Adobe’s recent updates to its flagship motion graphics and visual effects software have come at a time when motion design on the web is really leading the way. Seen as the industry standard in this area, After Effects allows designers the opportunity to animate pretty much any idea, with presets and custom options available.
The updates to After Effects are now all available in version 18.0; you can read the full details for the March 2021 release on the Adobe site but in summary:
3D scenes – these help designers to make creative decisions using Adobe’s new 3D rendering engine which shows changes in real-time and gives feedback in the Composition panel.
3D ground plane – this is also available via the Comp panel with a dedicated toggle button; it gives designers a sense of space and perspective within the 3D scene.
Composition panel improvements – speaking of which, this has also seen updates with a new way of organising the options and buttons.
Motion graphic templates – these are now live with swappable media options; designers can also generate different variations of a template with different media types to really embrace the functionality available.
Cloud collaboration within Team Projects – these have now been updated so changes can be shared and received much faster, with more efficient indexing for searches also
Multi-frame rendering (this is currently in public Beta) – the updated and simplified Render Queue will allow for multi-frame rendering support – this boasts of providing a 300% rendering boost for exports with multi-core CPUs.
These updates aim to give designers more functionality in the following areas:
- Branding
- Dynamic visual styles
- Videos
- 3D designs
- Creative decision making
Have you had a chance to road test these updates yet?
