Mine‘s better than yours
Friday, January 20, 2006 at 6:49PM An interesting debate sprang up in the comments on my previous posts. The question came up of "What do you do in AE that Fusion/Shake aren't good tools for?" While I feel that "my software is better than yours" discussions are silly, there is much to be gained by users and developers from a healthy discourse about the workflows that particular programs have really nailed. "After Effects suxx0rz compared to Shake" == not productive. "I can do this one thing I do a lot really fast in Combustion, whereas it takes forever in Fusion" == productive.
Last year I was putting together a teaser trailer and found myself missing a shot. The shot we desperately needed was a rack-focus from a barn to flies buzzing in the foreground over some unseen form. I had a still photo of a barn, and was able to camera-map it onto some planes in After Effects and create a convincing camera move. Next came the flies.
Creating the swarm of flies that buzzed around the camera, flitting in and out of focus, took 20 minutes.
Don't believe me? Well, I recreated the feat in AE7 for you to watch, The link below is to an unedited screen capture of a 17-minute session in AE7. I was able to shave three minutes off my time because I'd done it once before.
I considered the creation of this shot to be a triumph of AE's flexibility, 3D capabilities (including depth-of-field), and expressions. It might be a bit beyond what most people would consider appropriate for a comping app, but of course that's what I loved about it. I made a cool, spooky shot out of a still photo in only a few hours. There are many things I know I could do in Fusion or Shake that I would have a tough time with in AE, but the comment specifically asked for an example of something easier in AE than in Fusion, and I submit to you:
flies.mov (5.3mb Quicktime 7)
Feel free to comment and include links to your own examples of stuff you did in your favorite app. Better still, include a link that proves me wrong, showing you doing this in 16 minutes with some other tool!
Reader Comments (21)
A very informative post. I really appreciate you posting a video of your process - it's very enlightening. It also has the side effect of giving me more ammunition to upgrade to AE7! Can't wait.
I've also been wondering what I've been missing with other tools, such as Shake, Commotion, and discreet tools (not that we can afford them, but hey...).
Been subscribing to your feed for a while; keep it coming!
Thanks Allan! In fairness, I should mention that the shot for the teaser was made in 6.5, and there's nothing I did in the captured session that you can't do in 6.5 except enjoy AE7's new interface.
Someone on mograph.net saw some unfamiliar context-menu items in the session and theorized that they were fancy new 7.0 capabilities, but in fact they are features of Buena Software's awesome Depth Cue plug-in suite.
Yeah, now that I think about it, you're right - AE 6.5 would do. For me, the interface is one of the new reasons, I look forward to it. I'm really stoked about their new keyframing UI as well (which reminds me a bit of Motion2).
I'll have to check out Depth Cue.
Hi Stu,
Well since it's because of my comment that you went through the trouble of creating this video I felt it was only fair to at least respond.
I liked it very much. It looked very nice as well and I like it that AE indeed does do some sort of DOF. I did see you do a lot of things that probably would take some more effort in Fusion, on the other hand, since I don't know the AE interface that well, I don't recognize all the steps that you took. For example I did see you creating the slider which apparently controlled the amount of space inbetween the flies, but I couldn't see what it was connected to. Would that be the same as using an expression in Fusion or is that just not comparable?
One other thing: when you copy/paste the flies so you get all 26(?) of them, how come they are all in different positions? Doesn't AE keep all parameters the same when copy/pasting? Or is there another trick involved?
Anyway I found it to be highly informative. This was precisely the kind of answer I was hoping to get. Thanks for going through all this trouble. I'll be checking it out a couple of more times.
Hi Sander,
Thanks for responding! I'm glad you found it informative, and I completely understand how tough it may be to follow everything that's going on if you're not familiar with AE.
The motion of a fly is driven by the simple expression for the Position parameter:
wiggle(1, 300)
That will randomize the fly's position with perlin noise at a frequency of one "wiggle" per second and an amplitude of 300 pixels. In other words, a speed control and a sort of "radius" of the swarm.
Then I create two sliders that have no other purpose but to drive these values. That way, when I duplicate the fly, I have one simple place to control the motion of all the flies.
To link the sliders to the values in the expression, I select the numbers and pick-whip them to the sliders (at 08:55 in the Quicktime). When I do this you can see "1" and "300" getting replaced with the syntax for nabbing the values from the sliders.
The wiggle() function takes its random seed from, among other things, the layer's "index," or its place in the stack. So each fly gets a different motion but with the same characteristics.
This project illustrates a technique I do often in AE, which is to take advantage of the fact that "layers" in a 3D comp are objects in a scene much like in Maya, each with an index number and a variety of options for linking to other objects. In Shake, a very advanced user can create for/next loops in ASCI that could be used for similar techniques. It's something I'd love to be able to do in Fusion's 3D, but I can't figure out how it might work.
