons of great online resources like Motionographer, Wine After Coffee, and Mixed Parts that curate great MoGraph collections. Social media is another great place to look. There’s loads of fantastic MoGraph artists on Instagram, Vimeo, YouTube, Behance, and Dribble. A simple search will reveal hundreds of great artists.
A curated collection of MoGraph work at Motionographer
Now Go Make Something!
At the end of the day the secret to becoming a better MoGraph artist is to simply create stuff. Learning is great, but doing is even better. So go out there and make something awesome!
Looking for more inspiration? Check out 3D & Motion Graphics tutorials on Tuts+.
The post 5 Tricks for Enhancing Your Motion Graphic Projects appeared first on Envato.
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Selasa, 26 September 2017
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The Best Value After Effects Templates and What Makes Them Work - envato.com coupon
The Digital Stock Market is a fairly new and evolving business. However in the past few years it has seen substantial growth. This has been reflected in the many growing stock libraries, a larger customer base and a rise in popularity across the industry of stock items. These markets are often the first choice of many creatives who see stock items as a tool, rather than a ready-to-go solution.
Consequently, this popularity has brought a lot of competition, which is a good thing, especially for customers. It means more options, better quality, improved support and generally better value for any item.
On the other hand, for authors, the creatives that make our items, and marketplaces it’s becoming difficult to stand out. Today the digital stock market is more demanding and challenging than ever before. So how do authors on VideoHive manage to keep the marketplace competitive in a category as overcrowded as After Effects Templates?
The answer isn’t exactly straightforward with a lot of different factors contributing to online success.
For Envato and VideoHive the strongest point revolves around the business model. It’s a model that is proving to be particularly effective for collaborative environments. It gives authors the right amount of creative freedom. Encouraging them to take chances, and break boundaries. Something that is difficult in more traditional business environments where a lot of the everyday challenges don’t directly relate to design, get in the way of the creative process.
That’s why, besides every other carefully curated template, VideoHive also features some exceptional items whose value goes way beyond their price tag. These unique items help VideoHive stand out from the crowd.
Creating such templates requires experience, creativity and most importantly, time. They start, like every other design project, with research, inspiration, execution and at the end publishing. In the middle of all that, there are also tasks specific to template creation. Including market research, documentation, file preparation, and additional marketing once the project is online.
To give you an idea of the work and value behind templates on VideoHive, here is a rundown of the steps required to create an AE Template Pack: HUD – UI Graphics for Film, TV and Games
Research
This stage involves market research and seeking inspiration. In my case, it took more than a week to complete the research and collect all relevant materials. The process included analyzing a wide range of inspirational sources. Starting with old movies, going to the most recent sci-fi blockbusters, all featuring different types of FUI graphics. Research on functional (real-life) user interfaces was performed as well, including an examination of UIs that can be found in today’s computer systems. Wikipedia turned out to be very helpful during this part of the process, for both reference images and insights on UI functionalities. The information and data is then used to put together a few inspirational boards that help with the following stages. After everything is collected the project gets broken down into smaller steps. For this item those smaller steps were the 25 categories / After Effects projects included with the template.
Concepts
After getting an idea of the required elements, creating concepts is the next important stage of the design process. They are the first step to bringing designs to life. In this particular case over 100 concepts were created, however not all of them made it to the final project.
Image: Concept UI Designs ©framestore on VideoHive
Preparing Assets
Quite often some elements of a template come from outside After Effects. To complete the UI designs a number of particular objects had to be modeled, animated, and rendered in 3D. They create the 2GB library of over 150 pre-rendered assets that come with this project. The previous research process helped select the most commonly used objects in futuristic UI designs. Also a few blueprints were collected to help model everything from scratch.
Image: UI Assets ©framestore on VideoHive
Designing in After Effects
With a big part of the elements ready, the design and animation process on After Effects begins. Usually designers use another application like Illustrator or Photoshop to help create and set up most UI elements. Then they import those files back into After Effects. This process is faster but doesn’t allow for much flexibility when it comes to customization. That’s usually a priority for templates and it’s the reason why every design in this template was created using AE Shapes. They are fully customizable and scalable, all within After Effects. Which is an added bonus, because no other application is required for customization. This method also creates a future-proof template that can be adapted to match any upcoming standards in resolution.
