AE to Combustion help!

#1

Hi

I’ve been playing around with the Combustion demo, with a view to changing from AE, but there is a few things which I can do in AE but can’t figure out in Combustion. There is a feature in AE which allows you to create a depth mask from Z buffer info, but I can’t find this equivalent in the operators - how would you do this?

Basically what I want to do is composite a particle effect and have it respect the Z depth info. Is it also possible to animate the Z depth values?

Thanks for any insights!

#2

I’m not sure about the first question, but for the 2nd part, just use the 3D compositing mode in Combustion, this way you can move the emitter or particles in Z space.

#3

Thanks for the reply. I don’t think that would work though. Imagine you had an image of say looking down a path and there was trees and stuff in the way. I’m trying to figure out a way of having like a rolling fire coming down the path and engulfing the trees and stuff as it makes it’s way down. I suppose I could just cut the trees out and have them on seperate layers, but I thought you should be able to make use of the new G buffer tools…

#4

This might help you.
Make sure you turned on 3D Composite. If the trees are cgi and are rendered as rpf file, just turn on “3D Depth” under layer settings. Otherwise you can use the g-buffer builder to assign a zdepth to the footage. It helps alot to create “constant zdepth images” - what I mean is a greyscale image without gradients and each object has its own grey constant color.
Sometimes you have to tweak the z offset to get it working. With this method you need less layers than masking out each object on a seperate layer, but it depends on the scene which method makes more sense.

#5

Hi

Thanks for the advice. I am using .rpf file format for maximum options. I’m still a bit unsure how to get the particles behind some things and infront of others, but I did find out about using other images to drive the operators, so hopefully I can figure it out!

#6

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