I'm a computer science student and I'm trying to get started in programming plugins for After Effects CS3. I have lots of experience in developing java projects, especialy plugins and filters for image processing software. But my c knowledge is ... let's say ... little 😉 But I'm working on that.
So I was surfing the web and looking for books to get any guidance on how to develop a after effects plugin. Unfortunately i didn't find much information except for Adobe's API documentation and this forum.
The Documentation is pretty good I guess. But for a beginner it's kind of an desaster. It is just to much information at once.
Building the skeleton project succesed, but i get a lot of files and none of them is an *.aex . I'm using Visual Studio 2005. The full installation with all the stuff I probably don't need, but I wasn't sure. Do I need to change something in the programs settings?
So... to finnaly come to the point...
Can anybody help me? Do you know any good books I might use? Any nice guides on some websites? Any thing?
A step by step tutorial on creating a plugin would be perfect.
I'm not a newbie, I'm a good programmer but I just need some help getting started ;-)
this one is quite old, but it's the only tutorial i know of.
some of it is wildly out dated, alas it will give you a thorough insight as to how a plug-in is structured.
A plug-in is a DLL, from which After Effects USES a single entry point.
Have you seen the Quick-Start Guide, in the current SDK?
Sorry, I've never had the time to write the definitive O'Reilly book on AE plug-in creation. Not a big market. :)
The AE SDK Windows installer creates an environment variable, AE_PLUGIN_BUILD_DIR, which all the sample projects use for their output directory. If you have installed AE in the default location, the SDK projects will automagically build into AE's plug-in dir.
I'm trying to load up and build the projects in Visual Studio 2012, and am unable to do so with the SDK. As far as I can tell there is no AE SDK Windows Installer provided in the .zip file that I downloaded off of Adobe's developer center, so I'm not sure how the AE_PLUGIN_BUILD_DIR environment is set. I do see that environment var being referenced in the projects' property pages. Can you provide assistance as to how to ensure that environment variable is set in Visual Studio 2012?
Well, that was easy enough. The AE_PLUGIN_BUILD_DIR environment variable can be created through the same dialog on Windows where you change your system's path. Control Panel -> System -> Advanced System Settings. Under "System Variables" click "New. . ." then add AE_PLUGIN_BUILD_DIR and then the plugins directory for AE.
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