Lightwave and After effects

[Kojocci]

I got my new CS3 After Effects and I like to know is there any plug-ins between these two. And do somebody know good beginners tutorial (free, because my money went to Adobe)

[rjandron]

LW and AE don't talk to each other at the moment. There is no plugin, as with C4D that allows for render passes to be automagically created for use specifically within AE.

That having been said, it's not that hard. There is a great deal of power in the combination of AE and LW.

I'm going to direct you to this tutorial on scene breeakouts and lighting in a production VFX environment. It explains a lot of the concepts on how to arrange your renders so that they generate passes that can be used in a compositing application. Though he uses Fusion rather than AE, the concepts are valid--just the nuts and bolts of how its done in AE are going to be different.

The best way that I have found to think of AE is imagine it as Photoshop for moving images. The concept of layers that is the heart of Photoshop is very strongly followed in AE.

When I set up renders, I try to do scene breakouts on so that I'm rendering a separate scene per object. Each object is separately rendered out as an image sequence of TGA32 files. Then, these are re-assembled in layers in AE for final effects and colour correction. The TGA32 embeds an alpha channel in the image sequence so I don't have to dig sround for a separate alpha channel image sequence.

As far as multipass plugins for LW go, I believe that LW Passport is one but I haven't had a chance to use it myself.

[Kojocci]

Thanks for a quick answer

[Matt]

Some of the best and worthwhile AFX vid tutorials that I know of can be found here, along with some reasonably priced plugins

http://www.videocopilot.net/

[JeffrySG]

^yes there are some really great tutorials on that site!

[Woody]

Video Copilot rocks!!!!

[Matt]

Couldn't have said it better Charles... and while I haven't purchased any material from them (the bank won't allow the transfers at the moment), the results of their tutorials and their material sure seem to speak for themselves

[Jon D]

someone posted up that lightwave and AE don't talk to each other

that's true, but you can use motion vectors from lightwave to do your motion blur as a post process in AE, looks great too - proper light streaks and all

[Sodonn]

Render buffer export in LW will set up individual pass rendering...but at the moment....I think it only does 8 bit.....it used to do 32 bit in previous versions as I understand it....just broken in the current 9.2 and 9.3 versions.

[DorchaMéaróg]

Originally Posted by Woody

Video Copilot rocks!!!!

Gotta agree there

I have found that when rendering for AE post, the two formats that are the most AE friendly are RLA and RPF. Both formats can export z-depth, which comes in very handy if you're planning on using AE's 3d tools. The benifit of the RPF format is that it also exports your camera movement data (albiet the x,y,z read is strange in AE. You'll find that if your camera is dollying along the x axis in LW, it'll appear to be on the z axis in AE). RLA is great to grab the z-depth and some other special buffer info when you don't need the added size of having the camera data.

I don't know about LW 9.x, but in 8.5 to render an AE friendly RLA or RPF, you have to go to Image Filter and add either the "Extended RLA" or "Extended RPF". Hit options on the filter you've chosen and it will bring up a dialogue asking for the buffers you want output as well as file name/location. As I said, I don't know 9.x, but in 8.5 DO NOT USE THE OUPUT FILES TAB IN THE RENDER OPTIONS FOR OUTPUT! This may have been corrected since 8.5, but using the standard output module for either RLA or RPF formats, you don't get any buffer data exported. when you're ready to render, hit F10, if it tells you there are no saving options active, just hit OK and render. So long as either Extended RLA/Extended RPF is active, the image sequence will be output.

[Tintin]

this is what I do
when I am patient I render image sequences to ae
when am really happy I use the zaxwerks 3dinvigorator plugin for ae
and sometimes when am adventurous I render a mov file and compose it in ae
And the tutorial at videocopilot> glowing 3d vines is one of my favourite
There are also some great tutorials at creativecow and toolfarm
hope this helps

[jeremyhughes77]

I use the two together a lot. 2 plugins that are extremely helpful:

EXR Trader is a great one. Combine it with the AE plugin set you can download with ProEXR. This will let you open the EXRs in AE by the channel you want.

Also, I use Transmotion POIcam set of plugins to export camera and null info into AE. It works fairly well. It has an issue here and there but usually pretty solid.

[td123]

thanks for the link, was looking for something similar

[djc]

Rendering out to EXR format and importing the 32 bit data into AE CS3 is the way to go. The BattlestarVFX tutorial contains all of the setup information needed, and you can even download a spinning lightrig for the diffuse pass.