2.5d rendering in After Effects

[Jhonus]

is this an advert or an artwork plug? ;)

either way its a nice result for such a quick render time

[Ls3D]

Very cool, I will have to find to the time to play with this toy! Who knows, might even find a use in production! Thanks for creating it.

-Shea

[dunsoner]

I like it looks awesome! I love the blood, looks real I give it a 5 star awesome work!:bounce:

[yencaray]

Bravo! very nice work on this! Thats just so cool to see something like this be made! Nice price too. Can this plugin be used with animated files? So you could do what you did with that image but have that creature animated?

[Taron333]

Thanx guys! Yeah, it's actually a plugin for any environment, really. Thing is, it's next to impossible to cover everything it can do within anyone's attention span, even my own...haha!

I will post as many different ways to use it as I can, before anyone screams: STOP!!!

Main thing is, you need to check it out and play with it. Don't hesitate to try it one anything, really. It's a blast to figure out wicked fades for instance!

- Animate transparency and refraction amount for instance to do fascinating fades.

- Project one sequence as caustix and animate refraction index to dissolve it for example!

- Integrate elements like titles, paintstrokes or objects into real footage, using the real footage as environmental illumination.

It's endless...you can run ZbornToy over Zborntoy to do a multitude of off the wall effects or straight forward increases in complexity. Or spectral splitting for glass prisma type of effects.

And I firmly believe it is only a matter of one or two hours, before you actually know the entire tool and can start roaming freely within it, so to say. (not sure if that's a proper way of saying it?!)

:thumbsup: thanx for response already, for sure!

Don't hesitate to ask me anything and keep the feedback coming! It's also important to me, to find out about your first reactions to it all. I've been on it for so long, it's sometimes difficult to know how it all gets perceived at first, or even at all for that matter!

Taron

[Wegg]

Yes you can yencaray. Like Taron says in his post. . . it has a lot of uses. :twisted:

[Taron333]

Bravo! very nice work on this! Thats just so cool to see something like this be made! Nice price too. Can this plugin be used with animated files? So you could do what you did with that image but have that creature animated?

YES! Absolutely! In fact, you can go even non-traditional ways of animated the depth images afterwards. I mean, traditional would be to use a 3d application to export animated depth sequence (and color,normals and any other texture you'd like to use). But you can also use things such as liquify or mesh warp directly in after effects. That's a real blast, too! Oh, man, I should post some of that stuff...it's quite fascinating and a real blast to make, actually! :scream:

[RO]

This is amazing I saw a previous work done with this plugin but I did not bother to really look into it. Yeah you are right it is hard to sell this kind of plugin or explain it lol.

Once I saw how after effects used the plugin my jaw was on the floor for sure.

I am learning after effects so I can see how nice this tool could be.

Once I get into some heavy animation and charecter stuff ill play around with your sweet plugin. Buy it if my school does not lol :)

I am going to show my teacher this plugin. I find it entirly amazing. Having such control is just amazing.

[pretty9s]

amazing work

[valentine]

is this an advert or an artwork plug? ;) [...]

haha, thats exactly what ive been thinking.


amazing work

yes, amazing advert...

[Traffer]

geilomat, Alta ! ... :o)

[valentine]

wiede ?

[MrElmo]

Brutal! This will have quite an impact on productions.

[DoLeeP]

this render time is amazing in fact this will be Used in production an maybe in games in the near future !! will see

[Taron333]

Oha, I didn't quite understand "plug" and wasn't sure then what the message ment...advert or artwork. :hmm:

Decided to edit the text, because I had a revelation... (not a brutally big one, but good enough): This is an announcement! Not an advertising! And it features my work in everyway. Piece of visual me, piece of useful me (hihihi).

You guys rock! :buttrock:
You're bringing me a whole lot of happiness! Much needed and much appreciated! :bounce:

Taron

[Taron333]

geilomat, Alta ! ... :o)


HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! I'm sorry, that's awesome! Thanx! :scream: :applause:

Hahaha...dude!

[ChewyPixels]

Impressive plugin! Great price, too! :applause:

[meats]

Cool Image!

I've been using the plug-in for weeks and I keep discovering new things that it can do and new ways to use it. It has come in handy for me a bunch of times already for me.
The caustics produce really cool effects, give them a try if you get a chance.

thanks Taron!

[Zarathustra]

It's an enhanced advertisement so I'll just jump right to the product issue - when's the OSX version of Zborntoy coming out?

[Wegg]

Here are some torrents for the two large videos Taron has made. Please help me out by keeping the torrents open for a little while.

Treemare (http://www.eggington.net/%7Ewegg/4Taron/ZbornToy_Treemare.zip.torrent)

VectorPaint (http://www.eggington.net/%7Ewegg/4Taron/ZbornToy+VectorPaint.zip.torrent)

Thanks.

