Digital Anarchy Psunami 1.1

Product Review: Page (1) of 4 - 10/10/02

Digital Anarchy Psunami 1.1 Water effects for Adobe After Effects By Dave Nagel

We've explored a number of ways to create water effects from scratch for still and motion graphics. But there are innumerable situations where simple displacement maps and lighting effects, like those we've learned, won't do the trick. And so we turn to effects plugins that promise to take over where our manual skills leave off. Today we look at one such plugin--Digital Anarchy's Psunami for Adobe After Effects.

Now, Digital Anarchy is a company that makes some truly outstanding software for Macintosh and Windows, including Color Theory Pro (which we've previously reviewed here), Geomancy, Elements: Text and, most recently, Aurora Sky, which we'll be reviewing in the coming weeks. But Psunami is completely different from the company's other products.

What it does
Psunami has but one purpose, and that is to generate waterscapes within After Effects, especially ocean scenes, with controls for water roughness, wind speed, swells, lights and the like. It uses 3D geometry and raytracing to produce water effects with a photographic quality, and it provides quite a bit of depth in its controls, though the functionality of the plugin is quite narrow.

Psunami is fully self-animating. That is, once you apply the filter, wave, swell and wind motion are generated automatically at preset speed and directions. It also includes a number of presets, as well as the ability to save your own for future use. Below you'll see one of the self-animating presets that ships with the plugin.

However, if every animation looked exactly the same, Psunami wouldn't be terribly useful, would it? To this end, the plugin provides a wide range of controls to affect the look of the water and, to a lesser degree, the sky. Below you'll see a quick example of how changing a few parameters--like light color and position and wind speed--can alter the look of the preset you saw above.

Page: 1 2 3 4 Next Page