Earlier this week Warner Bros released the second trailer for Animal Logic’s epic animated feature Legend of the Guardians: The owls of Ga’Hoole.
Legend of the Guardians
Finally found a little time to port most of my After Effects plug-ins to the OpenFX format. So far I have Generator, Celulight, Occlusionist, Edgar, Floodgate and a couple more filters running in both 32-bit and 64-bit in Windows and Linux.
The port was fairly straightforward: Back when I was rewriting Normality for version 3.0 I’d designed a portable wrapper around the After Effects–specific parts of the code, so it would be easy to separate the graphics algorithms from the GUI side. My plug-ins also share many libraries with my 3D shaders, which were already designed to be cross-platform and 64-bit capable.
So this strict separation paid off for me as it made porting the software to the OpenFX format quite painless.
The OpenFX (OFX) format is, as the name suggests, an open standard for visual effects plug-ins.
For me as a developer there are a number of technical benefits as the API is open, reasonably modern and far more accessible than the proprietary, aging and convoluted After Effects API my plug-ins were originally written for.
The really great thing for developers and users alike is that OFX is supported by a growing number of compositing applications including Nuke, Fusion, Shake and Toxic/Maya Compositor. (Notice a prominent compositor missing from that list…?)
Anyway, that means the next time a software developer decides to arbitrarily end support for your platform of choice, you can at least take your collection of plug-ins with you.
Currently not, unfortunately… as much as I like the OFX API, it does have some limitations which make a faithful port of Normality impossible.
I do have a solution in mind but it’ll take some time to design and implement. Without revealing too much at this point, I’ve been considering freeing Normality from the shackles of a host application altogether for quite some time now…
Now that the trailer is out I can finally speak about the animated feature film I’m working on here at Animal Logic.
Legend of the Guardians
“Guardians of Ga’hoole”… ahem… “Legend of the Guardians” is based on the series of novels by Kathryn Lasky and is directed by Zack Snyder of 300 and Watchmen fame.
I’m working on this film as a Look Dev TD mostly developing RenderMan shaders and other tools for use by our team of lighting artists.
Please enjoy the Legend of the Guardians trailer!
Generator is a simple and free plug-in for Adobe After Effects which can be used to create normal maps from alpha mattes, such as text and shape layers.
It is based on some of the same algorithms as my more versatile Celulight plug-ins, but is comparatively simple and offers none of the advanced customizations its more feature-rich brother offers.
Generator is designed to run in cooperation with the free Normality re-lighting solution to create shading and lighting effects for text and arbitrary shapes without the need for pre-rendered 3D normal passes.
When using Normality to add lighting and shading effects to motion graphics, sometimes you’d wish there was a quick and easy way to create a normal map from text or shapes instead of relying on a complex 3D renderer… that’s where Generator comes in!
Just drop this plug-in on your text, shape or any other layer with a clean alpha channel and you will instantly see a normal map based on the layer’s shape. Generator is kept intentionally simple with very few options and hence little room for error — in fact, there is only a single parameter to adjust.
The automatically generated normal map can be used by Normality to add shading and lighting effects even without a pre-rendered 3D normal pass.
Note: Due to a bug in Normality, you must pre-compose your generated normal map before applying Normality.
Download
Generator for After Effects is a free download for Microsoft Windows.
Generator is a free After Effects plug-in for Microsoft Windows.
Donations
Developing free software costs time and money. If you appreciate my work and use it in production, please donate.
I will be more inclined to release cool stuff in the future if I see that my work is appreciated.
I am thrilled to announce that I have accepted a position at the Oscar-winning studio Animal Logic in Sydney, Australia. Knowing the quality of their work and the cool projects they work on, I am very proud and excited to be part of their incredibly talented team.
Being more of a summer-than-winter-guy, I am also happy to skip the harsh European winter this year and head straight back into a warm summer Down Under. Last Christmas I spent a couple of great weeks touring Australia and I cannot think of a better place to be.
Sunset near Mildura, Victoria
Not much, really. In fact my partners will continue to run the studio I helped build up without me. They are very supportive of my decision and I’m leaving on amicable terms.
I will probably have less time to spend working on them than I did in the past months. Expect updates and new releases from me to slow down.
Personally, I am super-happy to be moving to Australia along with my girl! Our visas have already been approved and flights are booked… nothing can stop us now :)