[valentine]

Oha, I didn't quite understand "plug" and wasn't sure then what the message ment...advert or artwork. :hmm:

Decided to edit the text, because I had a revelation... (not a brutally big one, but good enough): This is an announcement! Not an advertising! And it features my work in everyway. Piece of visual me, piece of useful me (hihihi).

You guys rock! :buttrock:
You're bringing me a whole lot of happiness! Much needed and much appreciated! :bounce:

Taron

nichts fuer ungut, sah irgendwie abgekartet aus ;)

[exe69]

Hi Taron

First of all I must say the plugin is revolutionary. I've had a chance to read through some tutorials as well as I downloaded the treemare. I am a Maya user and was wondering what is the best way to export Z depth out of maya in order for the ZbornToy to work. I've tried many aproaches and am gettin nowhere. I've tried using even 32bit hdr depth renders out of maya and am getting same problem. There's a lot of banding and overall poor image quality.

If anyone knows how I can export proper Depth map out of Maya. Please HELLLP.

Thank you.

[Labuzz]

Can we expect an integrated version of the plug for messiah in the "very near" future?
Looks cool anyway.

[Taron333]

Right after I made the first version, we realized the potential of it for messiah. In fact, we even did tests with rendering depth maps out of openGL, but despite the 'promissed' 16bit depth map, it actually gave out quantized 8bit info, which ended up being useless for the realtime use during animation. Needless to say that that would have been absolutely incredible. Anyway, it's still a thought, even if it was just for realtime adjustment of surfaces and such.

Thing is, I have evolved the shading principles quite a bit on the ZbornToy and I'd much rather be interested in translating those back into messiah. Partially we have done that already with the glossiness principle! If anyone has noticed, I'm not sure, but when you now want to change a surface's glossiness with a texture, it automatically adjusts everything necessary to make it feel either more glossy or more briddle/matte. The specular highlights also respond to the size of each light, which we then made work for each light type, including direct light. That makes it a whole lot more logical, when it comes to simulating either sunlight or that of a bulb or a real spot. Anyway, just a few of those inovations I came up with during experimenting with the ZbornToy. The translucency as it is in the ZbornToy is another real improvement and makes it super easy to adjust the look and feel with just two parameters as opposed to 4 or even 6. However, it is a limitation, but one that limits you to get really good results without having to worry too much.

Oh...yeah, and in the ZbornToy the glossiness is a real master features, because it really effects everything, just how it would on a 'real' surface! That prevents hard work of nudging all kinds of things to make a surface look right. Reflections and refractions get diffused just like the diffusion of the highlights! Very powerful and pleasant way of working.

If I was writing a shading engine for a new renderer, I would make this thing almost exactly like the ZbornToy. Advanced or expert materials would then allow for screwing it up again, hahahaha. I've never felt so at ease, doing shading and texturing, as I do, working with the plug-in! :bounce: ...eh... :rolleyes: ...now everything sounds like stupid advertising, but I swear I mean it. ...god i really don't like being made conscious of what I say in such a way.

Anyway, the cool thing is, you can just try it out and skip all I'm saying to make up your own mind! :wip:

Great set of comments again, thank you very much!

AND MEATS!!! Dude, I so want to see what you've been doing recently. You should share your first ZbT pieces already, that you made the night you got it! I was freaking blown away! :buttrock: ...and I'm still deeply grateful for it, shared or not shared! :shrug: :applause:

[RO]

I wonder who are the aholes who put your thread down by two stars what dicks! If thay even had the slightest clue what this really means.

[Taron333]

Ahh..a short form:

Nah, no aholes here. Just some, who really, really need to express how little they like it. :shrug:

So let's just enjoy this thread, while it survives those, who'd like to see it go away! :argh:
If everyone who likes it, actually votes, we could teach people the success of an actual democracy! But once again, it seems like only... ...nah, none of'em here. :shrug:

[Zarathustra]

Not to interrupt the love-in, childhood memories or the psychoanalysis of people who've expressed anything less then praise here, but about that OSX version...?

[Taron333]

HAHAHA! Coming up! It's in the works as we speak! Philipp's the man!

Ah, man...I just edited the text below...now this won't make much sense, but wisely, we just leave the nonsense!

[Zarathustra]

LOL! If it's perfectly fine, then why... oh, nevermind. Thanks for answering my question.

[monovich]

I've said it elsehwere and I'll say it here. This plugin is just amazing. I haven't even touched it and I can see that it has the potential to change a LOT of how people (including me) work.

ok now I'm off to try it. :)

-s

[Taron333]

If you guys have any specific questions or examples you'd really like to see, that are directly related to the ZbornToy, please, ask them and I'll prepare a demo! There are so many different things to show...

