The Best After Effects Tutorials

 

Have you ever seen an amateur film with some great special effects, and asked yourself how they did it? Or how you can add the same kind of effects to your own pieces without hiring expensive professionals? It can be done with some patients and determination. My interest in After Effects first sparked when I was a junior in high school, I wanted to learn and become efficient with it. Learning special effects could bring a lot of new opportunities into my productions, so I decided to scour the internet for tutorials and any other help I could find. One of the greatest resources I discovered was videocopilot.net, and I encourage anyone interested in learning VFX to take a look at the tutorials on the site. Andrew Kramer, the tutorial master at videocopilot, makes After Effects easy to follow, and you will learn a lot. I am looking forward to taking Motion Graphics here at IC, and I hope to learn more about visual effects, and the power computers can bring to productions. Below is a tutorial showing you how you can extend a field location to match your originally desired location which just might not have been practical for you to actually get to. There are other great tutorials on videocopilot.net that are worth checking out if you have any interest in After Effects. 

Inspiring work

Detail from "The light of hope" by Deng Jiansi

Here are some sites that have tons of tutorials on every imaginable (well...) method of doing models, maps, lights etc. Of course the list is endless since the 3D community is so huge, but you have to start somewhere. Thanks to Nada for providing these links.
One thing that you will realize is that you must have a basic understanding of different techniques like box and spline-modeling, texturing tools etc. to fully understand some of the more advanced tutorials, however I think by now it would benefit you enormously to check them out if just to get inspired by the level of work being done worldwide and, I must say, by the generous sharing of ideas and techniques by so many great artists.

Links: http://www.3dtutorials.sk/
http://www.cgtutorials.com/

This is a spline modeling tutorial which is clear and simple. Angelina Jolie by Song, Hwasup.
Link to PDF file.