building 3d comp of paths layers without their effect being on?

[Ian Corey]

First, drop the composition to Quarter Quality. And turn off all the effects that you don’t need. Your glow can be on an adjustment layer that you can switch on and off to make it easier. If you have lights going you can switch them off. Also, on your camera, tap AA and set the Depth of Field off. Sometime that requires extra processing.

[David Lieberman]

thanks for the help…

the comp view is already on third, and on quarter i cant even tell if the paths are aligned properly so that’s not an option. The camera has no depth of field. The adjustment layer ill try, but i dont see how that’ll be different to having the effect on right now and draggin the layers… i need to have them lined up perfectly as these are all strokes, this project is driving me insane, why on earth would AE need so much time to load a comp with vector paths that have glow and 3d stroke on them… there’s no animation/movemnet/music/depth of field… this doesnt make ANY sense.

thanx for the help.

[David Lieberman]

i just tried adding an adjustment layer and turning off the comp’s layer effects… NO use… the effect doesnt apply to any of the comps because all they are, are comps with layers that contain paths…

i dont understand why AE cant just preview a simple stroke quickly..im running a strong machine with gridiron nucleo pro… this is very annoying indeed!

thanx for the help.

[Darby Edelen]

[david lieberman] “i dont understand why AE cant just preview a simple stroke quickly”

Simple strokes render easily. So disable all the effects on your layers except for your ‘simple’ stroke. To disable effects select the layers, press ‘e’ and click the ‘fx’ switch on the far left for every effect you want to disable.

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[David Lieberman]

by simple stroke, do you just mean GENERATE–>STROKE effect?

I’ve done that now, which took about 20 minutes of going into every single comp and turning layer effects off and adding the stroke…and even now when i push up and down the timeline i cant just scroll and see the effect take place instantly like it should with simple things like that…

its quicker, but still takes far longer than it should, and it took 20 minutes just to set up all the layers to have a stroke…

must be a simpler way to view paths without having to apply an effect on

thanx for the help.

[Darby Edelen]

[david lieberman] “I’ve done that now, which took about 20 minutes of going into every single comp and turning layer effects off and adding the stroke…”

Frankly it sounds like your project has become overly complex. How many pre-comps do you have? Just so that you’re aware, AE needs to do a separate render pass for each unique pre-comp or layer you have in your composition. This can add up to a lot of time very quickly as you add layers and processor intensive effects to those layers.

I should mention that even with 3D Stroke (which is more complex than Generate > Stroke) applied to 12 layers in an HD 1080p composition it takes no more than 2 seconds to render a frame at full resolution on my computer with motion blur off… What else could be contributing to your lackluster performance issue? Are there pre-comps that can be pre-rendered?

Sometimes seemingly simple things increase render time dramatically. Case in point my co-worker was rendering a fairly simple composition last week that was taking 30 minutes to render 30 seconds. I told him to turn motion blur off on an animated Puppet Tool layer and the render time dropped from 30 minutes to 3 minutes with no apparent change in the visual quality of the render… Some Glow filters can have a similar (though not as dramatic) effect, and time-based effects such as echo, timewarp, remove grain, etc. can be very time consuming as well.

[david lieberman] “and even now when i push up and down the timeline i cant just scroll and see the effect take place instantly like it should with simple things like that… “

Unfortunately nothing is ‘instant’ in AE, everything is rendered. It’s just a matter of magnitude, and the complexity of what is being rendered has a lot to do with that. So yes, Generate > Stroke should render significantly faster, but not instantly. I apologize for the suggestion, I thought you already had Stroke applied to the layers.

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[David Lieberman]

thank you very much for the clarification…what you say makes perfect sense… I can only predict that the slowness is due to all my precomps….

I have a ‘forest’ of shapes… every shape is a PRECOMP..and every precomp has an average of 3-4 layers that contain shapes, which then have 3d stroke and glow applied to them…

all these precomps (about 20 of them) are added into a final composition… So, with relevance to what you said, do you believe it will all work quicker if i simply pull all the layers into one comp instead of precomping every single one?

Im going to finalize some of them and simple pre render them, or commit to disk with girdiron..

Applying a simple stroke has cut the waiting time by about half… so that’s a start i suppose…its just that it takes a while to just turn all these layers from 3d stroke to a normal stroke 😉

thanks again!

thanx for the help.

[Ian Corey]

Depending on how much you need the contents of the precomps for spacial organization, you can drop your comp window to One View and switch to Wireframe.

What sounds like the most help would be pre-rendering all of those precomps into footage.

[Darby Edelen]

[david lieberman] “So, with relevance to what you said, do you believe it will all work quicker if i simply pull all the layers into one comp instead of precomping every single one? “

Probably not, because you would still have the same number of layers to render.

What would speed your render time up is creating one or two pre-comps with a different ‘tree’ (using the forest analogy) in each. Then using 10 instances of each of these pre-comps (a total of 20 layers) in your final composition at different angles/scales so that they look slightly different again. When AE renders your final composition, it will cache the two pre-comps that make up the 20 layers in memory and will only need to recall them and place them at the angle/scale/location you specified. This should still requires some rendering, but FAR less… the contents of the pre-comps are already rendered and stored in RAM.

This will be especially fast if you don’t apply any effects outside of the pre-comps, which may not be possible in your case.

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[David Lieberman]

wireframe was the first option, but of course, AE developers havent looked into paths AT ALL in the past versions, and so when you turn on wireframe you simply see a square wireframe of your layer, instead of seeing the paths alone…

I simply cant believe the fact that AE still hasnt developed a way to see JUST PATHS. the only way is selecting a layer, but when you select multiples, of course, the paths disappear.

maybe a good note for some AE developers to look into?!?

thanx for the help.