Tutorials

How to Clone Yourself in After Effects

Superfast Running in After Effects

Blasters using the Beam Effect in AE

Effects Tests

Entering the Battle

Landing on an asteroid base

4 Short Clips

Battle Scene

FedLanding Landing Craft

Spaceship FlyBy

Formation?

How Many Kids I Have

Superfast running, cloning and lightsaber

Falcon FlyBy

Republic Cruiser Landing

Films and FX tests

Blasters using the Beam Effect in Adobe After Effects 5.5 - A Tutorial

The Beam Effect is a simple way of producing fairly good looking blasters. The effect can look quite nice if you put some time into it. But it will probably never look quite as good as rendering the blasters in your favorite 3D modeler and using After Effects to just supply the glow. I'm not saying the Beam Effect is bad, it's just that it's limitations can sometimes make the effect pretty hard to get.

Now, on the good side, the Beam Effect is a really cool tool because it allows you to create and animate a really wild array of different effects. In this case, I'm going to concentrate on blaster shots coming from a Tie Fighter.

Here is the video I made with this tutorial. It's a 2 second clip of a Tie Fighter firing lots of shots.

Like always, I've supplied the raw video clip used for the tutorial to help you practice the effect. That will save you the trouble of having to create your own.
You can get that here: Download Example file

I sincerely hope this is helpful to you!!

Please feel free to shoot me an email if you have any questions or suggestions.

Let's get started: Open After Effects