Chris Smith
Forum Replies Created
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Yeah, I started out using booleans, but the comp would slow to a crawl after you had a bunch of elements all revealing at once, and I couldn’t get nice grad effects, it was always harsh edges 🙁
I think it’s a matter of your final result. Since I use C4D for motion graphics and Maya more for “normal 3D”, I’ve been loving the grad reveals on flat objects (like text) to give them a nice style with almost no hit on real time framerate.
However, I have a challenge for someone to figure out:
go here:
https://www.renascent.nl/motion.htmand click on the piece named ‘Gestalt’.
Joost does most of his work in 3DS Max from what I read from his articles, rarely doing text and such in a compositor so that the text can interact smoothly with the surroundings like being distorted by refractive index transparency, and what not.
My question is the way he reveals his text. It’s very smooth and if you go frame by frame seems to run along the stroke of his letters. I’m sure you could animate a map in a compositor to drop in the alpha channel, but it wouldn’t be the extact same thing.
So in C4D I made flat text the usual way by dropping the text splines into a loft nurb. Then I used a copy of that text spline and a small cube profile to create a fat sweep nurb then animated the grow parameter. Then booleaned them together. However the results were not only sluggish (real time) but looked terrible from where the sweep nurb overlaps itself.
So any ideas how to do the text reveal in C4D that works along the stroke of the text and not just an arbitrarty reveal?
I suppose I could do the text outlines in AI. Send those into C4D for the loft nurbs. And import the same text into AE and use good ol stroke to create an animated matte to drop into the alpha channel of the C4D text. Any thoughts?
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
Yeah, there are a million lightsaber posts out there. Polls show that 1 in every 4 Americans have now made light sabers over home movies 🙂 Just kidding although it seems like it. I remember a dad wanting to find out so his kids could do their own lightsaber battle.
On a technical note: Doing a lightsaber and a snake would be two different approaches though. A lightsaber, you are rotoing an actual mask over the broomstick (including the motion blur from said stick) and using blurring and glow on the actual mask. This is basically how they did the real lightsabers in the original Star Wars films (although they did it optically instead of digitally).
A snake, however, would be a matchmove but would be a bear to get the motion blur just right to cover up the motion blur from the broomstick on film/tape.
Here is a tutorial. It uses Commotion for it’s roto since it’s a way better program for roto, but AE’s roto will do just fine for this:
https://crewoftwo.com/making/effects/lightsaber-recipe/index.html
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
also remeber you can right click on the parameter itself and choose show in timeline or show fcurve to see it.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
also here is my starglow recipe if you don’t have it:
1. Duplicate the footage. Add hue/sat to it. Use this to pull out all the saturation. Then add a Levels. Crush down the blacks and gammas agressively. Then clip the whites a bit. The point being, you don’t want to see greyscale anymore, you just want the very brightest bits to be white and everything else black. Add a Gaussian blur to this layer. Except make the blur horizontal only. Now crank the blur waaay up. Now add a glow effect. Change the glow colors to hues you like.
Now Duplicate this layer with these effects on it. On the second layer, change the gauss blur to be vertical-only instead of horizontal.
Now set these two additional layers to SCREEN transfer mode. Now you have a starfilter effect on only the lightest parts of the image.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
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Geesh, if it’s gate weave then make a note not to use that camera house or telecin
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Geesh, if it’s gate weave then make a note not to use that camera house or telecin
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Duplicate your object a few times. Assign a different color shader to each one. Then do the usual way of assigning object instances to particle objects (not TP partciles but the built in particles) and it will automatically randomly select which object it uses.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
CC is the shorthand for Cyclore Effects plug-ins that come free with AE 6.5
If you haven’t installed them yet, they are in a seperate folder on your AE 6.5 disc.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
As far as the reflection effect, when we shoot reflection passes for glass doors and windows and such, the compositor almost always just simply mixes it in with normal transfer mode and drops the opacity low. Another option is to do the same but in SCREEN mode. The only other thing you may want to do is give the reflection layer a slight tint say a light bluish.
As far as the mask distortion. Well a mask is going to create the effect of a wide angle lens. If the actor is not moving much, I think you can create a shape using distort plug-ins, or better yet map the layer onto CC sphere and make the sphere big enough so that if the helmet mask wrapped in a full circle it would be the size of your CC sphere.
Then at that point you would do basic roto so that the CC sphere layer would only be seen in the mask. But to help make it more realistic, you would want to do a Fresnel effect. Which is the way that reflections are stronger near the angles that point away from the camera. Just use a radial grad as a track matte for your reflecction layer and make the center area slightly darker than the outer areas. Also the roto shouldn’t have to be too detailed, I would think you could have pretty soft edges.
Whether you have to motion track the CC Sphere layer to the helmet is yet to be known. I would think that it would be a detriment because when you move your head, a reflection doesn’t move with you, it just shows another part of the world around you.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com