MatrixEngine

About this plugin

Apply MatrixEngine to a solid from Effect > Generate and it fills the layer with 3D digital rain. The streams sit on up to 16 depth layers and render through your comp camera, so the rain gets real parallax, fog and depth of field when the camera moves. Pick one of 19 character sets, from Matrix code and katakana to kanji, Hangul, binary, hex, Cyrillic, Braille or all of them mixed, let the rain fall, rise, run sideways or fly toward or away from the camera, and colour it with 18 palettes or your own head, trail and tail colours. Set the size, spacing and change rate of the characters, the speed, length and density of the rain, empty characters and gaps, add glow, flicker and motion blur, and loop it seamlessly. MatrixEngine renders on the GPU (CUDA on NVIDIA, OpenCL on AMD and Intel) or on the CPU, in 8, 16 and 32 bpc, with Multi-Frame Rendering. Free, for After Effects on Windows: unzip it, copy MatrixEngine.aex into After Effects' Plug-ins folder and restart After Effects.

What it does

• 3D digital rain on up to 16 depth layers, seen through your comp camera
• 19 character sets: Matrix code, katakana, kanji, Hangul, binary, hex, Braille and more
• Rain that falls, rises, runs sideways, or flies toward or away from the camera
• 18 palettes, or your own head, trail and tail colours
• Character size, spacing, mirroring, stroke weight and change rate
• Speed, trail length, travel distance and density, each with variation
• Stepped, cell-by-cell motion, or smooth
• Empty characters, animated gaps and empty streams
• Fog, near fade and depth of field from the comp camera, or your own
• Glow, head glow, flicker and hue shift
• Seamless loops, with a time offset and a random seed
• Transparent, on a solid colour or over the layer, as light or occluding
• Antialiasing up to 9x, and motion blur
• GPU rendering with CUDA (NVIDIA) and OpenCL (AMD, Intel), or the CPU
• 8, 16 and 32 bpc, and Multi-Frame Rendering