Anti-aliasing of Obscuration Layer (Particular)

[Michael Szalapski]

Turn off DOF and see how it looks. I’ll bet it’s not nearly as noticeable.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Kevin Camp]

if you go to redgiant.com you can probably find a tutorial on this (i thought aharon rabinowitz had done one years ago here at the cow, but i can’t find it).

but, essentially what you want to do is not use the obscuration layer and instead split your particle system into 2 layers (a front system and a back system) and sandwich your text layer in between.

so duplicate your particle system layer, position your text layer in between both systems and hide the ‘back’ particle layer (the one bellow the text layer).

in the front particle system, twirl down the visibility properties and adjust the ‘far vanish’ and ‘far fade’ properties until you have the only the particles that should be in front of the text layer.

then turn on the back particle system and set the near vansih property of the back particle system to the far vanish value of the front system, and do the same for the near fade property.

now the text layer should appear in the middle of your particle system(s) without the aliasing issue.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Pravin Chottera]

Interestingly enough, DOF doesn’t seem to play a role:

[Michael Szalapski]

This one, Kevin? https://www.redgiant.com/videos/redgianttv/item/16/

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Pravin Chottera]

Interesting solution Kevin. But what if I wanted my text layer to move through z-space? Would I have to keyframe (or link using expressions) the near/far vanish of my particles with the position of my text?

[Michael Szalapski]

Yes. I believe that’s covered in the tutorial I linked, but, if not, yes.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Pravin Chottera]

Nifty. Thanks guys!

[Michael Szalapski]

You could actually use expressions (again, I think this is in that tutorial, but in case it’s not…) to automatically figure out the distance between the camera and your obscuration layer.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Matthew Keane]

The ‘Elementary’ script on aescripts.com might help here. Although it was originally designed for use with Element3D, the ‘split’ function also works with Particular (and some other 3D plug-ins) and makes it easy to create a duplicate of the particle layer and animate the split point using a null.

Matthew Keane

Freelancer based in Paris, France
– Motion Graphics, Video Editing & Effects, Watchout Programming & Live Operation.