May 5 2010
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.
What's this OpenFX business?
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.
Normality for OpenFX?
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…
September 6 2009
While working on my Occlusionist plug-in I stumbled across an interesting side-effect of generating ambient occlusion in screen-space: It’s possible to achieve computationally expensive global illumination effects such as color bouncing in the same way!
And what’s best… it comes pretty much for free!
Screen-space color bouncing (right)
As it turns out, when processing ambient occlusion the
Occlusionist is already doing everything required to achieve color-bouncing, so it’s simple enough to call the source image’s color and bounce that around to simulate a nice final gather or global illumination effect right in
After Effects.
The overhead is somewhere around 10 – 20%, which is totally acceptable when you consider that true 3D global illumination effects generally take much, much longer to render.
Having access to screen-space ambient occlusion plus color bouncing right within After Effects will certainly make for some very interesting effects and opens a whole new world of possibilities!
September 1 2009
The Occlusionist is a spin-off of my Adobe After Effects plug-in Normality and is used to generate screen space ambient occlusion (SSAO) and global illumination effects.
So what’s ambient occlusion you ask? Basically, AO is an approximative global illumination method that checks to see whether any given point on a surface is occluded by other surfaces.
Right… now what does
that mean?! Well, objects that are close to each other block some of the ambient light which is cast by the sky or the surrounding room, for example. So the more ambient light is blocked in this way, the darker the surface becomes. This creates a nice shadowing effect which can be similar to true global illumination methods.
The effect is commonly used in 3D productions where true GI techniques such as Final Gather or radiosity would be too computationally expensive, whereas AO is comparatively quick to render and does not require a complicated setup.
It’s an incredibly useful tool to give your renders more depth and a more realistic appearance.
Usage
The Occlusionist requires a depth and a normal pass to do its thing. Once you’ve gotten those rendered out of your 3D program of choice it’s pretty straightforward to create ambient occlusion effects: Apply the Occlusionist plug-in, calibrate your normal– and depth pass and there you go — clean (or noisy, as you wish) occlusion effects right in After Effects.
This makes for a wonderful addition to your Normality workflow.
Although AO is fairly quick to render in any modern 3D ray-tracing engine, some of us prefer even faster methods — the reason I developed Normality in the first place!
I hope to get the Occlusionist plug-in close to real-time speed, which will probably require either making it multi-threaded or having it run directly on the GPU.
WIP
At this point the Occlusionist is a work in progress: It’s not at all optimized and requires too many samples to achieve pleasing, noise-free results, which in turn makes the render time a bit too long for my taste. 3 – 5 seconds per frame may be a dream come true from a 3D renderer’s point of view, but in comp that just doesn’t quite cut it.
In the coming weeks I’ll try to get the render-times to a level more on par with what After Effects users are comfortable with.
