“@chad_perkins Back from Adobe. Finally can tell you that the next version of After Effects is a WEAK upgrade (IMHO). But PS and AI will be GREAT upgrades!”

(via AE Portal)

The original statement has since been retracted because apparently the poster was under an NDA and spoke too soon… luckily I am bound by nothing of the sort, so I get to “retweet” (as it were) whatever I want.
No official word on new features yet, but judging by the rumors making the round it looks like After Effects CS5 is going to be the second lackluster upgrade in a row, 64-bit support notwithstanding.

Maybe the company that is no longer in the Flash business needs to spend a little less time coming up with cheesy feel-good marketing slogans and instead focus on what they used to be good at:

Making tools that just let their users get their damn work done.

Hint: Homebrew installers that take more than an hour to complete and require one to shut down their web browsers, upgrades that lay waste to all existing plug-ins and the oh-so pretty “Flash-y” but increasingly non-standard GUIs are not things that make artist’s lives any easier. Nor do they “help people communicate”, to put it in Adobe’s terms.

On a side note, it’s fascinating to see how many people contact me about my plug-ins when they cannot download them as opposed to after they did…

Edit: Fixed.

Will Normality / Atlas / Generator be ported to 64-bit for After Effects CS5?

The short answer: No.

Longer answer: Adobe has made the business decision to deprive me (and all other professional AE users) of a significant investment by removing support for 32-bit plug-ins, e.g. all existing third-party plug-ins, in AE CS5.

Again, this was not done for technical reasons, it was purely a business decision.

Along with my invaluable collection of third-party plug-ins I also lose the functionality I require to do my daily work. Now I need to go out and find replacements for stable and time-tested tools and in some cases even develop new ones to replace custom software I do not own the rights to.

AE’s main strength IMHO was the sheer number of third-party plug-ins that are not available for other platforms. In a way Adobe has leveled the playing field.

In light of this predicament I in turn have also made a business decision: I’m simply taking my business elsewhere.
As I’ll have to replace all my plug-ins anyway, this is the perfect opportunity for me to ditch After Effects for a more powerful solution. One that, ironically, manages to run in both 32– and 64-bit. And in Linux!

A word to the After Effects community

I’m not doing this out of spite or to harm the AE community in any way and I apologize to all users that have come to rely on my plug-ins for their daily work.
Updating my software to run in CS5 means I myself would have to invest in the new version, and I’m sure you understand that’s not something I’m prepared to do just to support some free plug-ins.

Just like Adobe’s, mine is purely a business decision.

And the kicker? I’m limited to 50GB a month. No, this is not a cell phone plan… this is a proper internet connection.

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.

Usage

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 Beta 0.2

Download
Generator for After Effects is a free download for Microsoft Windows.

Download Generator

Download

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.

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.

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

What this means…

For Studio Lampion

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.

For my plug-ins and shaders

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.

For myself

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 :)

Note: Michael Coleman has taken the time to respond to my concerns in the comments.

That in my opinion is a mistake if I’ve ever seen one.

Don’t get me wrong — I applaud the fact that After Effects is moving to a 64-bit architecture. It’s without doubt the way of the future and the competitors are already there and have been for a while. Personally, I’m ready… I’ve been running 64-bit operating systems exclusively for years.
However, Adobe needs to remember what AE’s strengths are: In my opinion, and that of many other users, a great part of After Effect’s appeal lies in the vast amount of plug-ins on offer — free and commercial.
If that is changed over night, one of the main reasons to choose Adobe’s software over Nuke or Fusion disappears over night as well.

A 64-bit compositor without the right tools to make use of it isn’t worth much, and let’s face it: Bare After Effects sans third-party plug-ins doesn’t cut it, 64-bit or not.

Now on the Mac side the users may be used to getting shafted by platform transitions every other year, but Windows users have come to love the luxury of being able to run obscure plug-ins more than 10 years old in some cases. I know many people that rely on them for their daily work.

It’s been shown in the past that third-party developers take their time to upgrade plug-ins, if they do at all. The main reason being that developing upgrades to new architectures costs time and money. However, they can’t charge their paying customers for updates like these without generating significant amounts of ill will. Definitely not a nice situation to be put in as a developer and one of the reasons I don’t sell my software to the general public.
In the case of for-hire/freeware developers like myself, there’s no incentive to spend the time developing an update at all unless I also switch to the new platform, which under the described circumstances I don’t see myself doing.

