By: Erik Vlietinck
Mon, March 10, 2008 - 1:44:00
Pros: Faster workflow, easier visualisation of multiple alternative effects, Photoshop Layers are recognised and stay intact, time saving features
Contras: Rendering seems to be slower than with Apple's Motion, GridIron's Nucleo Pro is no luxury

http://www.adobe.com
Score:

Adobe After Effects CS3 has lots of new and improved features such as shape layers, Photoshop layer styles and video layers, and Flash integration, but two of the most eye-catching novelties must be Brainstorm and Puppet Tools. Brainstorm is a properties experimentation tool, while Puppet tools is a set of tools that enables you to deform images with smooth motion.

Instead of summing up all the new features of After Effects CS3, I have decided to concentrate on Puppet Tools and Brainstorm, because these two make After Effects CS3 something really special in my opinion. Puppet Tools is a set of three tools that you can easily make available by clicking the Puppet Pin tool in the Toolbar.

When you click the Puppet Pin tool, a couple of options become visible. One of them is a mesh option. Puppet Tools works by overlaying a still image or vector shape --or even a text character-- with a mesh of triangles. The Puppet Pin allows you to place and modify pins on the mesh. The pins will be used to deform the mesh and with it, the image or vector shape.

The mesh can be made visible with the mesh check box. The mesh made visible allows you to see which parts of an image will be affected by moving the pins around. On an image that has no alpha masks to define a portion of the image that you want to be isolated for movement, the whole image will be meshed, and pins will move the whole image around.

Sketching a Puppet's Deformation in Real Time

However, when an object in a scene is isolated using an alpha mask or a separate layer, that object gets its own mesh. Pins applied to the object and moves around, will only move the object’s elements. Let’s say you want to animate a character floating above an image, then Puppet Tools makes that easy by enabling you to literally move the character across the image, much as what you did when you were a child moving your puppet’s legs one before the other to make it “walk”.

The deformation itself can be done by manipulating the pins with the mouse in real-time, setting keyframes along the animation, or by using the stopwatch icon in the animation timeline. If accuracy in distance or size is of importance, the stopwatch method is preferred. Another method is recording animation by recording the motion of the pins in the same way as you can sketch motion paths.

As soon as the motion is more or less what you want, you can fine-tune it in several ways. The pins can be moved, the mesh can be adjusted, etc. The pins you’ll use to make the puppet move are the Deform pins, but there are other pins as well. The first one is the Puppet Overlap pin. These are applied to the original outline and not afterwards to the deformed image.

The Overlap pins make sure you control which parts of the deformed puppet stay in front and overlap other parts of the image. The third pin is the Puppet Starch tool. This tool is used to stiffen parts of the image so they are distorted less.

The whole Puppetry system can be used to animate images synchronised with recorded sound. The rendering of the deforming puppets can be a fast or slow process. The speed of rendering depends on the complexity of the image to be deformed, the complexity of the mesh (the number of triangles you allow), the number of pins and obviously, the number of keyframes the pins pass through.

Wallace and Grommit, but Digital

Additional affects, such as motion blur, enable you to create pretty “realistic” effects with the puppet tool. One way of using this new feature in After Effects, is a digital “Wallace and Grommit”. You can take different shots of clay figures and then let them move using the Puppet tools. The net effect of the tool will be that you can do with less shots of the clay figures. You’ll also get more control over the deformation of the figures and the way they move through the scenes. And when you make an error, you can more easily correct.

Put it differently, when you don’t know what exactly is the best deformation, you can hit the Brainstorm icon in the timeline, and see alternative deformations being generated by After Effects based on your initial set up. Brainstorm can be compared to Photoshop’s Variations command where you can compare various adjustments by looking at thumbnail images with these adjustments applied with different parameters. Brainstorm is more or less identical, except that it will show you variations of an effect.

Brainstorm is fast and efficient, and will show you variations on a theme that are hard to visualise with your “inner eye”.

These two new features by themselves make After Effects CS3 a most wanted upgrade in my opinion. They also establish After Effects CS3 Professional as one of the easiest to use professional video composition or motion graphics software. Of course, the other features justify the upgrade equally well. Photoshop layers, for example, is one of the most interesting from the point of view of workflow; it’s just not as spectacular or cute.