For those of us who can't afford Maya Unlimited and its coveted Fluid Effects, here's a relatively simple way to create a convincing animated ocean scene using After Effects Pro. Join discussion...

"This particular post takes you through the creation of an entire project, from modelling in 3dsMax to ray traced materials, rendering issues to After Effects, and how to make it all work together. Click here to view the tutorial (QT, h.264, 46 minutes, 59 mb)." Join discussion...

This tutorial utilizes Trapcodes Particular, which is one of After Effects more popular 3rd party plugins. Creating an animation like a flock of birds is very versatile and is a great filler animation which can add a lot of style to a piece. You can also adapt this technique to create other flying creatures…. perhaps a flying skull with flapping wings? Join discussion...

Here's a fully animatable Earth project complete with water reflections and moving clouds. If you move the Sun to the back of the planet, you'll even see the night lights of the major cities! Requires Adobe After Effects 7.0 Professional. Join discussion...

"In this tutorial, Creative Cow Leader Aharon Rabinowitz shows you how to animate a signature appearing on screen, and a few tricks to make it look more realistic." Rabinowitz later did another tutorial on the subject. will post that later! Join discussion...

"In this video tutorial, Jayse Hansen demonstrates how to create graphic elements that will grow in After Effects. This question comes up in the forums all the time. Now we have a step by step tutorial." Join discussion...

Having problems, crashes or installation errors with After Effects 7.0 or After Effects CS3 (8.0)? Here's a collection of tried and true remedies, but before you start reinstalling and trashing things, make sure you've tried to locate what part of your AE project is causing the problems. Join discussion...

"Many individuals are not sure how to prepare downloadable streaming videos that will be placed on a web server. In this tutorial you can learn the general settings your can use when compressing content that will be downloaded. You'll learn techniques for adjusting frames per second, audio settings, key frame every, image smoothing and other video settings. This lesson also covers temporal compression and the 2-pass VBR coding method." This is part of a 3 episode tutorials I found on http://www.studiodaily.com. enjoy! Join discussion...

I came up with this effect using Trapcode’s Particular with a simple custom particle used in a slightly unconventional way. Simple effect and one of the start of the Particular season i’m running here at rhys-works.com, so check it out. Join discussion...

A Displacement Map effect changes the position (displaces) of pixels either horizontally or vertically or both, based upon the grey-scale or luma values in a separate reference layer. To use this effect, follow these steps... Join discussion...