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Seems to become a new often-to-use Plugin for me. Especially for the feature that I start planning right now, as my first flick is nearly throught Post

What? Trapcode Horizon by RedGiant Software. Maybe I should chat with them, as my next Flick will make use of Colorista, Looks, Horizon (if it’s as good as I think) and Particular. But let’s move on to Horizon. What does it do? And why do we need it?

First of all it gives you a 3D-Sphere around you After FX Composition. You can past a gradient on in with up to 8 colors in a line or a Point-Style. Of cause you can make portions of it transparent to view behind the sphere. You could ad more than on for instance and make portions of it opaque.

The other great thing are image maps. you can choose an imagemap and past it. In full 32bit-float. This will give you a nice way to ad space to your matte-paintings. I couldn’t figure out till now if it’s possible mo make the image maps feature transparency, which would totaly rock my ass of. This would really be a milestone. Imagine putting a 3D-Set-Extention with Greenscreenfootage in the middle of a comp, one horizon around it with the near outside, one with the bigger outside and one with the Sky. Bamn. This could be so f’cking cool. and being only 99$ makes it a no-brainer for me if there is built in transperency for image maps…

But let’s stay at the facts right now.

Floating Point Support

Offers support for Floating point mapping of .exr image maps in After Effects CS3

 

Equirectilinear Image Mapping

Familiar to 3D artists, “equirectilinear” images are maps that provide full 360-degree coverage of a sphere. Horizon will map these images seamlessly onto the background.

 

Gradients

Built-in gradient modes provide up to 8 colors for generating colors on the virtual sphere.

Coverage Controls

With controls for horizontal and vertical coverage of the sphere, you can determine how much of the virtual sphere to map—especially useful for using non-panoramic images or video.

 

Controlled Zoom

Mapping in Horizon depends on the Field of View in After Effects, so you can create a zoom effect by animating the field of view of the After Effects camera.

Looks okay for me, now I have to download it and test it out. There needs to be some transparency somewhere…

You may also want to take a look at the Videointroduction to Trapcode Horizon

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