Rowbyte Plexus is a next-gen particle engine for After Effects that lets you create, manipulate and visualize data in a procedural manner. Not only you can render the particles, but also create all sorts of interesting relationships between them based on various parameters.
Plexus is a plug-in designed to bring generative art closer to a non-linear program like After Effects. It lets you create, manipulate and visualize data in a procedural manner. Not only you can render the particles, but also create all sorts of interesting relationships between them based on various parameters using lines and triangles. The workflow for Plexus is very modular allowing you to create truly infinite set of configurations and parameters.
What's New in Plexus 3?
Object based UI
Plexus 3 comes with a tree based Object Panel, that helps you organize multiple Plexus objects with in the layer. It improves workflow dramatically and the panel itself is dockable anywhere with in After Effects. It helps you keep track of your Geometry Objects, Effector Objects, Render Objects and Groups by allowing you to select only what you need so no more scrolling through a long Effects Control Window.
Motion Blur
Finally. Now along with Depth of Field, you can add Motion Blur to create cinematic animations. You can use either comp settings or custom camera shutter values.
Sound Effector
A new Sound Effector Object let's you sample a waveform from a sound layer in AE and apply it to vertex position or scale or color. You can also Echo the sampled waveform so that the sound is sampled over time.
Slicer Object
The Slicer Object let's you 'slice' through a mesh and create interesting visualizations. It works best with OBJ meshes and can be used very well along with the instance object.
Seamless Beams
Render sweeping volumetric beams with seamless rendering. Beams no longer show any 'overlapping joints'. Not only it improves rendering performance, but also renders much more accurate colors.
Designed for AE's New Architecture
Plexus 3 was designed from the ground up to take advantage of AE's new multi-threaded architecture introduced in 13.5. That means better support for Persistent Caching, better performance and the best part, automagically refresh Instances. You can have many nested instances and all the changes are automatically detected. Also, just in case you need to refresh cache, a new button that let's you do that with a single click without affecting caches of other layers.
Depth Map Culling
You can use a Depth Map exported by a 3D program or Buena Depth Cue to occlude pixels directly. It helps composite Plexus in 3D scenes with ease.
Improved OBJ Import
You can now import OBJ files and file sequences using AE's default file importer, which helps you organize footage better and collect project files. OBJ Object now also imports normals and texture co-ordinates along with vertex positions and facets.
Unified rendering allows all objects to have a common 3D space. It allows points, lines & polys created by multiple objects to intersect with one another in z-space.
Loop Noise
You can seamlessly loop noise values for animations. You can cycle through noise evolution and it works for position, scale & color values.
What's New
3.2.5 (Current version) - May 3, 2022
- Performance improvements related to MFR.
- Resolved MFR render issues on Nvidia GPUs.
- Minor bugfixes.
