When we were younger, most of us recall watching Star Wars: Return of the Jedi and thinking that the special effects force lightning that the emperor could shoot out of his fingers was pretty “awesome!” Well, FXHome, who has been bringing Star Wars-style effects to the masses since their early compositing package, AlamDV, and more recently, Vision Lab Studio, now delivers the ability to create force lightning (as well as more natural electrical events) to your friendly neighborhood After Effects with PowerPlug. PowerPlug is one of two After Effects plug-ins that FXHome has released to see how they will fare in exploiting the plug-in market. The other of which is a plug-in for creating gun muzzle fire, called MuzzlePlug. Since it's essentially an AE plug-in version of the MuzzleFire section of VisionLab and EffectsLab, we chose to instead focus on PowerPlug, since it is an original product, rather than an adaptation.)
PowerPlug gives you the Hollywood-caliber ability to create realistic lightning and electrical discharges in After Effects.
For those of you who’ve read our reviews for other FXHome products, like VisionLab Studio and EffectsLab Pro, you know that FXHome normally creates standalone programs, as opposed to plug-ins. However, the interface for VLS and ELP are not nearly as polished as AE, so the choice to take the particle effects technology FXHome has helped pioneer and bring it to AE makes a lot of sense.
To put PowerPlug through its paces, I decided to take a still picture of a mansion and turn it into an animated crane shot by taking the original daylight shot and transforming it into a dark and stormy night. (Filmmaker Richie Rio wanted to have an impressive intro for his short film, which was recently critiqued. Since I wanted a good challenge for this product, I was happy to oblige him in helping out.) You can see the pictures of this throughout this review. (Check out the final videos at the end of the Final Comments section.)
With that said, let's break down PowerPlug and see how it fares in the highly competitive world of After Effects plug-ins!
Setting up beginning and ending points for lighting strikes is a simple matter, with easy-to-use targeting icons.
Ease of Use
First off, the plug-in is very easy to use. Simply install it and then, once you boot it up, choose the *.ProgramKey activation program. (Unfortunately, for most Internet Explorer users, there is a small hiccup at this point, because FXHome products use a proprietary ".ProgramKey" extension for their activation key. As such, Explorer adds a "*.txt" extension after the ".ProgramKey" portion when the key is downloaded. This means that the program can't initially install your activation code. Fortunately, if you simply rename your program key so that the "*.txt" is deleted, you should be good to go. As Microsoft is unlikely to change the way they do things, hopefully a future versions of FXHome products will check in both "*.ProgramKey" files AND "*.ProgramKey.txt" files.)
Once this is done, you can simply drop your plug-in on any footage that you feel needs a lightning strike or a tesla coil or a burst of maniacal force lightning. From here, you can choose any number of presets that best conform to what you envision. It does take a little time to figure out some of the temporary effects, like lightning strikes, since the animation for the strike is not always right beside your playhead. As such, you just have to flip open the timeline and look for the keyframes in the PowerPlug timeline. Once you realize what things are being keyframed, it’s simple to adjust additional attributes to get a more unique look.
