The Particular After Effects of After Effects

Note to self on perspective: this little psunami video from Japan, if you watch the first 3 minutes only it's like "oh whatever" -- but stick with it. Via @seanbonner, @petebw, etc. Plus, a state of emergency at five nuclear reactors! The Atlantic has pictures of the aftermath. Godzilla is an interesting metaphor, and those mocking Japan now about Pearl Harbor (see Ignorant and Online) aren't immune to natural disasters. 

Ok, Carpal tunnel's not as bad a tsunami, but still these cartoons hit home. There's another one as well...

Update: hiding beneath the funny... the "Bear" dies, and via Andrew Sullivan, an analysis of the recent NPR takedown by James O'Keefe (more), infamous for his manipulation of video on ACORN. Does raw video of NPR expose reveal questionable editing & tactics? is from "The Blaze, a Web site owned by Glenn Beck and edited by Scott Baker, a co-founder and former editor of Breitbart.tv..."

Animated Cartoon Arrows

In a new After Effects tutorial, Animated Cartoon Arrows, Brad Chmielewski shows you how to use Trapcode 3D Stroke to create the arrows and lines he did in the Animate Objects music video ''El Dorado."

Animated Cartoon Arrows from Brad Chmielewski on Vimeo.

Atlas: a new tone map­ping filter for After Effects

Stefan Minning has released a new tone map­ping plug-​​in for After Effects, Atlas. It's a work-in-progress and open-​​sourced under the free GPL license.

Atlas is Win­dows-only for now -- but the full source code is included, which means that any­one can com­pile a Mac ver­sion. Here's more from Stefan...

"So what’s tone map­ping you ask? Accord­ing to Wikipedia:

Tone map­ping is a tech­nique used in image pro­cess­ing and com­puter graph­ics to map a set of colours to another; often to approx­i­mate the appear­ance of high dynamic range images in media with a more lim­ited dynamic range.

The tech­nique is par­tic­u­larly use­ful if you have high dynamic range images, such as ren­dered CG-​​imagery in float­ing point color-​​depth (OpenEXR) or HDR pho­tographs, and you want to bring their broad spec­trum into a range more suit­able for dis­play on a com­puter mon­i­tor or tele­vi­sion screen."

Note: Stefan released [umm sorry, teased instead] another filter recently, Edgar, "which is designed to work in com­bi­na­tion with Nor­mal­ity and gen­er­ates squeaky clean car­toon out­lines. Edgar uses a novel, pro­pri­etary algo­rithm devel­oped specif­i­cally for the pur­pose of con­vert­ing nor­mal passes into line art for use in car­toon and anime pro­duc­tions."

Word Bubble, Thought Bubble

Round about the cauldron go... our economic models bubble (ala Orson Welles' Macbeth). But let's not go there now.

Digital Anarchy is offering a free filter, Cartoon Bubble for Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, that creates word bubbles. It works nicely in combination with Cartoon filters.

You could also create word bubbles from scratch in After Effects, and Pro Juice has a new tutorial to show you how. In Thought Bubble (After Effects), Nick from Pro Juice uses masking techniques, motion tracking and shadows, to create "a thought bubble that floats alongside Arlo's head helping him decide what to do."

Note: Pro Juice recently did another tutorial on a more common task in Witness Protection, where they take you through 3 different ways to obscure and render a character unidentifiable in an interview situation.

Red Giant ToonIt vs. After Effects CS4 Cartoon

In a video at Studio Daily, ToonIt vs. After Effects CS4 Cartoon, Red Giant’s Sean Safreed creates a custom cartoon look and briefly compares Red Giant ToonIt’s feature set to the bundled Cartoon filter inside AE CS4. Hopefully there will be more of this type of presentation that compares unique features of 3rd party products with free built-in capabilities, and maybe with a champion for native AE approaches who pushes limits in set-ups or preprocessing.

And how about a Particle World vs. Particular match? It wouldn't be a contest as much as a light on why Particular has become the favorite AE filter.

Cartoonification at Artbeats

In Cartoonification at Artbeats, Chris & Trish Meyer have tips for getting better results from the "much-loved" cartoon looks plug-ins:

"just slapping these plug-ins at their default settings onto any piece of footage rarely gives satisfying results. In this article, we will discuss which clips are better candidates for cartoon treatments, walk through using the Cartoon effect that comes with After Effects CS4, and suggest ways to pre- and post-process the footage to achieve more interesting results.

