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david van brink // Sun 2008.02.3 00:07 // {after effects}

Kaleidoscope Plugin

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:

glasswaterscope

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.

Blueprinty Kaleido

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.

2 comments
jimmy // Tue 2008.08.5 08:498:49 am

hello
I’m having trouble getting these plug ins to show up in after effets do you know how to get them to appear?

david van brink // Tue 2008.08.5 17:235:23 pm

You should just download the right ones (windows or mac) and place the folder into your after effects “Plugins” folder…

oh, i dont know. what do you think?


david van brink // Thu 2008.01.17 00:37 // {after effects}

Puppet Tool versus Motion Blur

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!

2 comments
Jonas Hummelstrand // Sun 2008.03.9 15:453:45 pm

Try CC Force Motionblur

david van brink // Sun 2008.03.9 23:2911:29 pm

Thanks for that pointer! I was unaware of that filter.

It does look very handy for adding subsample blur to *any* process on a compoosition… very interesting!

I’ll try it out to see if it’s any faster than built-in motion blur, for the puppet tool in particular…

oh, i dont know. what do you think?


david van brink // Thu 2008.01.10 23:30 // {after effects}

Particles Versus Multiprocessing

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.

++more

oh, i dont know. what do you think?


david van brink // Tue 2007.12.18 00:47 // {after effects}

Diffusion

Sometimes you just say, Frame-to-frame coherence, who needs it?
++more

oh, i dont know. what do you think?



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