Monthly Archives: December 2009

Its all falling into place

Posted on by
Reply

The background footage has been shot.
1) After a few false starts last week I managed to get a nice enough bit of footage shot on my rather cheap DV camera. Theres a rather heavy bit of grain on the footage but I can live with it and the footage in now in AE waiting to be used.
2) The path for the UFO is created. Its set to travel around the skyline of Ipswich with a pass behind a building.
3) The fire effect needs some tweaking to make it work properly. I brought the UFO and the fire files into the project file with the flight path and the scales went out of whack so I need to recalculate the size, shape and speed.

Once its all set I will render it all up and move on to AE.

Escaping gasses

Posted on by
3

I have spent the last hour trying to embed a three second flv video into wordpress and its not even that good.

[flv:http://www.kirkd.co.uk/blogimages/heattest1.flv 480 360]

Its just a test to see if my hot gasses do actually distort the way I wanted them to and, thankfully, they do.

Its an AE comp of the fire particles and the cone from the previous post simply done as two passes, one for the fire, one for the cone. Then in AE i’ve started with the sexy photo of myself (muuuuah), the cone pass, a fire pass with a brightness/contrast effect with the saturation right down and lightness up to 50% and the layers opacity turned down to 15% (this layer provides a whitish haze), another fire layer, an adjustment layer with a displacement map set to red and green to give the distortion. Above that is a pair of cone layers to provide masks for the haze.

I rendered it out as a flv file to upload only for wordpress to tell me its not secure! Bloody flash security.

It took longer to get a plugin up and working than it took to make the damn clip in AE.

Need a light?

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been playing with a new idea for the haze under the UFO and broke out pyrocluster this evening. Its been nice to work with this as its got such a quick feedback when using it so any changes are instantly there, you just need to hit render to see the final result. I’ve settle on a couple of versions both based around a particle emitter (150 particles) with a low life (10 frames) and high-ish speed (1500). This creates a dense cloud right under the emitter and with the cloudy effects from pyrocluster, this gives a nice gaseous cloud (like me after eating peanuts)

These are a couple of tests which allowed me to see how they would appear from different camera angles.

This first gives a thinner push near the base leading to a denser head.

fire effect

While this one give more contrast throughout the body of the cloud and a more even cloud.

fireball

There is a lot of intersection which worries me slightly as i’ve been fiddling with the settings and the intersection checkbox is on. Still, if the emitter is low enough it wont be noticeable on the final. I’m planning on a couple of AE tests to try out object buffers to make sure the final result i am planning will work.