Image: UI Screen Designs ©framestore on VideoHive
This is the longest part of the entire template creation process. It involves designing hundreds of UI elements – including maps, grids, buttons, tables, graphs, code, text, etc. – as well as over 800 unique small icons that are used throughout the project. As a final step every user interface is put together and animated. The 25 included categories feature over 1000 different elements and 200 UI Screens.
Challenges
Creating something new and different, especially on this scale brings a lot of challenges. The most demanding tasks for this pack proved to be file preparation and template structure. With such a large number of elements, and thousands of layers and comps, organizing everything can become very time consuming. That’s why a few scripts were created to assist with some of the more challenging tasks. They helped mainly to manage color controls, expressions, to bake color values, and apply effects for specific layer groups. By the end of the project the script that created color controls had to process over 25,000 color effects. Doing that manually would have required months of additional work.
The animation process presented a few challenges as well. To keep everything easily customizable, whenever possible animations were looped using expressions. In this way composition (UI Screen) durations can be expanded without worrying about adding key-frames. Achieving this effect proved to be very challenging with some of the 3D pre-rendered models, most of which feature looped animations as well.
Image: Loop Animations – UI Designs ©framestore on VideoHive
Image: Loop Animations – 3D Assets ©framestore on VideoHive
Project Value
Apart from everything described above, there’s actually a lot more work that goes into creating a similar template. From the user interface list, to fonts, color palettes, textures, 2D and 3D maps, code research, expressions, iconography, typeface design, template structure, comp and layer naming, color coding, comments, tutorials, trailers, and much more.
From a direct value perspective, all 200 UI Screens rendered out as Motion Graphic videos would amount to a total of around $5,000 (for single-use licenses). Hiring a freelancer to create something similar for the same amount of working hours, would cost a minimum of $15,000. That’s why this template price has such a tremendous value, even if using only a single UI design.
Below you can watch the full preview of the item, which is one of the biggest HUD and User Interface Template Packages on the web. Featuring a wide range of UI Screens and Window Designs suitable for screen replacements and heads up displays. Categories include: Maps, Schematics, Blueprint, Medical, Tracking, Hacking, Holograms, Analysis, Operating Systems, HUDs and more.
View framestore’sFull Portfolio on VideoHive
Let’s explore some other impressive templates across popular categories on VideoHive.Our market features a lot of similar templates the are amazing value. These items showcase the high quality and the exceptional skills of our global community of authors.
Photo Animator by Anton-and-Friends
Anton-and-Friends was the first author to bring parallax photo animation to the template market. Using some clever expressions this project can transform any image into a 3D animation. Featuring also a ton of added effects, like depth of field, particles, wave / wind effect, text placement in 3D space and much more.
The Ultimate App Promo – UltraHD Mockup Toolkit by Integnity
Here is a particularly valuable item in case you are considering to promote your next mobile game or app. Featuring 27 UltraHD (4K) Footage, Tracked and Chroma Keyed, with a value of over $1800. In addition this template also includes 150+ touch gestures, an animated iOS8 Toolkit, and advanced controls.
Ultimate Earth Zoom Toolkit by MotionApe
Zoom On Earth Suite by marcobelli
For that time when your client wants a really wide angle shot, go with one of these projects. The number of customization options alone makes these templates absolute winners in efficiency.
Particle Builder | Magical Gear: Magic Awards Abstract Particular Presets by PixFlow
If you’re looking to add some life to your photos, but you don’t want to waste hours playing around with Trapcode Particular, then consider this project from PixFlow. It includes a free plug-in, lots of presets and a super easy workflow. This template will make you rethink the way you use particle effects.
RTFX Generator + 510 FX pack by RTFX
140 Flash FX Elements by Recarto
Since the rise of smartphones and the boom of mobile gaming, 2D / Flash FX have had a small comeback. Creating these types of templates requires a great deal of talent in hand-drawn animation, not to mention a lot of time and patience. If you want to give some 2D life to your projects these templates are the perfect place to start. The flexibility of After Effects also adds some advantages of using a template over similar motion graphics options.
