After Effects, scripting and nerdery
Image sequences, love ’em. All those distributed renders and so on create hundreds of thousands of image files on my media drive, so it’s good to have a quick scrip for checking that a sequence has rendered completely without any gaps. Here’s one in Powershell. It tells you if any files are not in sequence … Continue reading A quick snippet for checking image sequences
I have some background elements that I want to wander around, and because I’m lazy I don’t want to hand animate them, so they just have a wiggle expression applied to their position channel and auto-orient switched on. Instant crowd scene! But I want them to have a drop shadow. Normally to keep the drop … Continue reading Auto orienting the drop shadow on an auto-oriented layer
…and this is what it took. Since Adobe removed multi-processing from After Effects I’ve been using the shell to run multiple instances of the aerender application. This can lead to massive performance gains – the screenshot below shows a 4,000% improvement in speed.
I’m doing a couple of month’s intensive After Effects work at the moment and I’m making tools to help the process. It’s a bit like making jigs for woodwork – a little time spent on a jig makes the whole process much easier later on. So here’s a little jig that helps with the sometimes…
A sigmoid function is useful for lots of graphics applications, it’s yer classic ease-out, ease-in curve for animation, and its a film-look response curve for colour.
From the “Posted on the Blog so I Can Remember it Next Time” department: A useful expression for making things symmetrical.
This is a script I should have written years ago. It’s fairly simple; it duplicates the selected layer in a comp, but unlike the built-in duplicate function it creates a new source for the layer in the project, allowing the copy and the original to be independent of each other.
If you want your AE project to access data from an external file to drive expressions you can use the javascript evalFile() function in an expression.
You can use text layers in After Effects as expression editors which means, among other things that a whole lot of layers can use the same expression. This has some big advantages: expressions update as you type, which gives you instant feedback. You can see and edit your expression right in the composition viewer, without … Continue reading Using text layers as expression editors in After Effects
Because of Lightwave’s rather broken undo system you need to save lots of incremental backups when you’re working on a scene. Mike Green kindly provides a script that makes a numbered backup of your file, so that your current copy keeps the same name. Drawing on his open source (yay!) script I’ve changed it so … Continue reading Save-n-Zip: automagic backups for Lightwave3D