Darby Edelen
Forum Replies Created
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[John Cuevas] “I’d create a heat like look with fractal noise in a precomp. Drop that into the main comp and use that to drive a Distort > Displacement Map effect.”
To take that a step further you could use 2 different fractal noise layers in the pre-comp, one tinted to be black/green and the other black/red. Set them to the ‘Add’ blend mode and use that to drive the Displacement Map. You can animate them differently as well.
This allows you to displace the underlying image separately in two dimensions: horizontal and vertical.
Darby Edelen
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One thing to note: you can’t curve a solid as Todd suggested in the Classic 3D renderer. You can only do that in the Ray-traced renderer.
The lines you’re seeing may be due to layers being too close together in 3D space or the light shining at a glancing angle to the layers. After Effects can get confused about what’s in front of what and how to render the shadows in that scenario (I should mention that the ray-traced renderer also fixes that in every case but coplanar layers, those that occupy the exact same space). If you don’t want to use the ray-traced renderer for performance reasons then here are some things you can try to alleviate the issue:
1) Move the layers a little farther from each other in 3D space.
2) Increase the Shadow Map resolution in Composition Settings > Advanced > Renderer > Options… I’d recommend going for the maximum 4000px size.
3) Move the light so that it is more in front of or behind the layers (i.e. placed so that the Z axis of the layer is pointing more at the light rather than the X or Y axis).Darby Edelen
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As Walter already mentioned the depth of the scene that is in focus has everything to do with the relative size of the aperture and the film back. Generally you wouldn’t mess with the film back (that just complicates things) so the aperture is where you want to work. The ‘Aperture’ property is just under the ‘Focus Distance’ on a Camera layer.
For focusing I like to add a Null object named ‘Focus’ to my scene and apply this expression to my Camera’s Focus Distance (note: you must keep the Focus null in front of your camera):
l = thisComp.layer("Focus");
p = l.toWorld(l.anchorPoint);
cp = toWorld([0,0,0]);
cv = toWorldVec([0,0,1]);
v = p - cp;
dot(cv, v);Another issue you may run into is that as the Focus Distance gets very close to the camera the amount of blurring in the background gets extreme. To combat that I’d recommend another expression on the Blur Level property to reduce the amount of blurring as the Focus Distance crosses a certain threshold. Something like this:
f = cameraOption.focusDistance;
z = cameraOption.zoom;
linear(f, 0, z / 2, 0, value);Which would reduce the Blur Level from its keyframed value (default is 100%) when the Focus Distance is half the Zoom Distance down to 0% when the Focus Distance is 0. These values are somewhat arbitrary so you can change them if you’re not getting what you want.
Darby Edelen
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I would:
1) duplicate the layer to be shadowed
2) add a Generate Fill effect set to Black
3) apply a distort effect. Warp is easy and it works in this case. Another option would be Bezier Warp.
4) blur and adjust position/size/opacity to taste.You could also blur some before the warp. Maybe only along the horizontal, or different amounts along the horizontal and vertical (it looks like this is what was done in the posted image).
Darby Edelen
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[Kyle Bales] “Here is what I’m up against. You can see the motion distortion at the very end. Also it got re-encoded to a different size when I uploaded it so hopefully that won’t derail your analysis :/”
So the interlacing I see in that footage is a common problem, but I’m not sure if it’s due to the resizing that occurred when you uploaded it or if it’s in the source footage. If you turn Separate Fields Off and zoom into your footage do you see single lines of interlacing in that fast motion portion? Or do they look more like big fat lines as seen in the top two images on this site: https://www.100fps.com/
If the latter then your footage was at some point (probably long before you got it) resized without first being de-interlaced. There is no good way to fix this. The best option is to ask for better source footage.
Darby Edelen
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[boob weisz] “The problem is in Echospace, which is normally great at repeating along a motion path, except only when that motion path is on the original element to begin with – NOT when the element gets its motion from a parent null.”
I’m not very familiar with Echospace but as I recall it will follow expression based animations just fine. You can “parent” the ‘original element’ to the parent null using an expression:
l = thisComp.layer("Parent Null");
if(thisLayer.hasParent) parent.fromWorld(l.toWorld(l.anchorPoint));
else l.toWorld(l.anchorPoint);Just apply that to your source layer for Echospace and change the “Parent Null” portion to match the name of the null you want the layers to follow.
The expression is a little more complicated than I anticipated because I just checked out Echospace and there are some nulls that Echospace creates that require a little extra code to handle 🙂
Darby Edelen
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[spencer dukes] “cannot render because camera’s parent has zero scale”
Does it continue to happen if you have CAPS LOCK on to disable rendering?
Darby Edelen
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[Kyle Bales] “I’m not sure I am adjusting the frame rate and resolution correctly. Should I just be be doing that in the comp settings or is it during the actual compressing?”
In After Effects the output frame rate and resolution is defined in the Composition Settings of the composition you are rendering (although it can be overridden in the Render Settings). However, you should also confirm that the frame rate of the footage source in the project panel is correct. You can alter this as well as the field order by right clicking the footage in the project panel and using Interpret Footage > Main…
[Kyle Bales] “And another problem is that when I drag one of the clips onto the new comp button it is creating a composition that is 4:3 instead of widescreen and in addition to that, when I view the footage in AE it is 4:3 even though it says the aspect ratio is 1.46.”
You should use the PAL D1/DV Widescreen Square Pixel composition preset if you want the rendered movie to be widescreen on square pixel devices (computer displays, HDTVs).
[Kyle Bales] “Is there an email address I can send you some stills of what I’m working with to you?”
You can upload images to the forum using the Image Upload button above the Message field where you reply (it’s the 3rd from the right in a row of buttons). A short clip may be better as it’s impossible to figure out field order from a still image. There’s a button for that too 🙂
Darby Edelen
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It sounds like you’re working with a source that was interlaced from the get go (PAL 50i). The best thing you can do is to interpret the fields properly. Once that’s done, and if you’re definitely delivering progressive, you can also try the Preserve Edge Quality checkbox (this sometimes improves jaggies).
Applying a 1px vertical blur as you mentioned is also a good idea. You could also apply Timewarp at 100% speed and enable motion blur to apply a small amount of blur to objects in motion.
If you can deliver at 1/2 the vertical resolution you could place your footage in a 50 frames per second 360×288 composition (use the source footage pixel aspect ratio) and scale it to 50%. This should result in a good 50p video (twice the frame rate!), although at half the original resolution.
If you’re still having trouble then it would help to see a short sample of the problematic footage. Of course only if the client isn’t protective of the footage 🙂
Darby Edelen
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You should also be able to get a good result using the built-in Distort > Displacement Map although the set up may be involved. You’d have to create a matte for the drip and create a psuedo-normal map from it in order to get good results.
Still, if the drip wouldn’t be hard to matte that’s the way I’d approach it.
Darby Edelen