As for Maya and a depth map export, I'm very certain you could at the very least do the good old fog-trick (all objects white and a black haze on it - shader using distance to camera to fade in black) and save that out as 16 or 32bit. 16bit is most of the time perfectly fine (oh crap, I can't say "perfectly fine", this is totally going to be confusing thanx to my previous text)... ...only super large scenes with complex objects at various distances would really want to have 32bit depth maps used!

Some 3d apps save out "correct" depth images, assuming you'd save out float images. That means that instead of white in the foreground close to the camera, it is black and everything gets brighter with distance. You'd want to invert such layers, before using them with the ZbornToy. You could do that with a "channel->invert" right above the plug-in!

Hope that was useful?!

Taron

[Aritz]

Thank for that great Plugin Taron.
I have a little problem, my render in AE appears faceted. In max I smoothed it more but the result is the same. I mean that I can see all the tris. That sounds like 3ds max problem, but any suggestion?

[peekoot]

i've tried it with combustion4... plugin registers but keeps crashing all the time... i couldn't get it to work... is it supposed to work with combustion?

btw. plug looks VERY promising... i'd love to try it..

[Taron333]

Ok, the faceted max exports:
- increase amount of subdivisions on your model, before rendering it out!
depth renders do not care about phong shading or smoothing of normals. Only the actual polygon shape counts!
We do use surface normals, if you exported those, too, but the shadows, just like in raytracing, need the geometry to be correct. It can easily reveal the nature of your geometry, regardless to your normals. So be careful.

I always recommend: Use the massive amout of rendertime you save, not to have to render lights, shadows, GI and everything like it. Instead increase the amount of polygons for your organic/round geometries!

Combustion 4:
It should not crash, there may be a different issue with your configuration of both system and preferences. However, appearantly that and Digital Fusion 5.x have changed something about their API, which doesn't support the layerfields we have used. As a result in the current version, you can't use "textures" for the parameters! We have just heard about it and crosschecked with other plugins to figure it all out. Looks like it is solvable, so count on an announcement from us in that regard. But it should not crash! Have you started a scene from scratch? Definitely set the memory use to be as high as possible! That's one tip I can give.

[peekoot]

i've tried it dozen of times... crashes all the time.. image is not too large (640*480 tif tried 8,16 and 32bit) and i have 3 gigs of RAM... well... i'll see to try it somewhere else as well... no matter.. i'll keep an eye on this one... looks sweet!

[Taron333]

Well, we'll figure it out! It shouldn't run into any memory trouble before 4k and everything turned on anyway! So that's really not the problem then. But we are part of the combustion beta now and work it out with great certainty! Thanx a lot, though. It's really perfect to get some feedback from both Combustion and Digital Fusion power users! So far we had our main focus only on After Effects of course. Also, I have no way of confirming this, but in Combustion 3 there supposedly are no troubles to report... if you still have a copy of this running, could you try? Don't worry if not...I'm just curious.

Taron

[peekoot]

just tried it with combustion 3... crashes again... might be my system specific though (xp pro sp2, piv 3.2 ghz (prescott) and 3 gigs of ram)

well.. as i've said.. this is not dampening my spirits... i'll be watching this one :)

[Taron333]

Thanx! Really sorry to hear that! And we shall not let you down! :wip:
Thanx for the specs, too! :thumbsup:

Taron

[AndHolzmeister]

well in my company we drop combustion and now we use after effects all the time becouse of this crash thing that combustion always had... combustion crashs too much...

Taron, you are always coming with inventive new ways and aproaches to the artist's workflow, i admire you for that, thanks for supporting us, artists, with such tools and workflows.

I did not have the chance to test it, but as i saw what you have done with it, i just realize the impact this will couse into production pipeline.

[Elron]

I find your picture miserable. You have already really made work better there!

Greeting,
Elron

[Taron333]

It's Halloweensh...not too much of an artistic statement, sorry! But I'm pretty happy with how it turned out!

Thanx, though! For complimenting the rest of my work, then! :)

I've made some off the wall kind of goofing around effect...wanted to play around with footage and found an old experimental segment of "people" with an alien for fun...haha!

Anyway, in this little clip I just made a background with after effects' generated fractal noise and an overlayed ramp and ran the plugin over it. Then I ran it again over the whole comp, using the comp to shine caustics through it and eventually took the whole thing to vaporize it into yet some more cautics.

http://www.frischluft.com/gallery/zborntoy/caustic_transmission.jpg (http://www.frischluft.com/gallery/zborntoy/full/caustic_transmission.mov)

Just to show some more funny type of experiments that can be done with the ZbornToy within a few minutes of just playing around.

