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Activity Forums Adobe After Effects Expressions jagged results with wave warp effect

  • jagged results with wave warp effect

    Posted by Stu Chudy on December 18, 2005 at 4:40 pm

    I am hoping someone can shed some light on this problem I am having. I wish to use the wave warp effect with the sine setting on a pretty high resolution layer (HD 1920×1080). When I crank the wave height settings any higher than 60 (my desired settings would be 120) with the wave width settings up high (900) I get some VERY jagged results. Some strange stairstepping effect that is totally unacceptable. The effect’s anti-aliasing setting is set to high. I thought maybe the quality was on draft, or that it wouldn’t render that way, but it does and there seems to be no way for me to resolve this uglyness. I could not find any other plugin that may do the same thing better (I like having control over the speed in my expressions).

    Is this just a bad limitation of this effect? Is there any suggested workaround or alternatte effect that I can buy to generate smoother sine wave curves?

    Thanks in advance for any help.
    stu

    Alex Spoettel replied 2 years, 2 months ago 7 Members · 7 Replies
  • 7 Replies
  • Jab Vent

    May 18, 2011 at 4:05 pm

    Hi
    I’ve got the same problem with Wave Warp plug in applied to a text layer. The antialiasing function in the plug in seems to make no difference on medium or high.
    I’m on a job am wondering what to do. Did you find a work around?
    I’m looking at various blur and light zoom filters to try and cover it up but the client doesn’t
    want any blurring— Ugh
    Anyone else have this problem or found a solution? I’m using after effects CS4

  • Andy Sapp

    February 15, 2013 at 5:22 pm

    Sorry to bump an old thread, but I have run into this issue as well.

    I would love to know if you guys found a workaround, or if there is an alternate plugin I can buy that wouldn’t stair-step the aliasing so bad at the higher heights/widths of the sine wave.

    Andy Sapp
    http://www.andysapp.com

  • Andy Sapp

    February 18, 2013 at 3:47 pm

    Also, I don’t know why this thread is in the expressions section.

    Andy Sapp
    http://www.andysapp.com

  • Luther Himes

    June 28, 2017 at 2:25 pm

    So, as far I can find there isn’t an actual ‘fix’ for this; the aliasing options don’t do anything. But, my workaround I just found is to drop a Median effect on top of it and crank the radius up a bit until things smooth out. This won’t work for everything- for instance, I think the background can’t be alpha- but it can fix some situations.

  • Alex Barnet

    July 12, 2019 at 2:23 pm

    This worked for me:

    Add a fast box blur (i put 15 for the radius)

    then add curves with alpha channel dropdown selected. adjust the curve so its a very harsh ‘S’ shape.

  • Remo Rauscher

    January 12, 2024 at 3:18 pm

    Found a workaround that could help. Using WaveWarp on a subcomp create a gradient that feeds DisplacementMap on the parent comp. See video:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzMfxAiZh4A

    Hope it helps

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  • Alex Spoettel

    April 11, 2024 at 1:48 pm

    A very effective inbuilt method is using “Effects>Matte>Refine Hard Matte”. This works really well for jagged edges / edges with artifacts on alpha mattes – which is exactly what you need to fix up the Wave Warp edges.

    It has many customization options and advanced parameters like feathering etc. that help smooth out the result and make for a great procedural solution for this problem.

    Only downside: it is a quite costly effect depending on the parameters used so it is best only enabled when rendering the final comp. A way to speed up rendering is to set “Reduce Chatter” tp 0% as this is irrelevant for jagged edges and is very hardware-intensive.

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