The After Effects tutorial portion of this article uses Artbeats clip TEL130 HD from their Teen Life HD collection, which is available free to their newsletter subscribers in March 2009; see the bundled After Effects CS4 project files for compositions that contain some of the treatments discussed herein. We will also include examples from several other clips to give you a broader idea of the possibilities."

By the way Version 2 of Red Giant ToonIt will debut at NAB 2009.

Scott McCloud on understanding comics

A TED talk by Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics (a deep comic book about comics). It's nice but short so he makes no comments about comics, graphic novels, and movies.

New Features in After Effects CS4: Part 4

Motionworks has another video in its CS4 tour, New Features in After Effects CS4: Part 4,

CS4 introduces us to 3 new effects: Cartoon, Bilateral Blur and Turbulent Noise. Bilateral Blur and Turbulent Noise are very similar to the existing Smart Blur and Fractal Noise effects. In this tutorial, we’ll take a quick look at these new effects and see what makes them different.

CS4 product trials are almost ready; you can be notified by Adobe when they're ready. The same gotcha for video is that Adobe trial software doesn't contain the license for some codecs.

Spilling the beans on Pixel Bender

david van brink comments on the Kevin Goldsmith post Spilling the beans... Pixel Bender in CS4:

"Pixel Bender is Adobe’s way of packaging up (essentially) OpenGL Shader Language, for use as effects plugins to their imaging products.

The outcome will be a lot of extremely cool effects plugins. Some of these will be old effects that run much faster, meaning we can use them more freely. Some of these will new effects that would have been prohibitively slow, but are now merely non-realtime."

In CS4 can you share these pieces of code, like the early shaders and filters done for Flash 10 pictured above (from Pixelero and Mr.doob, or even something akin to Fluffy)? I'm not sure, but After Effects is supposed to support the whole set of Pixel Bender functions, while Flash currently supports only a smaller subset, e.g., no GPU acceleration.

As noted earlier today, the Cartoon filter is a Pixel Bender filter, and the other 2 new GPU-accelerated effects, Turbulent Noise and Bilateral Blur, probably are too. And from an old post here, Pixel Bender in action in the Flash beta.

Update: Create Digital Motion (9/25) covers the same ground as this post and attracted clarifying comments by Kevin Goldsmith:

"Pixel Bender runs on the GPU in the Toolkit, in Photoshop and in After Effects. Photoshop’s new pan-rotate-and-zoom of super large images is also using the GPU. Premiere is using GPU acceleration built on AIF technologies, but does not support Pixel Bender filters in CS4.

Flash runs Pixel Bender multi-threaded on the CPU in 10.0

Peter’s original point is absolutely correct. Adobe was already using GPU acceleration before CS4, but in CS4 we’re pushing it even further. We’re also doing a lot of work on scaling for bigger numbers of multiple-cores. Run a complex Pixel Bender filter in FP 10 on an 4 or 8 core system and watch the CPU utilization."

Update 2: Kevin Goldsmith adds more with CPU, GPU, multi-core.

The Cartoon filter story

On the After Effects List, some of the AE team shared background on the Cartoon filter (see the Chris Meyer highlight movie), which has been been seen as symbolic of a lack of development focus by Adobe HQ.

Lost in the shuffle is that Cartoon is one of 3 the new GPU-accelerated effects; the others are Turbulent Noise (an improved version of Fractal Noise, but without looping) and Bilateral Blur (like a fast Smart Blur). Anyway here's the story:

Todd Kopriva:
The Cartoon effect was written using the same foundational technology that underlies Pixel Bender. So, rather than thinking about the time spent on the Cartoon effect as being just spent on the Cartoon effect, think of it as time spent by our best people on implementing, testing, and improving a platform on which all sorts of fast and flexible effects are being built.

If you want After Effects to use your GPU effectively and provide an easy way for users to create effects, then you should be happy that time was spent on the Cartoon effect.

Dave Simons:
For the whole back-story, it's what Todd said, plus this detail: Holger Winnemöller was hired into the research group at Adobe after doing his PhD thesis on real-time video abstraction.