TypeX – Text Animation Tool | VOL.05: Broadcast Titles Pack by RoyalFX
If you’re looking to make you text animations more interesting then you should really check out RoyalFX’s portfolio. His templates are perfect for turning boring text into eye-catching titles. The simple interface behind his scripts hides the real talent that goes into creating such useful and flexible projects.
Rigman – Complete Rigged Character Toolkit by YaroFlasher
Explainer Video Toolkit 3 by Taerar
Rigmo – Rigged Character Animation Mockup by creartdesign
Explainer Toolkits are part of a very popular category on VideoHive. Whether you’re looking for some animated characters, beautiful background elements, or a tool that can help you animate your own character designs, you will never run out of options.
Watercolor Motion Kit by ThomasKovar
Created in collaboration with GraphicRiver’s nr.1 Power Elite authorsevenstyles, this amazing toolkit will help you create unique watercolor animations. Featuring some stunning details and a new workflow that utilizes the power of Photoshop and After Effects. You will be impressed by what you can achieve with just a few clicks. Saving you countless hours of work, that would otherwise be required to design and animate something similar.
This is just a very small sample of what you can expect to find on VideoHive. There are so many more projects, motion design packs, and toolkits that a single article could never be able to cover. Regardless of your experience or what you want to achieve, you can be sure to find what you’re looking for on our extensive library. Featuring a wide range of After Effects templates that start as low as $6.
For more items like these browse our library of over 44,000 After Effects template onVideoHive
You may also be interested in:
- Everything you need to get started with Adobe After Effects
- How Stock Footage and Motion Graphics Can Enhance Your Video Workflow
- Envato items that gained fame in 2016
- How to Brand Your Videos
The post The Best Value After Effects Templates and What Makes Them Work appeared first on Envato.
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Top 14 WordPress Mega Menu Plugins of 2017 - envato.com coupon
It’s hard to imagine what the internet would look like without menus. They make websites navigable and if they didn’t exist, we’d probably never find what we’re looking for.
Although you’d be hard-pressed to find a website in existence without some sort of a menu attached, the characteristics that make them functional and intuitive by 2017’s are dependant on finding the right one for your particular site.
Mega Menus allow you to organize and present your WordPress website’s content clearly and beautifully. The good and bad news about mega menus is that there are a lot to choose from.
So which is going to be best for your WordPress website?
Having done some quality research and considered user feedback, we’ve compiled this comprehensive breakdown of some of the best WordPress Mega Menus available for you in 2017.
WP Mega Menu by Themeum
WP Mega Menu is a free WordPress menu builder plugin with premium features! It helps you create wonderful and interactive menus for your website. It is a highly customizable drag and drop-menu builder plugin with plenty of useful features. WP Mega Menu builds 100% responsive menus to fit any size of devices and any type of browsers. Your options to make menus stylish, interactivel and functional are unlimited.
WP Mega Menu offers a wide range of features including widgets in menu items, multiple themes/skins options, export/import themes, menu labeling/badge, menu stretch, menu background images, unlimited colors, Google Fonts etc. You can have social icons, search bar, brand logo, menu animation, and much more on the menu.
Being released after a lot of research and development, it combines all of the useful functionality available in today’s mega menu plugins. No other plugin has as many useful features as WP Mega Menu.
Any developer can use WP Mega Menu integrated with their themes and redistribute them commercially as it is completely free and open source. You can use the plugin for as many themes as you want.
Max Mega Menu by Tom Hemsley
Max Mega Menu is an easy to use menu builder plugin for WordPress. It can automatically convert your existing menu or menus into a mega menu. You can then add any WordPress widget to your menu, restyle your menu using the theme editor and change the menu behavior using the built-in settings.
You can offer your site contents by adding images, icons, maps or any other WordPress widget to your navigation. Use with your existing theme and automatically replace your existing theme menu, or use a widget, shortcode or PHP function to display your menus.
Max Mega Menu is a complete menu management plugin, perfect for taking control of your existing menu and turning it into a user-friendly, accessible and touch-ready menu with just a few clicks.
