Tech notes and stuff for Feb 010
I'm animating the first scene with like fields of dynamic grass now... I'm using C4d's awesome hair module... To make the grass like blow in the wind realistically I just added a wind object with a lil xpresso to vary the speed since I'm in R11 in R11.5 the wind object has a turbulence parameter that does this for you... I have characters walking through the grass SO you would think I would want to put hair collision detection of the characters right? I did some tests and the faster and actually better looking thing to do is to attach a turbulence object to the character down near they feet so when they walk through the grass it throws the grass around nicely... when using collision detection it was accurate I guess but not that interesting looking...
I've found that when doing tests comps in After Effects CS4 in 32bit with 1920x802 exr sequence material its really SLOW... I'm using a decent i7 920 system OC'ed to 3.4ghz with 8gb ram and its still slow... to redraw on screen, slow to render (and i turned a core off and made adjustments for my amount of ram according to teh docs)... just slow... NOW I tried the demo verison of Nuke on this OLD busted up laptop and its FAST with the same material... I can only imagine how fast it would be on meh workstation... WORD is After Effects Cs5 will come out soon and be 64bit only... lets hope they do something about the SLOWness cause its like working in GLUE.... thankfully I don't have to much in the compositing phase.. I just have to add in the sky, matte paintings, atmospheric stuff, do the DOF blurring with Lenscare, add the motion blur with Revision:fx Motion blur, and do a little "looking" to make it look how I want... Speaking of Lenscare... its not only TEH BEST bokeh and DOF blurring plug out there the developer Philipp is also a really c00 d00d... if you need a post depth of field blurring/bokeh plug look further than Frischluft mayne cause its teh best!
Something different I'm doing on this project is that I'm rendering out a depth pass with every shot... I only did it before when I knew I needed to add blur BUT then I done Lear_NED a lil more about WHAT your supposed to do in comp to add atmosphere and depth to your scenes... So when you have the depth pass you can use it to luma matte in adjustments layers to desaturate by distance or to correctly add in fog and dust... for that I use the excellent Zblur plugin... If ya didn't know C4d natives DOF doesn't recognize alphas and the interface in Zblur is much easier to use... I've been using it for 5 years now and its tite...
Brought to you by professional weirdo M dot Strange.