Ryan Marzolph
Forum Replies Created
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i did find a solution that worked and allowed me to render out my sequence. i’ve found more and more that when working at higher resolutions or with high poly scenes that enabling motion blur in element can cause some major instability in the system. in another project AE would crash after a few minutes of rendering and i couldn’t even view the screen at full resolution without a crash – but after disabling motion blur it took care of the problem. the issue was the same here. in the previous case of a motion blur crash i was working at 5k so i understood i was pushing it. in this case i was working at 1080 but i was using 2x supersampling which makes it effectively a 4k render each frame. once i disabled motion blur for the comp it rendered out in a matter of minutes.
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Ryan Marzolph
Visual Effects Supervisor
Dreamscape Cinema
https://www.ryanmarzolph.com -
whoops, sorry to waste your time, i found the answer over on the red giant page in the user comments for trapcode form 2. i’ll repost here with explanation so this will hopefully help someone else with this problem:
“for those of you having problems importing .obj files into After Effects CS6 I found a solution that worked for me. (Using Windows 7) My Trapcode form installer did not install the “TrapcodeOBJ.plugin” . Noticing that AE5.5 users were having luck I reinstalled Trapcode and added the CS5.5 software along with CS6. I found the plugin located in C:/program files/adobe/Adobe After Effects CS5.5/Support Files/Plug-ins/Format/Trapcode/. I copied the trapcode file into the corresponding CS6 directory and now I can import .obj files. Although still no animation preset. Maybe I’ll install the CS5 trapcode software and try that next? goodluck.”
in a nutshell, when i installed CC i mostly migrated my plugins over by copying them from the CS6 plugin folder to the CC. i checked them each as i did so making sure they worked and form did indeed work. what i didn’t realize is there’s a folder in the plugins folder called trapcode with a single file in it called TrapcodeOBJ.plugin. without this form runs just fine but this file allows after effects (which doesn’t natively accept .obj files) to import them for use in its plugins.
now that this is in the plugin directory i can open the files without any errors or missing info.
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Ryan Marzolph
Visual Effects Supervisor
Dreamscape Cinema
https://www.ryanmarzolph.com -
Thanks Ross, i agree that mocha pro is a fantastic tracking solution which i’ve been using for some time now and we will be making use of it in our pipeline. i know it would be most ‘professional’ so to speak to do these in post and that was my original thought, but i simply wanted to know if it was possible to do screens practical and at what cost to quality. the team we have for vfx is quite small and the scope of the project is very large and our deadlines will be very tight so anything i can do to save several days of post will be a godsend.
i’ve also watched the all the hollywood camera work dvds and they are an absolutely fantastic resource. i do know i can just track without screens to capture natural reflections but the reason i asked todd about his technique for adding reflection in post is that it is not always practical to capture real reflection off a glossy mirror like surface such as an ipad because it will often reflect your crew, camera and lighting so faking the reflection is best.
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Todd, thank you so much for this incredibly helpful and comprehensive answer to my questions, i think this gives me a much better idea of what is possible. we have access to the camera so i’ll make sure we do a few test shots before the shoot with live and green to see how they look.
i looked at your examples and i was wondering if i might ask you how you added the reflection to the faked ipad screen? is it a still or video and how did you deal with it changing as she moved the device? i’ve read that the human brain is not very good at picking up on the accuracy of reflection as long as it’s close to correct giving you a lot of freedom to fudge things like this.
Mark, you make a good point, considering this is probably going to be a fairly dim room we’ll probably keep the monitors on the lowest brightness to reduce spill and keep them as close as possible to the rest of the light values in the scene