omino pixel blog

qt_tools 2.7 corrects some incompatibilities with Mac OS X 10.5, “Leopard”.

Particularly, the settings dialog could get stuck in a hidden, inoperable state.

That is all.

If you tried to download the Windows version of the Omino After Effects Suite and had a negative experience: Please accept my apologies. I jumped the gun on the “release”. Lessons learned (something about DLL’s and testing, thanks).

On the plus side: http://omino.com/sw/ominoAeSuite/ has the fixed download. Confirmed to download and run on 3, count ‘em, 3 computers other than my own.

(The only issues were with download/unzip; once running, they are reliable and stable. More stable than Particle Playground ha ha.)

Especial thanks to Mike K at Muonics for dragging me kicking and writhing into the necessary knowledge of manifests, linker choices.

The next release of the Omino After Effects Suite is finally available! Oh, it’s got a fabulous new Kaleidoscope effect, mentioned in the previous post. But the real excitement is… is… is this:

In truth the Windows version should be considered Alpha. I’m confident that it works and is stable (as is the Mac version) but I’m still learning my way around the compiler settings, so it may run slower than necessary.

Oh, speaking of performance, there’s a handy feature in every single Omino Suite plug-in: a performance measurement.

Under the “debug” twirldown are options to display all the parameters, and the render time. These are both mostly to help me while developing the plugin; stamping the parameters creates a video record of possible outcomes. But the time stamp is actually quite handy while authoring, to give some idea of which settings are likely to take more, well, render time.

I’ll be posting a few more examples of usages of the Omino Suite. Stay tuned.

Note to Adobe. Free idea: show a performance measurement for each plugin. The application knows when each starts and stops and could do that. Sure, confounded a bit by threading, &c, but still.

My partner (of the non-business variety) recently built a beautiful oversized kaleidoscope for part of an artistic installation. Here’s a picture taken from within:

I can’t seem to find a picture of the device itself, but it stands about 3 feet tall, a foot across. With cardboard mock wrought-iron corners. And fused glass inserts. And a velvet-lined eyepiece. Anyway, I got to wondering about simulating kaleidoscopes. After Effects ships with CC Kaleida, which is a little bit nifty, but it only does arrangements of square mirrors. I wanted more flexibility. Actually, I wanted complete flexibility. So, I wrote omino kaleidoscope.

Its features include:

• Use any path to define a set of mirrors
• Set the shininess of the mirrors, so successive reflections may be dimmer
• Set a distortion amount, similar to tilting the mirrors a bit
• Set the number of reflections (fewer will render faster, but with less expanse)
• …and a few futz values that change some numbers, in the, the, you know, the math, that make it become more cool.

And here’s a demonstration of omino kaleidoscope:

This will be available in the next, soon, upcoming (!) release of the omino after effects suite.

Here’s another tip for improving render speed. Don’t laugh, this actually does work.

Disable the computer’s “sleep if no user activity” timeout.

I had mine set for three hours, nice and green you know? (On Mac OS X, the control panel for this feature has a light bulb for its icon.) But it turned my 6 hour render into… well… I came home from work and it was still unfinished from the night before. Because the computer was sleeping.

Works for all render applications.

Thwok.

Now, as to why After Effects doesn’t tickle the Mac’s timout API to say “i am here, i am here” is a very very good question.

The puppet tool (in After Effects CS3) sure is neat. Like “bones” — common in many 3d programs — for 2d images. Great for expressive animation. Morphy!

And motion blur is one of my favorite flavors of ketchup. Up there with drop shadows and glow.

But yee, put them together and After Effects renders most terrible slow. My puppeted comp renders about 5 frames per second without motion blur, and about 5 seconds per frame with motion blur. So, say, a factor of 25 slower.

I wish I was posting something fun and exotic about scripts or halftoning or clever optical effects… but right now the issue of “render time” is using up all of my AE angst. But soon!

Executive summary: if you’re rendering a comp with particles, sometimes turning off “Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously” in Preferences:Multiprocessing can improve render speed bloody significantly. In my case, it went from 54 hours (or longer) to 4.

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I saw the new movie of The Golden Compass a few days ago. I quite liked it. It suffered perhaps from squeezing almost every event from the book into the movie, without managing to transparently convey the layers and depth of Lyra’s self-discovery. But it gave awesome brass-gear-and-Zeppelin fetish work, so it all evens out.

One of the recurring ideas in the story is that everything is made of dust. Or Dust. All we are, you know, is dust in the (transdimensional) wind. And so on. So there were a lot of really nice sparkly particle effects. In a major production, I gather that you pull off this sort of effect with a lot of work: hand-written code, top-quality (expensive) plugins, and iterations with an art director who actually knows what looks good.

But I was curious how to pull off a rinky-dink imitation in a half hour with stock After Effects and no artistic guidance to speak of. One challenge of particle effects is their render time, especially if the particles interact. The approach I took was to have one particle layer with just a few particles, less than 100, which interact and repel each other, to “swarm”. Then add a second level of particle emission which uses the first layer as its “particle”. Particles squared, a swarm of swarms.

The result was ok. Some repetition is visible, and with a few more hours could be tweaked to look nicer. More colors and glinting, perhaps. Meanwhile, here’s the quickie.

After Effects’ “Time Displacement” effect provides yet another way to perform halftoning.
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