-Stu
You seem quite quiet as you work, Stu...in fact, I can't hear a thing on the video..but it's fun to look over your shoulder.
Hi Stu,
Well thanks again for explaining the actions in the video. Really helpful. Unfortunately I am not as useful in that regard, since I couldn't script my way out of a wet paper bag - textured or not -
I even manage to get syntax errors in things like print"I can't script"
But I do know/vaguely recall that in Fusion all tools are given a seperate ID to be able to 'reach them' with scripts -
From the scripting manual: TOOLI_ID: A numeric ID for the tool; indicates order of tool creation.
If that is accessible in some way you could use this number to feed the seeding of the random movement, the same way the wiggle does.
But like I said, I can't do anything in a script, so for me it would probably be faster to just open up the 26 flies and click randomize to get it to work :-)
Well, I skipped the creation of the fly, and it certainly took me longer than 15 minutes to think this out, but now that I know it, it shouldn't take more than 5 to 10 minutes to create.
Check out the Fu5 comp located here
http://showreel.shadowmaker.nl/Stus_Flies.comp
I've 'created' a cube and gave that a random motion (akin to the wiggle) and then spent some time thinking how I could make it bank according to the path (since Fusion in it's 3D environment doesn't expose stuff like the heading of a movement) - finally figured it out (let the target perform the same movement only with a small time offset to create the direction) then I went to duplicate 3D and made 26 duplicates with a time offset of 100, so although actually all 'flies' will have the same movement, because of the time offset, it will not be noticeable.
I didn't bother creating sliders etc. but I think those could be done pretty easily as well, either with a minimacro or an empty BC tool, wired to the x/y/z offset of the orginal 'fly'
I hope this still makes sense. For those of you without Fusion, I'll try to render out a low-rez preview of flying boxes.
This has definitely been fun and educational.
Here's a demo movie of a couple of cubes pretending to be flies :-)
http://downloads.shadowmaker.nl/flies.mov
Okay... and now with depth of field and motion blur... :-)
Hey Sander, my hat is off to you for rising to the challenge! A very clever solution. One thing my trick allows me to do is animate the null that the flies swarm around -- that's the only limitation that I can see in your method, and of course there are several advantages to yours as well. Thanks again for participating in this experiment!
Hi Stu,
Thanks for the compliment. It sure was fun to 'step up to the plate' as it were.
What would animating the null in your version accomplish? If you could use that for manipulating the whole swarm, you could do that in Fusion by adding another '3D merge' between the 'duplicate 3D' tool and the current '3d merge' this way you can move/rotate/scale the whole swarm all in one go. Or would the null have another purpose?
BTW what do you use to make those screengrabs? 5 Mb for a 17 minute video is great.
- Sander de Regt
Sander,
Yep, you are absolutely correct -- the null would simply animate the flies around en masse, and you could do that as easily in Fusion by animating the time-shifted flies all together. Don't know why I didn't think of that!
I use SnapZ Pro for Mac screen captures. The key is to use a very low frame rate (4-10 fps) and use the new H.264 Quicktime codec.
Hi Stu,
SnapZ looks like a great program. Now if only I would run a Mac it would be great. I do have a copy of Camstudio from when it was still an Open Source program and not yet bought by Macromedia when it wasn't yet bought by Adobe, which apparently still hasn't been bought by Autodesk. I'll guess I'll just have to convert the AVIs from it to QT or flash and use those for screengrabs.
Sander was kind enough to host my attempt at actually adding flies, motion blur, and depth of field as per barend's comment.
http://showreel.shadowmaker.nl/modifiedflies5.comp
It's not the fastest render under the sun, since I'm using implicit animation which doesn't cache well.
The implicit animation DOES make it really, really easy to make and to tweak.
- Chad
If you are really impatient, you can turn the motion blur quality on the Renderer3D down to 6, but it doesn't look as pretty.
Sander/Chad
That was fun I put a shake on the Z rotation of the wing and it looked great.I put the comp in my databanks Thanks
Hey Allan,
Sounded like a fun challenge to take:
http://users.pandora.be/Lightwaverz/Fusion/FusionTutorial03.html
Regards,
Andy
I know that is a bit old Title but...how about editin in fusion. I sometimes do my editin ig AE directly and render final movie from there. I guess I just lack of knowledge on fusion, but if you can edit in fusion : Tell me how :)
Thanx in advance :)
Hi,
I know that is a bit old post, but ..how about editing in Fusion. In AE I even can edit a couple of movies, to cut them,put one after another and I don`t need to go to Premiere or similar soft to export final movie.
Is there an option in Fusion for this? If yes ..ENLIGHTEN ME :)
Thanx in advance!
Has anyone created this project in AE and would you be willing to share the project files with me so I can use this for non-commercial purposes to make a goofy YouTube video. Thanks!
I am too much a beginner to follow along with the referenced how-to video. I just want to superimpose some buzzing flies over some video. Thanks again.