omino pixel blog

Here’s another variation on additive lighting tricks…

This one is a little experiment using After Effects’ spotlights on still images which have been rendered with similarly-located light sources.

Here’s one of the several still images.

And here’s a short movie showin a little more of the procedure, and some results.

Long, long ago I saw an article or talk by Paul Haeberli, of SGI. Oh, he covered many interesting and clever graphics tricks. One of them was the idea of “synthetic lighting”, or, “doing lighting in post”.

He has a page about it, here.

The idea is pretty simple. If you have images (or animations) of individual lights, you can add them together to get multiple lights. It appears to be a relatively common render feature these days, but I’d never played with it before. So here goes.

+

=

You can color and mask them, too, to get some pretty nifty effects, all from the same source images.

The pictures above, showing my infantile modeling skills, were done in Luxology modo, using full radiosity render. This can take a while! 10 minutes per low res frame, about.

The youtube video below shows some further examples of getting liveliness out of just a few frames, using this idea of additive post-process lighting.

Here’s a little movie that demonstrates a text track being used to “trigger” the opacity of another track.

Controlling Pip Opacity From Text

I needed a blinking pip. (It’s actually for an interesting optical effect… but for now, we’ll just talk about the pip.) Rather than keyframing each blink, I used a Text track where A is a very dim blink, and Z is a very bright blink. The blinks all have the same luminous decay. Every keyframe on the Text track triggers a new blink.

The expression to do this is actually a little program. (Exactly what some artists hate…)

Here’s the expression for controlling the Pip’s opacity. It’s in 3 parts: 1) Find the most recent Text track keyframe, 2) See what letter it was, from A to Z, and 3) Set the opacity, taking into account the brightness and how long it’s been decaying.

// find most recent key
var s = thisComp.layer("controlTrack").text.sourceText; // score layer
var n = s.numKeys;
var kValue = "A"; // default value
var kTime = 0;
for(var i = 1; i <= n; i++)
{
	var k = s.key(i);
	if(k.time <= time)
	{
		// only care if there's a char in our position.
		var a = k.value.charAt(0).toUpperCase();
		if(a >= "A" && a <= "Z")
		{
			kValue = a;
			kTime = k.time;
		}
	}
}

// now, how long ago was that?
var age = time - kTime;

// map character a-z to 0.0-1.0
kValue = kValue.charCodeAt(0);
kValue -= 65;
kValue = kValue / 25.0;

// decay appropriately
var result = kValue * Math.pow(0.3, age) * transform.opacity;

// done.
result

Why do this tricky control business with a text track, instead of just keyframing the flashes more directly? This way, the behavior is very well specified... and even more so for the next movie.

Controlling Five Pips With a Text Track

You can easily see what's going on here. Five characters control five pip's blinks.

The clever bit was to avoid pasting that monster expression from above into five different tracks. Instead, a single slider control track is driven from the text, and shows the first pip's blinking at time=0, the second pip's at time=300, the third's at time=600, and so on. The whole animation is 20 seconds, so there's plenty of room on the timeline for this.

Each pip's opacity is driven from the appropriate section of this slider channel:

pip0 opacity: transform.opacity * thisComp.layer("controlTrack").effect("scoreReader")("Slider").valueAtTime(time + 0*300)

pip1 opacity: transform.opacity * thisComp.layer("controlTrack").effect("scoreReader")("Slider").valueAtTime(time + 1*300)

pip2 opacity: transform.opacity * thisComp.layer("controlTrack").effect("scoreReader")("Slider").valueAtTime(time + 2*300)

... and so on.

So, why pile this cleverness atop an already tricky expression? Because with an expression that tricky, anything is better than duplicating five times across different tracks!

Here's the expression, which extracts brightness from the text track, for each position, at times separated by 300 seconds.

