Knoll 3D Flare By Aharon Rabinowitz Published on Friday, November 20th, 2009
So you may have caught on twitter that I was playing around with something called Knoll 3D Flare. It’s something being worked on and tested here at Red Giant, based on a project file sent to us in August, by David Vinson, Senior Visual Effects Supervisor at Outpost Pictures.
Basically K3DF is a new set of features to enhance Knoll Light Factory Pro, Hollywood’s go-to lens flare solution.
Currently, the feature set includes:
3D Camera Aware: Link a lens flares to a 3D Light’s XYZ position.
Z-Depth: Distance of flare from camera effects flare’s intensity.
Multiple Lights: Apply to every light in your comp.
World Scale: Control the amount of flare scaling relative to a light’s distance from the camera
Edge Flareup: As flares near the edge of the comp they automatically brighten and flareup replicating natural lens phenomena.
Full 3D Obscuration: All 3D layers in your composition can be used to obscure the flare. As the 3D light travels behind a layer, the flare dims and goes out.
This is not a final or complete list. It’s just something that’s being worked on with the ultimate goal of making Knoll Light Factory Pro, already an industry standard, even better.
What’s really interesting to note is that Knoll Light Factory Pro has been able to do most of this stuff for years! 3D lens flares and light linking are not new. I’ve been using them for a long time. However it required some knowledge of expressions – which you can easily pick up at Dan Ebbert’s Motion Script.com.
Anyway we’d love to hear your thoughts on these features, and what you might want to see in Knoll. Personally, I’m really impressed with 3D obscuration. Being able to have the flare wink out of existence when it goes behind any 3D layer opens up a lot of possibilities and makes life a lot easier.
Episode 32: Feature Film Title Treatment By Chan Bonanno
In this episode of RGTV, Chad Bonanno shows you how he created the motion graphics titles for the feature film “Dreamgirls.” These titles were also used in the broadcast ads and trailers for the award-winning film.
In this episode of Red Giant TV, Chad Perkins shows you how to create various elements for use in a Twilight Zone-esque TV show opening, using After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator and Cinema 4D. Get ready to kick it old-school…
Episode 30: 3D Motion Graphics Logo Hosted by Carl Larsen
In this tutorial, Carl Larsen shows you how to create an array of 3D particles using Trapcode Form and Red Giant Plane Space to achieve a look that, under most circumstances, has been reserved for more complex, 3d applications.
In this Episode of Red Giant TV, Tim Clapham shows you how to use Trapcode Form to create some particle-based 3D text along with a cool transition on and off.
Episode 28: Building an Airport Scene – Part 2: Compositing
By: Mathias Möhl
In this episode of Red Giant TV, Mathias Möhl continues his airport project, and shows you how to motion track with Mocha For After Effects, and then to use that data along with MochaImport (His own Script) to easily create a solid composite.
Something different folks – this week’s tutorial uses no 3rd party plug-ins. It’s just a straight After Effects tutorial with some good expressions information.
I know what you’re thinking… No plug-ins? why is it on RGTV? Well, why not? Our goal has always been to help you learn cool stuff. And sometimes cool stuff, doesn’t need a plug-in. That doesn’t mean we can’t share the info. So…
In this episode of Red Giant TV, I’ll give you some cool tips for working with numeric text, for things like video game scores and other digital readouts. No 3rd Party Plug-ins are used in this tutorial – Just straight After Effects.
Courtesy of Dan Ebberts, This tutorial uses 2 powerful expressions. Here they are:
1. Round to the nearest whole number:
s = thisComp.layer(”Null 1″).effect(”Slider Control”)(”Slider”);
Math.round(s)
2. Layer marker triggers addition to current value:
s = effect(”Slider Control”)(”Slider”);
n = 0;
if (marker.numKeys > 0){
n = marker.nearestKey(time).index;
if (marker.key(n).time > time){
n–;
}
}
s + n
Well, we were a bit surprised this morning to learn that Final Cut Studio 3 was released with the new Final Cut Pro 7 and Motion 4 updates. While we have had the product as a beta version in our QA lab for a while for testing, Red Giant Software has absolutely NOT seen or tested the final version of the products.We have created a preliminary compatibility table and will be releasing a few bug fixes as soon as possible. For more information, visit: Final Cut Studio 3 info page.
Please be patient when it comes to these updates. Our QA team has to test all our current FX Plug-compatible products with the final release version of Final Cut Studio 3. Just like you, we have seen the announcement but don’t have the shipping version. Testing and bug fixing is at the top of our priority list. But until we can get the real version of the products, we can only offer a preliminary feature compatibility assessment.
This is a great example of what can happen when you use 3D camera matching software (in this case PF Hoe) with Trapcode Particular 2. This video was created by Eric Epstein who’s work can be found at http://najork.net/:
