omino pixel blog

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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