Max Mega Menu comes as a free version with some basic features. And its paid versions offer more features in three different price options (Personal Licence at $23, Business Licence at $39, and Developer Licence at $99). You can not integrate any of their pro versions to your saleable themes, but you can use it for your site.
UberMenu by sevenspark
UberMenu is a familiar WordPress mega menu plugin offered at $20 for a regular license. The plugin lets you create awesome mega menus for your website. With its built-in full grid system and individual layout controls for each menu item, it’s easy to build gorgeous mega menu layouts. You can create beautiful navigation bars with columns, tabs, rows, icons, maps, forms, and more.
UberMenu has no issues with responsiveness on any type of device. It has a touch interface which unifies the user experience across mobile devices. You can easily add images and find styles that are truly yours.
UberMenu includes 50 icons which can be assigned to any menu item. You can grab the Icons extension to get over 500 icons, along with the ability to customize the position.
UberMenu has no free version. Developers who build themes for commercial purposes will not be able to use it for themes. The only pro version of this plugin comes at a price of $20 under a non-distributable single site license.
Hero Menu by heroplugins
Hero Menu is a drag and drop WordPress menu builder plugin. It lets you easily and intuitively create a slick and professional responsive WordPress menu. From the most complex “Mega Menu”, rich with features, down to the simplest of menus with simple dropdowns, Hero Menu will have any desired menu up and running within minutes.
Hero Menu’s structure builder makes life easy. Every aspect of building your navigation is in one place. It comes with standard 60 color presets as well.
Best of all, whether you are a long time WordPress guru or a complete newbie, you will be able to master this plugin in a short period of time
Hero Menu comes at a price of $19 with a regular license. Just like UberMenu, developers who build themes for commercial purpose will not be able to use it in theme packages. It is best for single site users.
Superfly by looks_awesome
Superfly is a premium responsive WordPress menu plugin that lets you generate space-efficient vertical push/sliding/static navigation, icon toolbar and full-screen menus of your choice. You can use it as a standalone navigation or complement to your main menu. With Superfly, navigation is much easier and user-friendly both on desktops and mobiles.
Slide in vertical menu is the latest trend different websites are adopting these days. This navigation style comes to WordPress with Superfly WordPress menu plugin. It’s perfectly suited for every modern site.
Superfly comes in two different licenses. The regular license is at $25 for only one client and you can also go for an extended license which comes at a price of $195. Please see the licensing details on this official page.
Slick Menu by XplodedThemes
Slick Menu is an advanced WordPress plugin for creating unlimited off-canvas multi push vertical menus. You can customize and style your menus directly within WordPress customizer with live preview.
Slick Menu comes with all cool menu features including unlimited levels, icon library, background images, background videos, animations, scroll to section etc. You can have a search box and social media icons with their links on the menu as well. There are some free and premium extensions for you to add more functionalities to your menu.
The plugin has two different pricing options. The regular license comes at a price of $25 for one client in a single end product. The extended license is at $89 which allows you to sell the product you make using this plugin. You can find more information about the licensing here. If you want to add more features, you have to pay extra amounts for each of the premium extensions.
WR Mega Menu by WooRockets
WR Mega Menu is a very powerful, responsive, and user-friendly WordPress menu plugin with a dedicated and intuitive menu builder. It gives you the complete control of designing and customizing your menu exactly the way you want.
WR Mega Menu has a lot of features. This will take away the hassles that usually come with WordPress default menu configuration panel. The plugin lets you create and save your menu settings into different profiles so that you can configure or apply them on other themes later.
WR Mega Menu has not been updated for last 10 months (as of this article publishing date). Only a single issue out of many raised ones has been resolved so far. By comparing to some other mega menu plugins in the WordPress directory, this one is worth going for.
Clever Mega Menu by Zootemplate
Clever Mega Menu is an easy to use mega menu plugin specially built for Visual Composer. It’s a user-friendly, customizable WordPress menu builder plugin for you to create nice-looking menus with Visual Composer page builder. Clever Mega Menu lets you add almost anything, such as raw HTML, shortcodes or widgets into navigation menus easily without any coding knowledge.
The plugin offers a wide range of features including selective menu icons, menu skins, menu layouts & submenu layouts, import/export menu themes, drag and drop mega menu builder, multiple CSS3 menu transition effects, display mega menus and flyout menus responsively, display widgets, shortcodes, adaptive menus with more than 100 menu theme options and so on.
