Mylenium
Forum Replies Created
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Yeah, I know what you mean, but if you want realism, even a fully fledged 3D program won’t give you what you want. Computer-based graphics simply don’t work this way, no matter how you tweak them. You know, nobody cares about real physics as long as it just looks real enough. If you want to stay in AE, even if you don’t want to hear it, Trapcodes Shine and Lux are still the best point to start.
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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Well, it’s ashame, but there’s not much one can do. In a way whenever releasing stuff you are somewhat asking for people to do that. It’s not particularly respectful and I surely wouldn’t do business with a company that has used one of my presets and sold it to their clients as their own, but it happens all the time. In 3D circles it even happens that people use rendered imagery from others and use them for their own promotion or even more strangely sell models that others provide for free on Turbosquid for a big stack of Greenbacks. Unless you intend to settle on Mars or some other remote rock floating in space anytime soon, we all just have to live with it.
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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No, unfortunately there is no built-in way of doing that. I agree with mstleger that it would be wiser to start off in Maya and only after that transfer your animation to AE. If that is no option for whatever reason, you should look into scripting. It would be quite possible to get out data from AE in a way that it could be read by the many MEL scripts for mocap or by Maya’s own ASCII import directly. I’m not really able to help you much since I no longer use Maya, but I’m sure you can find something on that topic. Perhaps ask at AEhancers if someone would assist you with your script…
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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Mmh, so far you are only considering one side, which isn’t very helping. Are you sure you are using the right import settings in XPress Pro? Have you turned off super-black and super white in XPress? To answer your question: No, you can’t make AE output a video signal via the mojo box. Other cards such as BMDs range can do that, though. Your best way to veryfy your colors is to use Color Finesse’s built-in scopes. Yeah, not ideal, since you need to open CF, but better than nothing.
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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Shouldn’t be too difficult… Use your contour as a matte on a gradient layer in a subcomp, then use Gradient Wipe in the main comp to reveal it. By using your pre-comped layer multiple times and adjusting its values (e.g. contrast/ brightness) you can isolate parts of the greyscale to form a glowing head as you need it. It’s al ljust a matter of finding the right balance between effects. If it’s an option, you could also ask the 3D guy for a depth pass. This will give more coherent gradation and thus make for instance the intensity of the glow as it fades in the depth of the image more believable and can also be used to add other effects like some minor DOF.
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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Your Shine problem is more one of your layer order and cannot be solved otherwise meaning you need to rearrange your project layout… Volumetric shadows can easily be faked by using a second instance of Shine used as a Luminance Silhouette or simply tinted black and used in Multiply mode. You can derive positional data from a 3D layer to use with Shine by means of some simple expressions. I suggest you look at http://www.motionscript.com for Dan’s lesson on layer space transforms (the one with the lensflare) to understand those matters. Basically you only need to add a dummy 3D layer or light as a reference for the Shine source point…
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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Your Shine problem is more one of your layer order and cannot be solved otherwise meaning you need to rearrange your project layout… Volumetric shadows can easily be faked by using a second instance of Shine used as a Luminance Silhouette or simply tinted black and used in Multiply mode. You can derive positional data from a 3D layer to use with Shine by means of some simple expressions. I suggest you look at http://www.motionscript.com for Dan’s lesson on layer space transforms (the one with the lensflare) to understand those matters. Basically you only need to add a dummy 3D layer or light as a reference for the Shine source point…
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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Unless I misunderstand you, why not just reverse the transition completion values with the back layer in Card Wipe set to “none”? I do that a lot of times and it usually does the trick.
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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Unless I misunderstand you, why not just reverse the transition completion values with the back layer in Card Wipe set to “none”? I do that a lot of times and it usually does the trick.
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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[Kevin] “Doesn’t seem like too far of a stretch for ADOBE.”
Actually it is. Even though nobody believes it, only now applications are beginning to share functions and code. Otherwise we would have had full support for Photoshop layer styles, blend modes and whatnot already back in AE 4.1 or something like that. As for your problem: Look into using dingbat fonts. There are tons of free fonts around containing almost all the shapes one can desire and if that fails, you can even easily built a font with some freeware/ shareware tools or e.g. Corel Draw. The beauty of this approach is that you will have a lot of control over your setup either directly with animators or some expressions.
Mylenium
[Pour Myl