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Zaxwerks 3D Serpentine: Review

By John Hess

When the folks at Zaxwerks asked me to review their newest After Effects Plugin: 3D Serpentine, I jumped at the chance to try it out. Being a huge fan and avid user of their 3d Invigorator Pro for the past 6 years (Invigorator allows you to created 3d Text objects and Shapes inside of After Effects), I was eager to see the latest that Zaxwerks had to offer.

Before we dive into the nuts and bolts, here’s just a quick demo of some of things you can do with 3D Serpentine:

The Basics

The primary function of 3D Serpentine is to add a 3d “extrude” or “sweep” function inside After Effects. Although not 100% intuitive from the get go, a quick glance at the user’s manual or online video demo should give the proficient After Effects user an idea of how 3d Serpentine works.

Essentially Serpentine starts with a face (be it a preset line, rectangle, star, or even a custom face) and extrudes it along a path which you define by creating a dummy layer with an animated a 3d path.

And that’s basically all 3D Serpentine does - A deceptively simple concept, but it opens up a huge world of 3D possibilities for the creative After Effects artist.

Extruding the Possibilities

With creative application, a lot of interesting things can be accomplished with 3D Serpentine. By defining a twisted path, you can build elaborate corkscrew serpents. Using the global settings (and a little bit of forethought) you can repeat the serpents over and over again creating a group of winding serpents.

Using the preset line as a source of extrusion you can build long winding film strips or ribbons which can be filled in with a pattern of your design. You can also cap the ends with preset shapes and arrow heads (to make animated 3d arrows) or if your so inclined, create your own end caps using Zaxwerks ProModeler or third party 3d Modeling Package.

3D Serpentine also includes some rudimentary shading options that allow you to control specular brightness and define basic bump and reflection maps. Although they don’t offer the control that a sophisticated package like Maya, they’re more than good enough for creating simple and quick animations. Also included are 5 shading presets (normal, cartoon, absolute, wireframe, and hidden line).

Putting the Extrusion to Use

My first project putting 3D Serpentine to the test was with a project for friend making graphic title cards in the style of a superhero movie. I created a single title card animation and duplicated it 40 times to cover all the names necessary. Using 3D Serpentine with a text layer for the name meant that I had to do was replace the name of each person and all the rest of my animation settings stayed the same. It was an amazingly painless process.

Using After Effects CS4 on a Quadcore machine, 3D Serpentine ran reasonably fast especially when working in a 720p project at half resolution.

If there was one thing that could be improved it’s the missing “Live Update” feature. If you make a change to your path, you have to select click on the “update now” graphic inside the plugin in order to see the results of your change. I’ve had some instances where the live update works by itself but it’s spotty. Being that there are so many calculations to make when you make a change like this, it seems to be a reasonable trade-off having to click on the Live Update button.

Each time I thought I was running into a bottleneck when working with the software, I quickly found a work around. I would like to see the ability to alter the face in terms of size and rotation inside the plugin, but these can all be adjusted when modifying the dummy layer that defines your extrusion path. Little workflow elements like this, although not quite as logical as they would be in a full 3d package, are part of the tradeoff for the sake of working inside After Effects

Bottom Line

The bottom line is: Zaxwerks 3D Serpentine is an easy and powerful tool to add 3D graphics to your project without having to learn a big 3D program. The programmers have really put together solid package that offers a great deal of flexibility in an After Effects Plugin package. Although some of the work flow might be a bit confusing at first, it quickly becomes familiar and intuitive. Priced at $199, Zaxwerks is an affordable addition to any motion artist’s tool set.

With 3D Serpentine, Zaxwerks gives me yet another excuse for not learning that big expensive 3d package I have sitting on my desk.

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Tags | 3d, 3D Graphics, 3D Serpentine, After Effects, CGI, Digital Effects, Extrusion, motion graphics, Plugin, Post-production, Sweep, Zaxwerks