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REVIEW
• JULY 11, 2001 On the 3D front, there's a whole new category called 3D Channel. After Effects 5 allows you to import files that contain additional channels of information, including Z-depth, surface normals, object IDs, texture coordinates, background color, unclamped RGB and material ID. The effects in the 3D Channel category allow to to interpret and manipulate these data, including adding a matte along the Z axis, isolating elements and blurring individual ones, applying fog, inserting new objects and even extracting 3D channel information to use as parameters for other effects. Effects include 3D Channel Extract, Depth Matte, Depth of Field, 3D Fog and ID Matte. Supported formats include RLA, Softimage PIC/ZPIC and Electric Image EI/EIZ. With the Production Bundle, you also get 10 additional distortion effects. Here's a great example of how 3D compositing can change the way even common distortions work. Say, for example, that you want to apply the new Bezier Warp effect. You grab a corner and pull it in your Comp window to stretch and distort your image. But if the layer you're working on is operating in 3D mode, you can actually spin your layer around and pull your Bezier paths out from the layer, giving you true 3D distortion. In addition to Bezier Warp, the Distort effects included in the Production Bundle are Bulge, Corner Pin, Displacement Map, Mesh Warp, Optics Compensation, Reshape, Ripple, Twirl and Wave Warp.
In the Render and Simulation categories, you get three new effects: Lightning, Fractal Noise and Particle Playground. Lightning does just what its name suggests, with control over origin and end points, detail, branching, etc. Fractal Noise (known previously as Noise Turbulent I and II in Cult Effects), provides incredible fractal effects that can resemble anything from undulating smoke to flexing cell structures. This was always my favorite plugin from the Cult Effects package, and Adobe has done a nice job of merging it into a single effect for easier access to all the controls available.
The last one, Particle Playground, is similar to many particle emitters out there (such as the one included in the Boris Continuum package). And, like other particle systems, you can use custom particles—images, text and even video—to create particle-based explosions, floods or other effects that need to be controlled by limiters and emitters. The effect is actually pretty speedy, even when using QuickTime layers as particles. You run into problems when you try to explode a layer with particles, requiring vast amounts of time and memory. In fact, with my 512 MB system, I was never able to get it to do this effect. But, on the whole, the Particle Playground can create effective special effects and can also be a joy to play with. Post a message in the Creative Mac World Wide User Group. Dave Nagel is the producer of Creative Mac and Digital Media Designer; host of several World Wide User Groups, including Synthetik Studio Artist, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, Adobe LiveMotion, Creative Mac and Digital Media Designer; and executive producer of the Digital Media Net family of publications. |
