Luxology Renderer should be good with After Effects

#1

One of my biggest complaints with Lightwave is that it’s very difficult to export camera motion data from Lightwave into Adobe After Effects for compositing (it’s possible but requires 3rd party tools and is difficult and flakey).

Even though Luxology’s renderer hasn’t been released yet, I speculate that it will overcome this problem. Luxology has already voiced support for Maya ASKII project files (.ma). If Lux’s renderer can export a .ma project, then Adobe After Effects already has support for extracting motion data from .ma files. Camera motion data then should be able to be passed between the two applications, without the need for any third party plug-ins.

This is just my speculation, but if true, then it would be a great feature to have this integration between Lux renderer and Adobe After Effects.

#2

why AE and not something like combustion?

#3

Why do I use AE? Because it was the first compositing app out there. For a long time it was the only compositing app. I’d really like to have Shake as well, rather than Combustion.

After Effects has inbuilt capability to import Maya’s ASCII (.ma) project files, and extract the camera motion data from them. I’m expecting (well hoping) that Luxology’s forthcoming renderer will be able to export these files.

#4

lol…why use either when u can use shake…ehehehhehe

#5

How about price, does that qualify as a reason? :stuck_out_tongue:

#6

spend money to make money…if u want a job dun rite…get the rite tools…its worth it

#7

speakin of after effect and professionalism… hmmm…

it was one of my best investments in past years including lightwave and fprime as plugin for it…

so if you ask me i would not like to start afx fight here but afx have everythin i need to do PROFESSIONAL job … and afx IS professional tool and reallly powerfull tool.
btw shake is past story for pc users… and dont like that shematic wiev

#8

Get a g5 den!!

lol

#9

nah only joking…personal preference…alsong as u can get the job dun and well…hu cares what app ppl use…I have to agree that both discreet composition software and afx and shake r all very kwel

#10

i would throw in a vote for AE support as well =)

#11

OK taking this thread in a different direction
I saw the render demo at Siggraph. And a very small part of it included a view port that was node based. At the time I was under the impression that this was the camera and render function view port (or something it was very fast and a lot to take in), But what I’m hoping for is that extends deeper into the program. I always wished that LightWave had a node based texturing engine. Follow me here
wouldn’t it be awesome if you could create a single fractal noise pattern, and then could connect it to you diff and spec (or whatever), instead of having to copy and past every time. Now lets say you needed to add a Brightness and Contrast node or any 2D image processing tools to it, boom, drop a node on it and have control of that as well, one operation. Now I know some of you aren’t used to node-based paradigm like Shake or D-Fusion or Nuke, but you have to admit it is very powerful. Ok and here is my point. If they did head down this direction, how big of a leap would it be to then modify those same nodes to create an integrated composting package right in to the render engine. Brad, Eric, Joe
are you guys listening???

#12

It’ll be a no brainer to use a node base texturing system, do we really need a legacy texture editor? Its alot more powerful than what i was used too, but worth the effort in learning. You got my vote for it! I’d like to hear what the Lux guys think about it though…:slight_smile:

#13

I meant, they should support more than one compositor equally, not just AE. Not everyone prefers AE, others like Shake or Combustion.

#14

I don’t think it’s a matter of whether Luxology supports After Effects or not. It’s a matter of Luxology supporting the Maya ASCII file format, and it just happens that After Effects supports the same file format.

Maybe one day someone will write a plug-in for Luxology renderer to enable it to export directly to the file format of various compositing applications.

Does my assumption that the Maya file format may be a bridge between Luxology’s renderer and Adobe After Effects sound feasible?

#15

:smiley: better yet, why dont Luxology work on their own compositing module(along with the render,animation module), they enough talented people! XSI and Houdini has its own compositing module also.

#16

Nah…i dont think they shud…They shud not take on too much…just make a modeller and a renderer etc…i wud prefer 2 amazing appz than lots of ok appz…after all shake supports .ma files…and so does AFX…and they r decent…lux wud have to work hard to beat em in composition…yet alone worrying about measuring their renderer up against renderman etc

#17

hi,

ive been workin with shake for a long time, what do you mean by shake supporting .ma files?

#18

What are the procedures for translating camera motion data from 3D apps (for example Lightwave) to compositing apps like Shake?

Pity there’s no industry standard file format for camera motion. FBX is almost there, but when translated it always wants to “bake” a keyframe onto every frame.

#19

I’ve been using messiah for a short time which is node based and while it’s taking me a bit to get up to speed on the way everything works the power of it is amazing. One of the great things about node based texturing is that if you have something you like and want to experiment a bit more you can just disable the node and add something else, or copy the node and you will instantly have a backup of it incase you want to go back to what you had. Also, (in messiah anyway) you can do cool things like create a noise texture and use it’s color to affect on thing, use each of it’s other values to affect other things then you can add another copt of the color out and blent it back into itself to get some really weird results. I have yet to try sending values out of a texture, through other things and then back into itsef, but it may be interesting to see what happens. It may also just crash. :eek:
Using messiah’s texturing system along with some of the others out there (WCS, etc) really makes lightwave’s simplistic surfacing seem very outdated.

Anyway, to get back to modo, they are going to really have to add something amazing to get me to upgrade to their rendering package, because messiah studio seems to have all of what I need and is compatable with most of the major animation packages out there. Not to mention it’s probably one of the best character animation packages available. Personally I wold rather see Luxology spen the majority of ther time working on Modo. Part of me worries that if they make a complete package, the modeler part may end up being forgotten about as was the modeler in lightwave, which is why I bought Modo in the first place.

#20

Sorry about that…i ment maya iff files!..(a moment of dumness)…however i think there are some scripts floating around (try highend3d) that extract cxamera motion for .ma files…

Again…im sorry…i am stupid!

cheers

alex