cannot beleive lack of automatic shadow generation

[hyrlvlrec]

I know theres more to this, so please, someone inform me…..

I had to simulate shadows for an actor shot on greenscreen today for a 30spot…i was posting in smoke7…..stupid tedious work

When i got home, i went to open a combustion3 comp ive been working on for another freelance project and accidentally opened one of the combustion tutorial comps, only to realize that combustion was creating a shadow for one of the layers

i only became more and more ticked off as i played with the light source in the comp, watching the shadow react accordingly

So….. anyone know of any good reason why flame or smoke cannot create true shadows that react to lights in a composite???

[Keyser_Soze]

hyrlvlrec wrote:

I know theres more to this, so please, someone inform me…..

I had to simulate shadows for an actor shot on greenscreen today for a 30spot…i was posting in smoke7…..stupid tedious work

When i got home, i went to open a combustion3 comp ive been working on for another freelance project and accidentally opened one of the combustion tutorial comps, only to realize that combustion was creating a shadow for one of the layers

i only became more and more ticked off as i played with the light source in the comp, watching the shadow react accordingly

So….. anyone know of any good reason why flame or smoke cannot create true shadows that react to lights in a composite???

Because the software is old and there is no real competition. Imagine what they could do at autodesk if they felt somebody was breathing down their neck. As it is now they can just continue with “minor” updates. I mean I love their tracker and it’s very accurate. But it is old technology. What if they managed to write something like the tracker of mokey. That would be something 🙂 And so on…

[Anonymous]

I totally agree with Keyser_Soze. From a certain point of view, the flame and Smoke systems seem to come from the stone age, and actually they do. Ten years ago, they were the only systems able to achieve highend effects and compositing. But today, desktop compositing systems like Combustion and even more After Effects feature very common but powerful “effects” like automatic shadow cast that you just can’t find on the FFI systems that actually are 1000 more expansive. Garbage mask are also more powerful in Combustion than on the Smoke or the Flame. And as Keyser_Soze also said, there’s no competition in the “real time compositing market” for discreet. But I also believe that the guys from discreet are aware of that. Why? Because today have can buy a non compressed reatime HD PC based system running combustion or After Effects for 30K dollars. Far less expansive than any Smoke or Flame system, and also, from a cezrtain point of view, more evolved. 😉

[Anonymous]

Seems like they’re developing Toxic, not FFI.
Flame is a collection of modules, some from the Jurasic era, some new, with 3 different Gui’s.
You have 3 types of schematic/nodes design;
Action, MK and Batch.
And you have Combustion and Toxic as well, that’s 5 different design for handling nodes, all from the same company.
The thing FFI is still good for, imo, is the desktop enviorment, with pixel based Paint and editing handy, as well as gestural editing, besides the nice tracker.
If they could only modernize and stream line it.
I wouldnt want FFI to die.

[Keyser_Soze]

sindbad17 wrote:

I totally agree with Keyser_Soze. From a certain point of view, the flame and Smoke systems seem to come from the stone age, and actually they do. Ten years ago, they were the only systems able to achieve highend effects and compositing. But today, desktop compositing systems like Combustion and even more After Effects feature very common but powerful “effects” like automatic shadow cast that you just can’t find on the FFI systems that actually are 1000 more expansive. Garbage mask are also more powerful in Combustion than on the Smoke or the Flame. And as Keyser_Soze also said, there’s no competition in the “real time compositing market” for discreet. But I also believe that the guys from discreet are aware of that. Why? Because today have can buy a non compressed reatime HD PC based system running combustion or After Effects for 30K dollars. Far less expansive than any Smoke or Flame system, and also, from a cezrtain point of view, more evolved. 😉

I would not like to sit with a client and work in combustion (and defenetily not after effects – that’s for motion graphics not compositing). No matter how fast the computer is. And that is why I think Discreet/Autodesk still can go slow with development. There really isn’t any serious competition in the client attended “real time compositing” market. Although I admit that the power of desktop systems are becomming pretty impressive. If you still can draw a line between “highend” and desktop? I mean smoke/flint is “just” an ibm pc 🙂

[Keyser_Soze]

itai wrote:

Seems like they’re developing Toxic, not FFI.
Flame is a collection of modules, some from the Jurasic era, some new, with 3 different Gui’s.
You have 3 types of schematic/nodes design;
Action, MK and Batch.
And you have Combustion and Toxic as well, that’s 5 different design for handling nodes, all from the same company.
The thing FFI is still good for, imo, is the desktop enviorment, with pixel based Paint and editing handy, as well as gestural editing, besides the nice tracker.
If they could only modernize and stream line it.
I wouldnt want FFI to die.

I think that you would find it hard to “streamline” FFI without irritating a lot of people. But I wouldn’t mind getting some new interresting image technology into the box. It’s good to see apps like Toxic or Combustion getting more and more powerful. But I don’t want FFI to be “left behind”. So if you can hear us Discreet. Shape up! 🙂

[patdawg]

sindbad17 wrote:

Garbage mask are also more powerful in Combustion than on the Smoke or the Flame.

In what universe? Masking is ten times slower on the fastest combustion or AE workstation than it is on flame or smoke. Dragging those damned control points, and waiting for the update kills me. On smoke/flame there is no wait…it’s updated in realtime. Also, I’d jump off a high building before I went into a client session knowing I’d be working on combustion or any other desktop compositing app. I agree that smoke and flame need raytraced shadows similar to combustion’s, but I think it’s more of an OpenGL issue than anything else.

[Anonymous]

patdawg wrote:

sindbad17 wrote:

I think it’s more of an OpenGL issue than anything else.

making it high time to rethink the open gl issue.
good for the 90’s, handicaped in our day and time.

[patdawg]

itai wrote:

patdawg wrote:

sindbad17 wrote:

I think it’s more of an OpenGL issue than anything else.

making it high time to rethink the open gl issue.
good for the 90’s, handicaped in our day and time.

Really? That’s funny, because After Effects, combustion, and other compositing/fx apps have been moving more and more towards better OpenGL support for awhile now.

[worldofmaya_vb]

patdawg wrote:

After Effects, combustion, and other compositing/fx apps have been moving more and more towards better OpenGL support for awhile now.

Hi!
The main problem is that if you for example go into 3D with After Effects, it’s extremly slow… I’m allways stunned when I work in Action on an highres image, doing pushing and pulling points on several bicubic in 3D, pressing preview and I get the result from an simulated physical cam… and I’m working here on an old onyx2 system with I think 4x200MHz CPUs… I can’t imagine what you could do if you use a newer system 🙂
-klaus

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