I think this is something Adobe definitely needs to reconsider.

There should be a transition period where 32-bit plug-ins are supported seamlessly along-side the (hopefully soon to be updated) 64-bit versions.
It’s technically feasible: Just look at pro audio software (Sonar, Reaper, etc.). Those developers clearly understand the value plug-ins have to their customers and have made the effort to ensure 32-bit plug-ins will work seamlessly in their 64-bit environments.

If upgrading to CS5 means losing (in)valuable plug-ins/waiting ages for updates that may or may not arrive one day, many users are stripped of a significant investment and might just go ahead and think “Oh well, might as well go with Nuke then if I’m forced to start from scratch anyway”…
I know I’ll be hard pressed not to take this perfect opportunity to ditch After Effects, and I guarantee you I’ll take my home-grown plug-ins with me wherever I happen to end up.

Addendum

Just to make it clear: I’m not complaining as a commercial plug-in developer; I’m complaining as a user and customer of After Effects.

Frankly, I couldn’t care less about the extra work it would take to upgrade my own plug-ins to 64-bit — in fact, it’s probably not a big deal in my case and porting to Nuke’s OpenFX format would actually be more work.
But I have no vested interest in AE development — I don’t make money doing it. I also have no ties to After Effects beyond the financial investment I have made in the software and third-party plug-ins. If Adobe’s decision to cut support for 32-bit plug-ins means I lose that investment, you can be sure I’ll take a good look at the alternatives.

If I choose to switch platforms over this decision then so be it. It just means that there will be no 64-bit updates to my plug-ins for AE… nothing is lost for me personally.
Whether this poses a problem for anyone else out there I don’t know.

The one remaining bug I’ve come across is the broken Reinhard ’05 mapping — please let me know if you find anything else broken or behaving unexpected!

Download the newest version of Atlas.

Grab the latest version!

This release is Windows only for now… however, the full source code is included, which means that anyone with more time on their hands than me can feel free to compile a Mac version. I didn’t try it myself, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t run on Mac OS X.

To compile the code you will need to download and link with the After Effects SDK. For legal reasons I unfortunately cannot distribute these files with Atlas. The required pfstmo libraries are included with the download, however.

The code is not yet well documented, but the plug-in itself is just about as simple as it gets, so you should find your way around easily if you’re familiar with the SDK.

Hints on usage

If you’re not familiar with the concept of tone mapping, Wikipedia has a good introduction that should give you an idea of the use and functionality of this versatile technique.
Please note that for obvious reasons the effect is most useful in 32-bit color mode with 32-bit source images. It will work in lower modes but the resulting effect might not be what you expect.

Please go ahead and download Atlas and then let me know in the comments if you come across any bugs or have other suggestions!

Tone Mapping

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.

There exist numerous tone mapping operators that approach this problem from different angles and achieve varying results.

Supported tone mapping operators
Drago
Ashikhmin
Reinhard ’02
Reinhard ’05
Mantiuk
Durand
Pattanaik
Fattal

Lately, the effect has also become something of a fad in photographer’s circles, as a quick Flickr Search will show.
Still tone mapping is a very versatile technique that can be used for photorealistic as well as artistic effects.

Download Atlas 0.3 (Beta)

Download
Sorry, Windows only for now. The included source code may be used to compile a release for Mac OS X by someone with more time on their hands than me.
If you want to play with the code you will also need to install the After Effects SDK, which I cannot include for legal reasons.

Usage Notes

Atlas is designed to work exclusively in 32-bit floating point color-space. Applying Atlas in 8-bit or 16-bit projects will yield unpredictable and/or possibly unbelievably gross and ugly results. Don’t say I didn’t warn you…

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.

So far only 13 (!) of the roughly 55.000 downloaders have contributed to say thanks and to support continued development of the software. Alas, that’s less than 0.1% of all downloaders.
Now I never expected to get rich by releasing a donationware After Effects plug-in… but it would definitely be nice to at least be able to offset my hosting costs.