Taron

[monovich]

nice. I tried this out with bunch of simple buildings and I got some nasty stepping in the shading. I tried the fog trick in LW and tried both 16 bit and 32bit exr. It was a little better after I turned off "dither intensity" but it was still steppy. I'm sure it was my fault.

It's not exactly as easy as I'd hoped to figure out. I'm sure with some real time investment it would be. The documentation on the site is bearable, but great documentation and tutorials are a big selling point for me.

[Rivendale]

Wow, that plugin seems awsome! Just watched the videos...it seems really fun to play with and with a lot of cool possibilities. Great work!

CML

[stijn]

You had me giggling with glee playing with this last night, when I should have been sleeping.
Only I keep thinking it's ZThornboy. ;)
Thanks again Taron.

[Taron333]

If anyone of you runs into questions or issues of anykind, even while they may not be related to the ZbornToy directly, but the software you use to make source footage for it, don't hesitate to email me privately, please! I'm pretty sure you all know how to get my email. Either use the support email for taronites, or my private on the bottom of my own website! :cool:

Eh, the idea is NOT to disclose it from the public, I mean, post your concerns here, first of course, I mean in addition to that, just contact me, because I really enjoy helping out and we can avoid lengthy back and forth and simply post the solution later! So don't misunderstand the motive behind the above, please! :thumbsup:

[Taron333]

You had me giggling with glee playing with this last night, when I should have been sleeping.
Only I keep thinking it's ZThornboy. ;)
Thanks again Taron.
Ahahaha....excellent! Mission part 1.5 accomplished, hihihih! :applause:

[Lino Grandi]

nice. I tried this out with bunch of simple buildings and I got some nasty stepping in the shading. I tried the fog trick in LW and tried both 16 bit and 32bit exr. It was a little better after I turned off "dither intensity" but it was still steppy. I'm sure it was my fault.

It's not exactly as easy as I'd hoped to figure out. I'm sure with some real time investment it would be. The documentation on the site is bearable, but great documentation and tutorials are a big selling point for me.

That's what you should do (Lightwave 9):

- place to nulls (parented to the camera) in the near/far points of the 3d space (if you're considering a character facing the camera, place a null in front of it and another just behind).
- now open PSD Export Image Filter Plug.
- under Geometry select Depth and Custom Range.
- set Min and Max to the Z coordinates of the 2 nulls (just copy/paste the values).
- Activate 16-bit component output.
- under Additional Shading check Diffuse Color.

Don't forget to activate Depth Buffer AA (Render Globals/Render).

You can use Classic or Perspective camera.

That worked fine for me. Let me know if you have any trouble.

And, Taron....what an incredible Plug-In you've coded!
I got really cool renders in no time. I'll post something soon.

[Taron333]

Four new projects added to the Free Stuff (http://www.frischluft.com/free/free_taronites.php) section:

Text&Texture.zip (http://www.frischluft.com/free/Text&Texture.zip)

All four projects contain the same elements, all generated within after effects itself.
The generated element is composed of two sub-comps:
(A) Text with animated opacities.
(B) A fractal noise background, overlayed by a ramp effect and element (A) blended in lighten mode on top.

The (Main Comp) contains the generated element (B), which has the ZbornToy applied to it!

(The Output) contains the (Main Comp) scaled down for additional edge antialiasing.

1. Text&Texture01-lighting: point light and direct light
2. Text&Texture02-lighting: point light, different animation, adjusted shading settings
3. Text&Texture03-transparency&caustix: transparency and cautix turned on
4. Text&Texture04-caustix only: caustix only settings change and some minor tweaks

[Taron333]

Hey there, I've added a set of projects and quicktimes for you to show the more "design" oriented capabilities of the plug-in!

It's a set of 4 quicktimes(1.5Mb/each) and after effects 7.0 projects:

MOTION DESIGN - projects to inspire! (http://www.taronites.com/free/zborntoy_movies.php)


Those projects use only after effects internal filters (noise and cell pattern) to create the source for the ZbornToy rendering! So all you need is the demo of the plugin and after effects 7.0!

By the way, the MAC version is released, too! :lightbulb


Taron

[Taron333]

Check out the new "Getting Started" (http://www.taron.de/zborn/tutorials/GettingStarted-ZbornToy/GettingStarted-ZbornToy.html) mini-Tutorial. I finally brought up the courage to speak, too! :blush:

And of course see all the other tutorials HERE (http://www.taron.de/zborn/tutorials/tutorials.html)!

[peekoot]

amazing... simply amazing what you've done with a dull image that served as a starting point..

you've definitely reminded me of this tool... i've tried it with combustion before and failed to start them but now that i've seen this i've got new born motivation :)

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