I betcha your one of theose guys who use aaed zdepth too Many people fail to do this in shake becasue they are too used to how images usually work. (shake users find it very hard to FIND the z range because its the real distance in the 3d like maya app encoded in -1/z where the max and min arent constant but true object distances)
Shakes about raw data AE is about helpper structures. And i know the raw datas sometimes way scary-
QUOTE(stevedavy @ 03/08/07, 03:02 AM) [snapback]261801[/snapback]
in Shake, period! But that's just me.
But to say it's not a compositing program is ridiculous. It may not be film quality but for many, many houses -- and freelance individuals like me -- it's a standard comping app and perfectly capable.
No its a effect/ motion graphics program. That means it fan layer stuff okay but its not really very good at the computational stuff. Quite good at Motion graphics if i must say, however thats its main focus and it still has room for improvement there.
For example some rudimentary comp: if you wanted to do a normal pass, youd have to somehow encode the data into a range of 0 to 1 and then if you wanted to do simple dot product between a light vector you suddenly couldn't do it very well without going into api code even then its ridiculously clumsy. So doing something thats elementary 3d pipeline graphics is well beyond AE, wich means if i wanted to split the computation even further then rendered images i couldnt. On the other hand in fusion and shake itd be just a node network. So i could do a pipe where the lighter uses shake to see what it would look like and render shadows after the fact. (even if there really is a relighting tool in AE its not that id want to use it all the time there might be that im researching into developing the shader so i might want to use some other computation)
Now this leads to AEs main problem it does not let you use precision to your advantage. Because it does not allow you to work directly on the data but you will have to normalize it forts then work on it with limited precision and then sue that as some sort of mask.
Now this is one of a the ridiculous features of AE it is form a implementation point of view very trivial to do theese things OKAY. I mean whats worng with letting me acces the RAW data. But no you cannot do the simple mathematical stuff very easily in AE. Which is stupid because now im limited to what ADOBE thinks graphics artist should be doing. (also try to do sumething like calculating the amount of light that hits a house at certain time in the day with AE, uuurgh, you can do this in shake by the way)
However i do think that shakes way is a bit too heavy on the "artsy" guy. So what i would like to see is a prog that has the deep no dodal structures/ devenv of something like shake with deep computational access under a hood (but in the gui for quick prototyping) thats suppressing the user form this if he wants to.
So what a perfect comp app would do is allow those who can do computation free their minds but then allow those who do not still feel comfortable. Leading to a environment where both benefit from each other, and accumulation of knowledge would actually push people deeper.
[b]
PS.[/b] as for standard its well actualy not, sicne its the only one thet works thisway. Its photoshop like, but ps is not a comp app,