Alon_a
Forum Replies Created
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What I know is that Houdini is great for very specialized applications, mostly having to do with sophisticated simulations. It’s much more programming-oriented than artist-oriented, and my experience with it (admittedly a very short one) has been that it’s very difficult to get used to. If you really know you need its special features, go for it, but otherwise… it’s very expensive, and I am not sure the service is so much better than that of other vendors.
Having a lively community to support you is, in my mind, at least as important as the company’s official support – probably more important. I don’t know that Houdini has much of that, honestly. Take a look at forums where such work is presented and discussed – Houdini shows up very rarely if at all. You’ll probably find it a bit more in VFX forums, so if that’s your goal I may be off the mark.
You didn’t mention Softimage|XSI, and I honestly believe it’s a serious mistake not to give it a try. It has absolutely top notch features and workflow. The Foundation version, which contains most of said features, is offered for a ridiculous price. I’ve used some of the other apps (MAX, Maya, some C4d) and feel a lot more comfortable in XSI. You’ll get most of you’re questions answered quickly at XSIbase.
TrueSpace, as far as I know, is purely a modeling solution. If you’re looking for a dedicated modeling application, take a look at Luxology. Modo beats Lightwave in every way almost by definition – it’s largely the same team of people who made a fresh start with a much more modern architecure.
Just my $.02, of course.
AA
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Are you sure you want to actually write a plug-in? There is some SDK documentation on the Adobe website, but for what you describe this hardly seems necessary. Apply the effects to one layer and save them as a .ffx preset which you can then apply to the other layers, or use an adjustment layer, or if all else fails write a script – this is still much easier than an actual plug-in. Scripting is covered in the AE docs, and also over at Dan Ebberts’ site, particulary this section:
https://www.motionscript.com/ae-scripting/table-of-contents.html
– AA
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Are you sure you want to actually write a plug-in? There is some SDK documentation on the Adobe website, but for what you describe this hardly seems necessary. Apply the effects to one layer and save them as a .ffx preset which you can then apply to the other layers, or use an adjustment layer, or if all else fails write a script – this is still much easier than an actual plug-in. Scripting is covered in the AE docs, and also over at Dan Ebberts’ site, particulary this section:
https://www.motionscript.com/ae-scripting/table-of-contents.html
– AA
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I agree with Steve: this must be an aspect ratio issue. What I would do is a couple of tests: within this composition, create a solid about the same size as the Quicktime movie, and rotate it. Does it get squashed? Also, create a new comp from the Quicktime alone, and rotate it there – does it get squashed?
I’m no expert but I’m almost sure that there is a pixel aspect ratio discrepancy among one of the following: the aspect ratio of the original footage (Quicktime), the aspect ratio AE *thinks* is that of the original footage, the AR of your comp and the AR of the preview. Something doesn’t match.
Just guessing, hope that helps.
– AA
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2D or 3D comp? Any cameras around? A screenshot would probably be helpful…
– AA
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I don’t see anything here to suggest that you’re off track. Getting fluent motion is sometimes a challenge, especially when combining camera and layer moves.
One thing I wasn’t sure about though – you mentioned that the background appears static, so why is it a 3D layer? It usually makes more sense to keep backgrounds as 2D layers, so that they do indeed remain static regardless of camera moves.
Finally, if you have multiple keyframes on the book, consider making them roving. This will help make the speed more even, which may or may not be a good thing, but sometimes it helps fight clunkiness.
– AA
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DigiEffects’ plug-ins are notoriously slow, this has been my experience with them and I believe other people’s as well. It is quite possible that you SHOULD be getting such a dramatic slowdown, there may be nothing wrong with your system or settings.
I looked at the PDF documentation of the Berserk Laser effect, it seems that this should be reproducible with the standard beam effect, circle, glow and transfer modes… would be much more work but you may literally make up for it in render time.
– AA
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Wow, thanks a lot! It would be very interesting to tear those apart 🙂
You emphasize “Open the file in AE 6.5” on the download page, would these projects not work in 7.0?
– Alon
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It’s not hard to do in a 3D app, you don’t need extensive knowledge for that but you do need some knowledge. May be a bit difficult task for a first project but if you can get someone to help you it shouldn’t be too hard. Of course it also depends on the quality you’re after. If you need pointers to get started, let me know.
Doing it in AE is actually harder, if not impossible. If you can get away with an abstract ribbon rather than an actual filmstrip, consider using particles: animate a null to fly around your layers, then make it an emitter for a stream of dense, monochromatic particles set to 0 velocity. If you use Trapcode you should be able to set your layers to obscure the particle trail when it is wrapping behind (it doesn’t happen automatically, you need to tell Particular about those layers). Later you can use the ribbon as a track matte for something more elaborate, but getting a film strip this way is going to be very hard.
– Alon
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The trick with parenting is that the parented object gets its own local coordinate system. This is good since it lets you, for instance, animate rotations indpendently of what the parent object is doing. The downside is that you have to translate those local coordinates to global ones if you want to tell an expression where things actually are.
See, for instance, here:
– Alon