Clever Mega Menu has both free and paid versions. It offers SEO readiness, vertical menus, advanced support, advanced menu widgets only in the paid version. The pro version comes at a price of $30 for the regular license and $150 for the extended license.
AP Mega Menu by AccessPress Themes
AP Mega Menu is a free WordPress plugin for building mega-sized menus on your site. You can add several column-wise widgets, configure them and create great looking horizontal and vertical navigation menus easily with this plugin. You can create brilliant mega menus without writing a single line of code.
AP Mega Menu supports flyout and allows you to create a menu easily with drag and drop facility. You can choose to match the template/layout for your theme from its various pre-designed skins/templates.
The plugin has no issues with responsiveness on any type of device. It works fine on all browsers and across the mobile OSes. You can easily add images and find styles that are truly yours.
AP Mega Menu is highly compatible and works with any well-coded WordPress theme. It is search engine optimized and secure.
Mega Main Menu by MegaMain
Mega Main Menu is a highly customizable WordPress mega menu plugin for you to have a functional mega menu on your WordPress site. The plugin lets you create awesome looking menu menus with a lot of functionalities.
There are 10+ combinations of dropdowns where you can place text, images, widgets and so on. The plugin supports 600+ Google Fonts and offers unlimited color options. You can have icons, a logo and a search bar in the menu.
Mega Main Menu offers 2 different licenses. The regular license is as low as $14 and the extended license comes at a price of $120.
A professional website will have organized as well as smart looking menus on it. A WordPress mega menu plugin helps you build such a mega menu. Without the right plugin, it is just a hassle for the developers. Choose your mega menu plugin wisely otherwise you will have to end up going for the next one. Good luck with wow looking highly functional mega menus on your websites.
Menu Management Enhancer for WordPress by sevenspark
Developed by SevenSpark, Menu Management Enhancer allows sub-menu items to be collapsed and expanded and offers a vertical scrollbar that can be used to jump to top-level items, quickly. These features help you move menu items more easily and speeds up the administration of WordPress menus.
The item aims to improve the menu management user experience to allow you to manage large numbers of menu items with ease, expand and collapse menu trees, quickly jump to any top-level menu item, enhanced drag and drop jump-to-item functionality, view menu item IDs, and create child and descendant menu item counts at a glance.
And it won’t affect anything your site visitors see as it’s all back-end, affecting only the Appearance > Menu screens.
WordPress Menufication by iveo
WordPress Menufication is a WordPress menu plugin that replaces your main menu with a CSS3 flyout menu when viewed on a mobile device. It comes in a light and dark style.
The menu can slide in from the left or right-hand side of the page and there is an option to add your logo to the menu header or add your logo inside the menu.
WordPress Menufication is user-friendly and can transform your WordPress 3 menu into a responsive fly-out menu inspired by Facebook.
NOO Menu – WordPress Mega Menu Plugin by NooTheme
NOO Menu is a plugin that allows you to customize your site’s menu items in a super interactive and intuitive admin interface.
It boasts of having all the options in one place, not changing your backend structure, or adding options to your WordPress default menu configuration panel. Instead, it allows you to switch between your usual view and the NOO Menu builder with one click. There you’ll find all the options for customization in the one place.
It’s also 100% responsive, features real-time previews when making changes, includes fonts, presets and is very flexible.
For something intuitive and versatile, it’s a great option.
WP Mega Menu Pro – Responsive Mega Menu Plugin for WordPress by AccessKeys
WP Mega Menu Pro is a premium WordPress plugin that allows you to easily add widgets in single or multiple groups. It includes both horizontal and vertical mega menus, it has a built-in visual mega menu builder plugin with features to display the menu as flyout or mega menu type with orientation as vertical or horizontal.
It comes with 14 beautifully designed template/skins and you can customize. You can also create your own.
Pick the right one for you
Every website is going to require something different. We hope this list has given you some insight into what you should be looking for in a mega menu, and helped you find the best option for you.
The post Top 14 WordPress Mega Menu Plugins of 2017 appeared first on Envato.
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