Thanks for the kind words, it’s nice to hear my work is appreciated!
I think the lack of response is in part due to people not fully understanding the purpose of the plug-in, and yes, it is definitely a bit disappointing after all the work I’ve put into a software that I’m giving away for free.
Anyway, I have produced and uploaded a two-part video tutorial that will hopefully help people understand the power of this software:
Absolutely. Looking at its potential value, you could have easily put a price on this plug-in.
Thanks and a big thumbs up for releasing this to the community.
The original version of this software was not free, in fact I had even registered a small business with an online shop and everything that goes with it based on people saying they would “definitely pay” for this.
Eventually sales were about as plentiful as the response to this thread so I ended that endeavor at some point.
So basically I had a choice… say “Screw you guys, I’m going home and I’m taking my toys with me” or I could make it free.
I noticed this morning that there is a bug in the blend modes. It’s nothing major and won’t crash the software or anything, it just makes it a bit inconvenient to control the overlay, soft light and hard light blend modes.
Apparently I made a mistake when porting the optimized code from my latest shaders to Normality.
I’ve already fixed the problem in the Windows version but I can’t release an update for now because I want to retain feature parity with the Mac.
Work fine on CS4 - Windows 64 bits here,
just curious about the limitations of 2D relighting technique in post.
According the Faq, aliasing artifacts are unavoidable in some situations but other than that,
is it possible to completely re-light heavy scene or it’s more suitable for single object.
It was principally designed to work with single props or characters but we have found that it is quite suitable to use it on entire scenes, particularly if you are not going for a photorealistic look.
All characters and many of the backgrounds in our short film A Night at the Cathedral were shaded and lit in Normality showing that it is definitely a viable option for larger projects.
It has saved our arse more than a few times when after final renders the client suddenly decided to have a nice juicy spec at that particular position or an additional fancy blue light we hadn’t discussed earlier.
Naturally the process has its weaknesses: As Normality doesn’t render shadows, depending on what you have in mind might not look too convincing. You may counter this with occlusion maps and AE’s built-in shadow maps, but sometimes self-shadowing is simply a requirement; re-lighting isn’t what you need in that case.
Anything that requires ray-tracing like global illumination, accurate reflections etc. is out of the question.
The mentioned aliasing issues are another thing to consider, but I must say that I personally have not run into this issue much - I just include it the FAQ because some users have asked me about it.
It’s more of a problem with the normal passes and not so much with Normality itself, so it’s not something I can control in software. With properly filtered normal passes the problem is negligible in my experience. Sure it’s possible to set up Normality in a way that overemphasizes aliasing, but in daily production with reasonable lighting it’s not something I usually worry about.
Normality (or any re-lighting solution for that matter) will not replace a full-blown GI ray-tracer anytime soon, that’s for sure. It’s not intended to.
If you focus on its strengths and don’t try to bend it into doing things where you know it will break, Normality can definitely speed up production and in my experience make it more enjoyable: The main reason I started programming the software was because I was sick and tired of waiting for slow and crash-happy 3D renderers when tweaking shading and lights… so that’s what Normality really excels at.
An interesting way to use Normality for entire scenes is to build the scene in 3D, render out the normal passes and then use Normality as a pre-lighting tool in combination with matte paintings.
With camera mapping you can then project the already shaded and lit scene back onto the 3D geometry, do your camera moves and pretty much forego any long render times in the entire process.
Hi Stefan,
thanks for your the details and explanations,
the camera mapping trick sound really appealing!
I was toying with the plug today and yes, Normality open a huge door for 3d improvement in post. Fabulous.
At some point you should post on forum like mograph.net to get feedback from hardcore AfterFX users.
I have updated Normality 3 to fix a couple of bugs relating to blend modes I mentioned earlier.
Theres also one new feature: I am including my mental ray shader minMatcap directly in Normality, making it is possible to render images like below in After Effects.
The matcap shader is extremely simple to use as it only requires a simple spherical shader ball, which you can see on the left side of each image.
[color=white]This plugin looks incredible! I’m really looking forward to trying it out. I’m surprised you arent getting more of a response so far; It looks like a very robust and well supported plugin. As more people run across this little gem Im sure it will get more use from the community. I hope this doesnt discourage you from developing more tools for AE.
Based on feedback from my esteemed friend Andrew Kramer of videocopilot.net I have updated Normality to version 3.1. This release is available for Windows and Mac OS X.
Changes include:
An entirely re-written lighting system that more accurately reflects each light’s position relative to the currently shaded pixel.
The added option to render the angle of incidence to create nice back-lighting effects.
Normality now hides inactive parameters in the interface in order to make the plug-in a bit more accessible to new users.
The color and shading engine is now based on the system I developed for my 3D shaders - so in a sense Normality is now performing true shading. Future releases will build upon this concept by introducing a plug-in interface, allowing shader writers to develop their own shaders for use in Normality. A plug-in in a plug-in if you will.
Normality is free for commercial and non-commercial use
but remember that I rely on your support and donations to fund the development. Frankly speaking: No donations = no updates.