Maintaining and supporting free software costs time and money that I am no longer able or willing to put in at this rate.

I simply refuse to waste any more time dealing with Microsoft’s issues. They broke it, they can fix it. minning.de looks fine in all modern browsers and that’s good enough as far as I’m concerned.
So people tell me to give IE8 a try because it’s apparently much improved — no. I don’t care. I’ve had enough of Microsoft’s failure to comply with 10-year-old standards and I’m not interested in whether they have finally caught up with the rest of the pack.

Same thing with Windows 7. After the hideous, bloated mess that is Vista, I am not giving a Microsoft OS another chance. They clearly have other priorities than what I am looking for in an operating system.
The main thing that bothered me about Vista was that it looked like they let a bunch of amateur WindowBlinds themers run wild with the interface. How am I supposed to perform accurate color corrections when I’m blinded by the flashy GUI? I quite intentionally didn’t set up my workplace to be a translucent, turquoise Fisher-Price environment and I’d prefer my computer desktop to reflect that choice. Just stay out of my way, OS!

In the eternal words of Weird Al Yankovic: “Poke out my eyes, man!”

Apparently Microsoft has a vastly different opinion there as they somehow inexplicably managed to make the interface look even more garish and tacky in Windows 7. Words fail me.

Now I’m definitely not a huge Apple fan — in fact the only time I turn on my Mac is to compile software. But I must hand it to them: At least their stuff looks professional and not like it’s aiming to woo preschoolers.

Now, after subtracting the thousands of “illegitimate” downloads during an attack on my site in September, I can proudly announce that Normality has officially reached 50.000 downloads!

Normality Downloads by OS

The chart shows  the distribution between the Windows and OS X versions, leaving the Mac all the way down at just 10%.

Normality Downloads by Region

And, because I’m a fiend for statistics, here’s the breakdown by region. A couple of surprises there in my opinion!

Anyway, this means there are (potentially) 50.000 users of my plug-in out there! I would definitely like to hear from you all about your experiences with the software and the cool projects you are using it on.

“Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign”

Instead of starting from scratch I built upon the existing design’s code and look, taking the good advice from A List Apart about realigning instead of redesigning; the foundation was quite solid, after all.

If you’ve visited my site before, you should feel right at home:

• The main navigation remains the same with an extra bit of polish.
• All links should still work.
• I’ve implemented a proper caching mechanism that should not only speed up page loads significantly, but will also prevent the site from stalling whenever Video Copilot links here.
• The cool AJAX page loading turned out to be a not so great idea overall, so that’s gone.
• Comments were a bit of an afterthought in the last iteration… this time they are fully integrated into the site’s concept.

Please bear with me while I iron out the last issues and enjoy the refined minning.de!

Early concept art of the magnificient bell tower

Brainstorming for story concepts we came up with more than half a dozen plots in just as many different settings but soon realized they all had one thing in common: They were too complex! So we took a step back and critically analyzed all the concepts we had come up with and whether there was anything that could be simplified so much as to be realistic within our modest means.
After much back and forth we eventually decided to go with the medieval theme as this undertaking seemed reasonable after eliminating any dispensable characters, settings and subplots. Moreover, we felt a strong connection to the main character and had a vivid image in our minds of what the resulting film should look like. We were aiming to portray a painterly, traditional cartoon feel and wanted to avoid the somewhat sterile look displayed by many modern 3D productions.
Armed with a set of proprietary tools that would help us in achieving this goal and years of production experience in all areas of 2D and 3D film-making, we finally got underway with our short film A Night at the Cathedral.

At this point in the process we had concepts for the characters, the setting and a basic plot, which boiled down to “Our birdbrained protagonist Belze is on a quest to steal the golden statue of the Holy Mazioles from a medieval cathedral and, of course, fails miserably.“

We traveled to Cologne Cathedral to gather reference photos and inspiration

With the story’s plot taking shape we decided to get a feel for the film’s atmosphere and surroundings and did a lot of research on medieval art and history. Unfortunately, only few medieval structures remain in our town of Berlin, so we took some time to travel to historic and inspiring places such as the Cologne Cathedral, Notre Dame de Paris, Lyon and to visit castles on the Rhine river. There we took hundreds of reference photos, many of which we later reused as textures or details in our background mattes.

