*Editor’s note: For those reading this early in the day, there are no videos attached to this post yet. I’ll upload them as soon as I figure out the best way and place to upload them at. More than likely they’ll find a home on Flickr

Today’s post comes late as they typically do, but really, aren’t you just glad I’m still alive? I should really stop putting hard dates on things. They only serve to embarrass you dear reader, when you open my blog expecting a promised post, only to find pie in your face. Sweet sweet pie in your sweet sweet face.

The shadow fight continues. Today you get to enjoy a smorgasbord of tests that’ll educate and delight! First up is some continuations from the previous discussion: a demonstration of the benefits of using the Layer Effects (the fancy shading method)   vs. Layer Styles (the easy way out) . In both images, the scene is rendered with 3d layers and blue sphere should be behind the yellow. Sadly it fails in the much simpler Layer Styles example which renders at a speedy 7 frames a second on my computer, compared to 1 frames per second with the more complicated fancy shading method. A benefit of the fancy method though, is that Effects can be easily turned off with a layer switch, enabling quick previews. We’ll call it a net gain :)

In this next test, I rework an old animation sketch I did a while back. The original looks like this . Using our super duper fancy shading method, we can achieve this result , which I feel is more pleasing than the original. Look-wise, we can consider all that shading experimentation thus far a success.

The method however is tedious. A lot of layers have to be exported from flash individually , duplicated and stacked correctly on the timeline , and 7 effects with minor changes applied to each one . The multistage process is long and prone to clerical errors, which I’m extra susceptible to. Being able to save collections of Effects as presets helps quite a bit, but it still takes some noodlin’ about. I’m looking at Afx scripting right now, and hopefully I’ll find a way to automate the process a bit more. Ideally, I’d like to highlight a layer, hit a “fancy shadowfy” button and let the machine take care of the rest, but we’ll come back to that another day.

Before I leave you, a quick video from my next round of tests, light blooming! Its not quite developed yet, but its already looking pretty neat, and adds a nice subtle effect that makes the scene look more delicious and dramatic than the original . I stole the hdr image from petervanallen on Flickr and carelessly flipped the image horizontally as you can tell by the backwards lettering on the boat. I pointed it out so I don’t want any guff about that okay?!

Will my injustices ever end? Stay tuned to find out!

Labels: development