Magic 3D FX

General Info

Cube 3D is a highly versatile FxPlug plugin that creates a three dimensional Cube. You can twist and turn it, split each side into smaller tiles, swirl all those tiles around while wonderful specular reflections make the cube shine.

By adding additional glow effects you can create a million different looking cubes.

History

V2.1.0:

• Added compatibility for OSX 10.7 and OSX 10.8 sandbox functionality
• Some speed enhancements
  

V2.0.0:

• Now fully compatible with Final Cut Pro X and Motion 5
  

V1.5.1:

• Several interface enhancements and speed improvements
  
• Fixed compatibility with Snow Leopard

V1.5.0:

• Several enhancements
• New and easier Serial Number system
  

V1.4.1:

• Fixed a bug related to the aspect ratio of a rotated side of the cube
  

V1.2:

• Added Animation Feature
• Added Transparent mode
• Added capability to use images with an Alpha layer
• Added Flip H/V for each side
• Each side of the cube can be rotated in an arbitrary angle
• Added "Diffuse Light" parameter

V1.1: Resolved compatibility issues with Motion 3

V1.0: Initial release

Configuration

All screenshots of the controls in this manual are taken from Motion. The controls in Final Cut Pro are the same.

At first you have to drag and drop the plugin Cube 3D from effects menu to the timeline. The canvas will show a plain cube with colored sides. Now it's up to you to animate the cube.

Distance
Move Horizontal
Move Vertical

Use these three controls to move the cube within the 3D space. Distance controls the distance between the camera and the cube, while Move Horizontal and Move Vertical move the cube up, down, to the left and to the right.

Rot X
Rot Y
Rot Z

You can rotate the cube around it's axis with these three controls. The center of the rotation is always the center of the cube itself, even if you have moved the cube around in the 3D space.

If you look at the front of the cube (which is the blue side after applying it to the timeline) the X axis goes from the left to the right of the screen, the Y axis from the bottom to top and the Z axis goes from the camera position away from it.

Size X
Size Y
Size Z

With these controls you can resize the cube in all three dimensions. By changing the size of the cube you can create different shapes like a flat surface as well as a long stick.

Separate Sides

Here you can separate the six sides of the cube from each other. A value of 0 creates a cube. Higher settings move each side further away from the center of the cube.

Tiles - Horizontal
Tiles - Vertical

Usually a cube consists of 6 sides forming the shape we all know. With these two controls you can split up each side into smaller independent pieces. Each side can be split up in 50 by 50 tiles.

Tile Content

If the sides of the cube have been split up with the above controls, you can use this popup menu to select if a below defined texture can be seen on each tile or if it will be split up in such a way that each tile only shows a portion of the texture.

(The tiles have been rotated a little to demonstrate this effect.)

Tile Ordered Rotation
Tile Random Rotation
Tile Random Movement

Use these three controls to rotate and move the tiles that have been split up with the above Tile controls. If the sides of the cube have not been split up, these three controls will affect the whole side as one piece.

Ordered Rotation	Random Rotation	Random Movement

Animation Amount
Animation Speed

With these two controls you can automatically animate each side (or tile, when the sides are split up). The sides will move around in 3D space in a random way. The speed of the animation can be controlled with the Animation Speed parameter.

Transparency

This controls the transparency of the cube. The cube can appear solid or you can make the cube transparent, so each side will be transparent.

Not transparent	Partial transparency	Fully transparent

Textures

This section controls the textures for each side independently.

Each side can be given a texture by your choice. Simply drag and drop the desired texture to one of the image wells. If you use this plugin with Motion, you have to add the needed texture at first to the Media-tab before adding it to the plugins image well.

With Orientation you can flip the applied clip or image horizontally, vertically or both.

Use Rotation to rotate each side of the cube independently.

Use the control Crop Border to crop any unwanted border from the applied textures.

If no texture is applied to a side, it will use an adjustable color. Each side can be given it's own color. Use the Color control box to select the desired color.

Enable Light and Specular

Here you can switch on or off the light method for the cube. If this control is switched off, you will see that the cube appears much brighter. This might be confusing. So you have to understand that this control does not "switch on a global light" that illuminates the cube. This control selects between a flat lightning model, which makes the cube shine with full brightness, and a light model with a light source that creates specular reflections with an angle dependant method to illuminate the surfaces.

Light Brightness
Light Diffuse

If Enable Light and Specular is enabled, the colors you select with these two controls are use for the ambient and diffuse light in order to illuminate the cube.

Specular Brightness
Specular Size

Adjust the size and brightness of the specular reflection. This control only has an effect if Enable Light and Specular is enabled.

Light model switched off	Light model switched on Small specular light	Light model switched on Larger specular light

Anti-Aliasing

Switch on/off the anti-aliasing feature of the borders of each side. Note that this features slows down render times a bit, but gives you much nicer results. CHV suggests that you turn off this option for your animation creation process, if your computer is not fast enough to be able to run this plugin in realtime.