The Full Enchilada

It’s been quite some time since I played around with Adobe After Effects, perhaps several years. And yet even with version 4 and on and on….it was quite “complete” in its features. It had and still has the widest range of plugins available. The latest incarnations, the CS series, currently the Adobe After Effects CS5 mainly adds native 64-bit OS support over CS4 along with Roto Brush tool and the mocha plugin.

Now I was always curious why so many raved about Eyeon (eyeonline website) FUSION years ago when it had no sound/audio support, and apparently years later it still doesn’t. The same thing can be said for D2/thefoundry’s NUKE or NukeX, again absolutely no support for audio, not even playback, forget about keeping it in the final render. Some would have you think that’s not a big deal….which is ludicrous.

Sure it isn’t ‘bad’ to own Nuke, NukeX or Fusion but my recommendation is if $10k is a lot of money to you, stick to Adobe After Effects. Its an unbelievable bargain for the power within it, and you won’t have to go through headaches of manually synchronizing audio clips. (frame numbering never agrees between applications with certain encoders like Divx etc and when you base it on time its not as accurate and forget about effects that change the timeline since then resyncing your audio will have you pulling your hair out and then jumping off a cliff.)

So why don’t these so called “high-end” FILM video compositing systems support audio? Adobe After Effects does, and does it well, which allows for easy usage of such great fx such as Trapcode Sound Keys and others. The music, audio/sound effects in a movie or a commercial are just as important as the video and there is no doubt being able modify one without having to redo the other is a very huge time saver.

So no, not having audio support doesn’t make those programs “cool” and “high-end” and not “bloated”, it makes them incomplete, a work in progress, beta software, at least not something that can be used without crutches.

I say this out of disappointment, because I really do prefer the NODE based workflow. I really enjoyed Silicon Grail, Rayz and also NothingReal Shake (then bought by apple to be cannabilized).

I’m now very curious about Autodesk TOXIK (it seems to borrow a lot from the ultimate Autodesk/Discreet FFI, Flame, Fire, Inferno along with their great keyers which used to be SGI only back in the days), which has been renamed Autodesk Maya Compositor and is included with Maya 2010. It also has a nice nodal based workflow reminiscent of SHAKE and I bet it probably can handle AUDIO, because Autodesk is a ‘real’ company

I will be adding various worthy 3d images, artistic yet photo realistic (ie lighting textures etc)….. for now here’s some nice stuff from good ‘ol PovRay (I’ll be adding some from finalrender, fryrenderer, and others not sure if to same page yet..) :

The images presented on this page show a selection of the types of art that can be
created using POV-Ray.

This POV-Ray picture of a beach of pebbles was generated entirely using POV code. No modelers were used at all. The image features radiosity and focal blur to give it that realistic feel, and took 4.5 days to render on an Athlon 5600+.

Study in atmospheric media and in different ways of “planting” using the trace command.

(continue reading…)

Well, ok so as a beginner, you’re not going to be capable of creating as beautiful a model as the one above just yet, that’s something to aspire to as your skills develop. (If you want to just do animation with already created models you can get for free, that article is coming next.) In the previous articles I gave a quick overview of the programs I recommend for those wishing to delve into virtual 3D world creation, the culmination of my articles will in the end branch out to real-time game creation systems and highly realistic 3D movies, ie rendered virtual 3D worlds versus realtime interactive 3D worlds.
(continue reading…)

These days games like Second-Life are the craze, everyone’s locked up with their computer living in a Virtual World. This escapeism to a virtual life of freedom may be just an extension of our usual daydreaming and a way of relaxation and stress relief from this suffocating modern world, and stress relief is always a good thing. (continue reading…)