// Allow different sections of this track to extract the brightness for each pip.
// we divide it up into 5 minute segments (300 seconds). To find out your brightness
// at a particular time, examine *this* track at time + 300 * pipNumber.
//
// This is an alternative to duplicating the rather ornate expression into each pip, at
// the expense, of course, of complexity.
//

var segmentDuration = 300;
var segmentIndex = Math.floor(time / segmentDuration);
var segmentTime = time - segmentIndex * segmentDuration + .01; // local time... plus 1/100 for roundoff

// find most recent key
var s = thisComp.layer("controlTrack").text.sourceText; // score layer
var n = s.numKeys;
var kValue = "A"; // default value
var kTime = 0;
for(var i = 1; i <= n; i++)
{
	var k = s.key(i);
	if(k.time <= segmentTime)
	{
		// only care if there's a char in our position.
		var a = k.value.charAt(segmentIndex).toUpperCase();
		if(a >= "A" && a <= "Z")
		{
			kValue = a;
			kTime = k.time;
		}
	}
}

// now, how long ago was that?
var age = segmentTime - kTime;

// map score character a-z to 0.0-1.0
kValue = kValue.charCodeAt(0);
kValue -= 65;
kValue = kValue / 25.0;

// decay appropriately
var result = kValue * Math.pow(0.3, age);

result

And lastly, here's the self-contained After Effects project.

Here are some super short notes about using Pixel Bender inside of After Effects CS4. This post is just another dicing of the available info culled from the After Effects help, and the Pixel Bender Developer Guide.

But it’s the stuff that I most needed to get started, as well as a handy copy-and-paste source for the parameter control types.

This is about Pixel Bender in After Effects specifically.

Installing

Let’s start at the end. To use a Pixel Bender kernel in After Effects, just drop it in the Plug-Ins folder.

• By default, it shows up in the Pixel Bender effects category.
• It won’t show up until the next time you start After Effects
• If it has any syntax errors, AE will warn you as it starts up, and reject the kernel.
• Any changes to the kernel won’t show up until you quit and re-run After Effects. (Purge-all doesn’t seem to reload it…)
• (And you can put it in a subfolder of Plug-Ins, of course, to keep things organized.)

Authoring

Source Image To work with After Effects, near as I can tell, it must take at least one image4 source. Even if the kernel is a pure generator, it needs to take an image input.

Multiple Source Images If the kernel takes more than one source image, the additional sources can be chosen in AE by a layer control. (Grand!)

Control Types By default, all parameters show up as sliders. But you can request a different control in the parameter description.

Example

Here’s an example of a Pixel Bender kernel that just generates a solid color. It has several parameter controls on it of the different supported types, and accepts a second layer as input. These are all ignored! But we can see how the controls are displayed, which is handy.

Here’s a screen capture, with the About box. (Trivial bug, the display name isn’t used in the About box…)

And here’s the code for the kernel, showing the various descriptors.

<languageVersion : 1.0;>

kernel solid_color
<namespace : "omino"; 
 vendor : "Omino PixelBlog 2009"; 
 version : 2; 
 description : "Generates a solid color.";
 displayname: "Solid Color";
 category: "omino"; >
{
 input image4 src;
 input image4 src2;
 output pixel4 dst;

 parameter float4 color 
  <defaultValue: float4(1,0,0,1); 
   aeDisplayName: "Color"; 
   aeUIControl: "aeColor";>;

 parameter float angle 
  <defaultValue: 45.0; 
   aeDisplayName: "Angle"; 
   aeUIControl: "aeAngle";>;

 parameter float2 point 
  <aePointRelativeDefaultValue: float2(0.5,0.5);
   aeDisplayName: "Point";
   aeUIControl: "aePoint";>;

 parameter int popup 
  <defaultValue: 3; 
   aePopupString:"Zero|One|Two|Three|Four"; 
   aeDisplayName: "Popup"; 
   aeUIControl: "aePopup";>;

    void evaluatePixel()
    {
        dst = color;
    }
}

Onward

With this amount of flexibility, and the instant cross-platform nature of Pixel Bender kernels, the barriers to entry for effects development have been dropped to almost nothing. Great stuff!