[Chris Wood]

I saw on a SFX channel on Youtube about using a 2 Litre bottle as a mould for a neck, use modelling putty to create a kind of skin, then just drizzle fake blood down that. Seems like it would get results!

[Chris Wood]

I broke down and rendered with AO on for one of the scenes (1:10 seconds for 137 frames which isn’t too bad) but I have another scene with 280 frames, 6-7 minutes per frame, which is very bad.. Over a day of rendering. My PC will asplode!

I’ve been trying to get this to work nearly all day and just can’t. Surely there’s an easier way? Rendering AO just the once is 6 minutes. After that there’s no change on the texture as its just the cameras perspective that’s changing.

Thank you.

[Chris Wood]

Sorry, I’m not following you for what I should do here.

I emailed the guy who made it and he got back to me with this:

“Hello Chris,

A couple of things to help bake the ambient occlusion:

* Add Ambient Occlusion to your Render settings (under Effects).
* Enable Diffusion on the Materials and set the Texture to Ambient Occlusion (under Effects again).
* On the Bake Texture tag, enable Ambient Occlusion, set SuperSampling to 1, set Background to black.

I went with the default 256×256 in PSD format but you can try different sizes and formats.

After you bake the texture, replace the Ambient Occlusion shader on the Diffusion channel with the resulting baked file. You can also disable Ambient Occlusion in your Render settings at this point. This greatly improves render times.”

This seems to be a step in the right direction, however, it still looks nothing like actual AO, and still has weird glitches over some of the textures.

[Chris Wood]

I gave it 5 minutes and it finally unfroze, with Memory blah blah unticked. Now it renders fine.

C’mon Adobe!

I have the same CPU and RAM in my PC, the same settings on my PC, and it works perfectly on my PC. What’s the cheese?!

[Chris Wood]

What version of After Effects? Include the minor version number (e.g., After Effects CS5.5 with the 10.5.1 update).

CS4 and CS5 (not 5.5)

Have you installed the recent updates? (If not, you should. They fix a lot of problems.)

Installing now

What operating system? This should include specific minor version numbers, like “Mac OSX v10.6.8”—not just “Mac”.

OSX 10.6.7

What kind(s) of source footage? When telling about your source footage, tell us about the codecs, not just the container types. For example, “H.264 in a .mov container”, not just “QuickTime”.

Apple ProRes 1080p footage (Proxy)

If you are getting error message(s), what is the full text of the error message(s)?

No error message, just hangs.

***UPDATE***

Every time I untick Memory and Multiprocessing, I get the same hang. How can I disable this?

[Chris Wood]

Could you give some hints on how to make the particles form the human shape I have masked out? Not having much luck myself.

Thanks.

[Chris Wood]

Ah… I have to pay for them 🙁

[Chris Wood]

This can be deleted, I figured it out 😉

[Chris Wood]

Thanks, I already did that with the grass. It doesn’t track perfectly but it’s barely noticeable.

My Dissertation is on VFX, so I feel like if I use Magic Bullet it would be cheating 😉 Don’t worry, I already have experience with Apple Color.

Cheers!

[Chris Wood]

How’s this look? (the door is meant to have the red glow coming from it, which I will animate to make it pulse)

https://img209.imageshack.us/img209/9187/mvi22530000022.jpg

I still need to make it look like sunset / nighttime, and I haven’t quite worked out how to track a mask to the ground so that I can keep the grass infront of the corner of the door.

Cheers lads.