Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Temporal (Speed) Animation Test


Here is a temporal (Speed) animation test done in After Effects CS3.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Oprah's not the only one with "The Secret"

What does Adobe's After Effects 7 and Rhonda Byrne's book have in common? They both know "The Secret". Even though Adobe's secret takes more then just positive thought, the reward can be greater to an artist trying to get a rendering done before a morning deadline.

Here's the problem: While rendering, you get a "frame buffer full" error and everything stops and you start to c*ss at the monitor. Hopefully you are rendering frames!!!!

Here's the solution: Start After Effects; Go under the "Edit" pulldown menu; hold SHIFT; Open the PREFERENCES flyout and select GENERAL; Now select the PREVIOUS button.

Now you see a preferences panel titled "Secret". In the "Purge Every ___ Frames During Make Movie" insert a number of frames (I use 60). Now After Effects will clear the cached data after every two seconds of animation.

Now pay attention to the RAM percentage in Make Movie, it will drop to zero every 60 frames.

Now you have "The Secret" and wealth and happiness comes with every render :)

Monday, September 3, 2007

The RCA web spot...



This was a web spot I did for RCA in a previous life. The model was built in 3ds max using spline modeling techniques (surface tools). This modeling technique has many advantages over simple polygonal modeling. When prepared correctly, it allows you to control polygonal density with a spinner using the "Surface" and "Turn to Poly" modifier.

The product and ribbon animations were done in 3ds max and composited in After Effects 7. We separated the ribbon and product into render passes to allow for specific effects. Motion blurs were done in Combustion 3 using the RPF tools.

*Here's a tip, when you render a RPF pass for motion blurs in Combustion, make sure the background color is the same as the product model. meaning if your product is black, make your background black. If it's a lighter color it will give a halo effect in your compositor.

break on through to the otherside


Here is a still from an animation I'm working on that will never see the light of day in its finished form. I was going to use it on the new basement site but the load time would have sucked. The chuck were simple splines in 3ds max that were extruded. I added a multi sub-object material to store the gray and white shaders in the same material. The animation was hand tweened instead of using a Reactor simulation. Most times, I'd rather have the animation control. However, physics simulations can look amazing when used properly.

Everything outside of the chucks and arrow uses a Matte-Shadow material. This shader is used when you want to composite the frames. I'll post more about Matte-Shadow shaders in the future.