Tutorial 167: Intro to Nodebox

Joe Clay | Mar 15, 2019

In this week's After Effects tutorial, we explore Nodebox instead. Nodebox is a free node-based application that is perfect for 2D graphics—especially for data-vis. Since a lot of motion graphics work overlaps into this field—especially with future user interfaces (FUI)—it's an excellent tool for building elements to bring into After Effects. In the short time I've worked with it, I've made a few interesting elements that would've take a lot longer to build in AE, and it's fun working and thinking in a different manner—especially without keyframes.

Since you're basically manipulating data, it's really easy to build things that are representative of data. I've brought text files in and animated an interesting take on a file system. You can go line by line and add things based on filtering text. It's crazy how far you can take it if you like tinkering. So I encourage you to download Nodebox and give it a try. It's available on all major OSes and other than a few quirks, it's rock solid. And don't forget to check out the docs and tutorials on their site too!

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