Concept Art of Clara playing the organ

The various impressions gathered during these research trips were incorporated into our concept art, which we drew, painted, modeled and rendered in 3D to visualize our ideas and to help define the look of the film.
Around the same time we started sketching out ideas for the protagonist Belze, our evil but not exactly brilliant thief. Belze represents the archetype of the comedic villain: He is sinister and wicked but yet clumsy and totally useless. In designing this character we were inspired by classic Disney villains and also took some cues from the Monkey Island series.
His antagonist is Clara, a young lady playing the organ during the night our story unfolds. She is a somewhat one-dimensional plot-device in that she doesn’t have any motives of her own and is only there to react to whatever Belze is up to.

Storyboard: Belze fleeing from the Cathedral

日本語ページ

A user with the IP address 208.95.112.198 found it necessary or fun to download Normality 44.712 times in one night… that’s simply unacceptable and unfortunately actions had to be taken to prevent continued abuse of my limited resources.

I apologize for the inconvenience and hope to reinstate downloads once the traffic has returned to a more reasonable level.

Most of the blend modes are pretty straight-forward to implement, but one of my favorites has so far eluded me as the information published by various sources never seemed quite right.

After spending an evening trying to match my image blending code to various test-scenarios I set up in After Effects, I think I’ve nailed it!
For anyone interested, here’s my version of the Photoshop Soft Light blend mode that proved to be 99% accurate in my tests:

// Not optimized!
Color cx = ((16 * ColorB - 12) * ColorB + 4);
if (ColorA <= 0.5 )
ColorSoft = ColorB - (1 - 2 * ColorA) * ColorB * (1 - ColorB);
else if (ColorA > 0.5 && cx <= 0.25)
ColorSoft = ColorB + (2 * ColorA - 1) * ((cx * ColorB) - ColorB);
else
ColorSoft = ColorB + (2 * ColorA - 1) * (sqrt(ColorB) - ColorB);

I hope this helps… figuring it out was quite a pain as there are many different implementations floating around the net and most of them aren’t even close to Photoshop’s original Soft Blend mode.

The updated blend modes and a couple of other fixes will be released in the upcoming Normality 3.11 — by the way, I’m not following the Windows versioning scheme… ^_~

1. Normality is not a copy of ZBornToy

   Far from it. While both plug-ins were developed at roughly the same time without knowledge of each other, the first official release of Normality was in fact published more than half a year before ZBornToy hit the scene in October 2006.

   And whereas the features may seem similar at a cursory glance, the plug-ins also serve quite different purposes and address other production needs.

2. Normality is not a free replacement for Youveelizer

   I’m not sure how this one started. Anyone taking two minutes to read the feature-lists will realize that not only do Normality and Youveelizer not do the same thing, their features don’t even overlap.

   Yes, they are both plug-ins for Adobe After Effects, but that’s where the similarity ends. (Technically Youveelizer isn’t even a plug-in: It’s a Pixel Bender script, but that may be arguing semantics.)

   Anyway, Youveelizer is designed to apply textures or decals to pre-rendered objects and I highly recommend it if that’s what you are looking to do. Normality on the other hand is used to shade and light pre-rendered objects within After Effects and does not deal with textures.
   Please don’t get the two mixed-up, they’re totally different concepts.

3. Normality can’t replace a 3D renderer…

   … and it’s not designed to, either. But that doesn’t make it useless! After making yourself familiar with Normality you can simply choose on a shot-by-shot basis whether the trade-off between quality and speed that the plug-in offers is Good Enough™ or whether your shot calls for all-out GI, FG, super-sampled ray-tracing with subsurface scattered 4K displacement maps at the cost of potentially waiting hours just to see a little preview that does not reflect the final render in any shape or form. With Normality, what you see is what you get, and that’s a plus to many users, even if it means dealing with some limitations.

   Studio Lampion’s animated short film A Night at the Cathedral was shaded entirely in Normality, showing that it is in fact a practical solution if the look you’re aiming for allows for it and you understand what you can get away with and what is better left to a true 3D renderer.

   In the end Normality is just a tool — a free one at that. Use it if you feel it’s suited for the task at hand, just don’t expect it to work miracles.