As many of you have heard and seen, we revealed the next version of After Effects at NAB2013 (and have officially been showing After Effects CC at AdobeMAX this week), and the ‘big’ news was that we now offer a true, live 3D Pipeline directly into Maxon Cinema4D. Build your models, bring them into After Effects, go back to C4D and make changes, and they update inside AE’s composition panel. No rendering, no re-importing or messing about, just working the way you’d (hoped) you could work…and we finally made it happen.
I was fortunate to not only meet a bunch of the guys from Maxon (and present alongside one of their finest, Mathias Omotola) but the more I’ve played with this feature (pre-NAB/MAX, and since then) I can honestly say that it sincerely makes 3D ‘accessible’ to the AE compositor who simply thought the 3D/2D worlds were too far apart; or in most cases, simply fearing that 3D was too difficult.

Me and Mathias on the last day of NAB2013
Nick Campbell (from Greyscalegorilla) and Dave Kiss (from the Maxon team) put together this great video highlighting the workflow, the capabilities, giving you a taste of ‘the buzz’ from the show floor (including clips from the my After Effects/Maxon presentation with Mathias.
NAB 2013 With Maxon, Adobe, And Greyscalegorilla from Nick Campbell on Vimeo.
Not long after we finished our last demo of the day, we caught up with none other than Mr. ScruffyTV himself, Kanen Flowers. Though I’ve known of Kanen for years, we only officially met at the San Francisco Supermeet back in January. In one of those rare, “I met you five minutes ago and I feel like I’ve known you my whole life,” kinda moments, we re-connected at NAB, shared a few laughs, did a quick interview, and then snapped a few post-tradeshow pics in the spirit of fun and total exhaustion.

We were getting a little loopy by the end of the show…

‘Put Your Head On My Shoulder…’

At this point, we just couldn’t stop laughing. Good times.
The weeks that followed were filled with lots of comments from attendees of the show to those who experienced my demos ‘live from the stage’ on AdobeTV; but the nicest thing about all of it? Everyone seemed genuinely excited about this new direction for AE and this much-needed partnership in the 3D modeling world.
At the end of each presentation, Mathias concluded with the line, “Welcome to the family.” Perfect words for a perfect (and long-awaited) coming-together of technologies.
Welcome to After Effects CC and Cinema 4D as they were meant to be: working together.
Blog on.