Siggraph paper: http://videoabstraction.net/papers/videoabstraction.pdf
Demo movie: http://videoabstraction.net/movie.php?size=large

BTW, the technically superior Red Giant ToonIt costs $379. Upgrade to AE CS4: $299.

free again: BCC Rays Cartoon filter

This time the offer comes from Toolfarm... like last month, Boris FX is offering a free light version of the Rays Cartoon filter from Boris plug-in from Continuum Complete 5, plus a tutorial. Rays Cartoon creates light out of the user-defined "cartoon edges" of an image, which might be faster than using other tricks. BCC Rays Cartoon is available for Adobe CS3, Apple Final Cut Studio 2, and Avid for a limited time.

free Rays Cartoon filter from Boris

Through June, Boris FX is offering a free light version of the Rays Cartoon filter from Boris plug-in from Continuum Complete 5. Rays Cartoon creates light out of the user-defined "cartoon edges" of an image, which might be faster than using Find Edges with other tricks. BCC Rays Cartoon is available for Adobe CS3, Apple Final Cut Studio 2, and Avid until the promotion expires July 1st.

NewBlue Cartoonr filters free

NewBlue, Inc. is offering a free plug-in, NewBlue Cartoonr, to "toon up" live-action video with a cartoon look. There's versions for many common desktop video apps at the NewBlue Cartoonr page. (via)

AE Primitive with Invigorator

Many are familiar with Zaxwerks Invigorator from previous bundles with AE, but like me might lose touch with the latest features in what Zax calls Invigorator Pro.

Invigorator Pro will give you the basic primitives, which are comp camera and comp light aware, and can import 3D models from 3d programs. You can also get visible 3D paths, function curve control, animation assistants and even expression-based control over 3D animations. Warping is done in a separate filter, 3D Warp. Intersections and other AE-specific features might have to wait for the AE team.

The Zaxwerks blog features a number of links tutorials by John Dickinson and Alan Shisko. Here's Zax's rundown of the newer features:
3D Text Creation
3D Primitives
New Import/Export Format
Motion Blur
Tracking AE's 3D Objects
Layer Map Animation
Highlight Mapping
Render Farming
Wireframe and Hidden Line Rendering
Cartoon Coloring
Absolute Coloring
Matte Coloring
Shadow Catcher Rendering
New Swatch Handling

Celulight and Floodgate: AE filters

Stefan Minning has 2 new filters in beta, but for Windows only for now apparently (see CGTalk discussion).

Celulight is a cel shader and normal map generator for AE, and uses drawn outlines or cels as source files and allows them to be lit in a pseudo 3D environment using AE’s internal lights. Possible styles include: Classic toon shading, Modern 2.5D Toons, and “Kingdom Hearts” Styles.

Floodgate "can be considered an advanced paint bucket or fill tool" which "floods up to 64 distinct areas with up to 8 different colors. Floodgate is squarely aimed at coloring in toon and cel animation and outlines drawings, which is a real pain to do in After Effects without it."

Update: these might be fun with Live Trace versions of video...Aharon Rabinowitz had a video tutorial series on this feature, Converting Video to Cartoon.

Update 2: there's a report in comments here that this filter has problems in AE8.

Digital Anarchy's TOON IT

from Ko Maruyama's new blog, Ninja Crayon:

"Digital Anarchy's TOON IT [new filter package]...is a very, very good reason to check out Digital Anarchy at NAB (or at Photoshop World for that matter). Jim Tierney has a couple of tricks up his sleeve: One for Photoshop users and another for After Effects users."

Update: a person in comments finds this filter too slow for real world work and couldn't get a refund even a day after. Hopefully buyers will try the demos before a purchase, and vendors will realize that piracy is very easy. This blog mostly just passes along news so sorry I didn't comment that you can do this sort of thing by hand with multiple layers of posterize filters, blurs, color correction, and mattes. The setup would be much harder than a filter but once you have a formula you like...

The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick was a science fiction author whose writing has been getting the Hollywood treatment (Blade Runner, Total Recall, Screamers, Minority Report, Paycheck, and in 2006 A Scanner Darkly) since his death in 1982.

The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick by R. Crumb is a cartoon version of PKD's "Valis" experience that was published in Weirdo #17 in 1986. See the Wikipedia PKD summary for more.