Light Beam

This is one of my entries for the blog No Plugin Way (https://nopluginway.tumblr.com/). We took a look at the plugin Echospace from Trapcode to see if it's still useful today. It may be limited but it still has a place in my toolkit. I added a little texture to this with my Dynamic Grain preset for AE (http://kevinsnyder.net/store/).

Not too long ago I worked on a project where I needed to animate a light beam in 3d space. I went straight to the big hammer, Cinema 4D. While Cineware is a great addition to AE, it’s nice to do as much as possible inside After Effects to keep a project file light and fast. Playing with Echospace has made me realize that I could have easily created the effects within After Effects.