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CC Glass Bump Map: composition and footage give different results
I’ve followed a neat tutorial on making a rain drop on a surface. It uses bunch of Turbulent Displacements and Particle effects to create a black and white bump map.
That map is fed into CC Glass to create refraction. I wanted to render just the black and white bump map to avoid overhead with Turbulent Displacements etc…
My problem is, that when I use a video of image sequence of a bump map, cc glass renders completely different than if I use the actual composition, created at runtime.
Check this images:
With prerender as bump map: https://imgur.com/a/WrEx9
With composition as bump map: https://imgur.com/a/gjwzjWhen I use a video as bump map I got awful a lot of pixelation going on. To further prove my point, check this image of a bump map composition and bump map prerender. There is 0 visual difference. And even if there are small differences, that should cause so many artifacts.
Can someone explain why is this happening? Thanks, Mitt
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8 Replies
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Thanks for stopping by. I don’t think so. The rendered movie is exactly the same as the composition (see third image
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Are you working in your project at a higher bit-depth than what you’ve rendered?
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Dave LaRonde] “AE CC 2017 has a nasty habit of not defaulting to Full image quality when rendering. It’s a bug. You have to set your comp to Full — not Half, Third, Auto, etc. — and 100% scale BEFORE you render.”
For a little more information, this bug affected Dynamic Link and was fixed in the January release. Notes from Adobe here:
https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/kb/known-issues-after-effects-cc-2017.html#main-pars_header_401889935Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
Nope. All the same.
This are the project files:
https://www.videocopilot.net/blog/2017/01/new-tutorial-realistic-rain-drop-fx/#comments
You can go into Water composition and render the bump map to see the problem in action.
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That project is set to 32bpc.
Set the project to 8bpc; you’ll immediately see the artifacts you describe. 16bpc (“Trillions of Colors”) improves it considerably, and 32bpc of course is the original.
If you’re pre-rendering the bump map to an 8bpc (“Millions of Colors”) video format, you’re losing important information. Render to OpenEXR at 32bpc (“Floating Point”) for the best results.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
Thanks. I’ve prerendered to openEXR with project set to 32 bpc. The issue remains. Although I am not really familiar with all the render settings, so feel free to render it your self (it is a fairly quick render).
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[Jeremy Paul] “Thanks. I’ve prerendered to openEXR with project set to 32 bpc. The issue remains. Although I am not really familiar with all the render settings, so feel free to render it your self (it is a fairly quick render).”
Sorry. The defaults for OpenEXR are not completely lossless. You’ll have to go into its options and set it 32-bit floating point. It defaults to half-float.
But if it’s a quick render, why bother pre-rendering in the first place? If you’re not going to save significant render time, why bother with the hassle?
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
Because it is a clean way of storing data for later reuse and it reduce render overhead at the same time. But after all this trouble, I’m just getting more curious why it doesn’t work. I clearly don’t get some aspect of AE.
I’ve completed an openEXR render with 32 bit checked. The issue remains.
I hope I not asking to much, but could you render it the PRO (your :D) way and see if it actually a render setting issue?
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