In this tutorial, guest host Grischa Theissen demonstrates a must-know technique for adding motion blur to your 3D renders in After Effects using ReelSmart Motion Blur. Watch tutorial (10min, 20MB)
The Foundry has released 3D Camera Tracker and Kronos, two exciting new plug-ins for Adobe After Effects.
Alexander of Amateurmedia.net has created a stylish new font named Typograph Pro. Also check some of the great usage examples created within Cinema 4D.
Red Giant Software has released Colorista 2, with some exciting new features and improvements. Use motionworks10 for a 1o% discount.
Fontfeed.com has an excellent column “Screenfonts” which discusses the use of fonts in movie posters.
Industrial Light and Magic has a new site. It’s quite amazing just how many productions ILM has been involved in.
Urban Dirty has terrific free grunge stock images and also provides color themes for various images with a downloadable .ASE file. You can import the .ASE file into After Effects using Swatch You Want.
44 Responses to this post
January 20, 2010 at 10:55 am |
Thanks Grischa and John for sharing this cool tutorial, very useful indeed.
January 20, 2010 at 1:55 pm |
One of my most used plugins! I love it!
January 20, 2010 at 1:59 pm |
@Joel You’re welcome.
@Benjamin Indeed! I love it too.
January 20, 2010 at 2:04 pm |
I use most of the times RSMB but vector motion blur is not my choice, but NOW will be
Thanks very useful!
January 21, 2010 at 2:44 am |
Cool that I could provide some new informations!
January 20, 2010 at 2:42 pm |
I was waiting this tutorial, cool stuff, very thanks Grischa
January 21, 2010 at 2:56 am |
You’re welcome!
January 20, 2010 at 3:52 pm |
great tip Grishcha! now we HAVE to get it for our studio!
January 21, 2010 at 2:51 am |
Thanks Brett!
Maybe I get commission from revisionfx
January 20, 2010 at 7:22 pm |
RSMB and particular are the must have plug-ins for AE i think. defiantly worth the purchase.
January 21, 2010 at 2:53 am |
That’s right! The whole Trapcode Suite is worth it.
January 21, 2010 at 2:10 am |
Thanks very much Grischa & John. Definitely one of those ‘A-ha!’ tutorials. Very very useful indeed.
January 21, 2010 at 2:55 am |
Cool! Probably a nice time saver!?
January 21, 2010 at 3:26 pm |
You’re welcome Mark.
January 21, 2010 at 10:13 am |
Great tutorial. Looks awesome!
January 22, 2010 at 9:28 am |
you save my millions hours of render in cinema!!!
i love you!
January 22, 2010 at 3:26 pm |
Hope you can spend them in the sun!
January 22, 2010 at 10:04 am |
hey Grischa! very cool tutorial. it is really essential, so thank u and thanks to John as well for hosting it!
little question. maybe im mistaken, but i think you could just pre-comp your C4D render, and add RSMB to it [not the vector one], and youre all set. Though, that whole Multi-pass rendering, and Alpha channeling those Green boxes- why is it so necessary to do? is it a lot faster than just adding RSMB to the comp?
January 22, 2010 at 3:23 pm |
Hi Danny!
Thank you!
Sure, you can just add RSMB without the motion vectors but if you do that it’s guessing where the objects are going. It’s not as accurate as getting the information from your 3D package and sometimes you get artifacts. Especially in my chase where a lot of objects are overlapping each other.
And it shouldn’t take to long to render out an extra motion vector in your multi pass.
But if you don’t have a motion vector you can always try RSMB without it.
January 27, 2010 at 5:21 am |
thanks John.
January 27, 2010 at 2:25 pm |
You’re welcome.
January 27, 2010 at 11:09 am |
awesome tutorial guys I use most of the times RSMB but vector motion blur is something new for me to know , but NOW will be
Thanks
January 28, 2010 at 9:40 pm |
You’re welcome ahmed!
Hope you saved some render time and get more accurate motion blur!
January 30, 2010 at 8:04 am |
Really great and useful information – tuts like these make you the rock stars you are. Thank you Grischa and thank you John.
Could something like XMult be used on the vector motion pass so the edges do not need to be choked back?
January 30, 2010 at 4:06 pm |
Thank you Eric!
I am not sure about XMult. Never heard of that.
If it generates the alpha and can shrink it a bit it will probably work. I guess the more accurate way is to use the existing alpha of the RGBA image.
But give it a try and report back
January 30, 2010 at 10:59 pm |
XMult is a free plug-in that does the same as Knoll Unmult, that is, unmultiplies a layer from it’s background. Good for creating mattes for flares, fire, smoke etc. Give it a try Eric, and you may also want to try the built-in “remove color matting” effect.
January 31, 2010 at 3:55 pm |
Thanks guys, I was thinking out loud when I typed that, and realized after that there would be some issues unmultiplying but thought I could compensate by adding some levels to the RGB and alpha. The result was just OK since the motion vector values were close BUT not accurate to the original.
However a second and simpler method that worked great was simply making a copy of the motion vector pass, desaturating it 100%, and clamping the the white levels so that everything was either completely white or black and using that as the matte. This method provided a 100% accurate matte for the motion vector pass with no choking needed, no black fringing, and with out effecting the RGB values of the pass. It looks great!
February 1, 2010 at 11:14 pm |
Excellent Eric, thanks for the tip. Best wishes, John.
March 5, 2010 at 11:29 am |
Hiya! Thanks for going through this and a high five to Eric Litwin regarding his solution to the matte of the motion vector!!
One thing I’ve been thinking about though, is how would you combine Motion Blur with a Depth of Field blur.I haven’t had much chance to experiment with that, and was wondering how you’d stack the effects etc. Should you apply a motion blur to a pre-comped depth layer, before using it?
Thanks again!
March 5, 2010 at 5:16 pm |
Hi Anders!
To be honest: Never did it before.
I would try to apply the DOF first and on top of that the motion blur.
March 10, 2010 at 4:55 pm |
Thanks for sharing motionworks with the community. It’s a great resource.
March 10, 2010 at 5:24 pm |
Thanks Grischa,
Great tutorial!
Caught your reel on Vimeo about 4 months ago. Really sweet work, super styling.
March 15, 2010 at 1:43 am |
Thanks so much Chris!
March 29, 2010 at 1:41 pm |
hey i dont have a “PNG” out put in my save tab. wtf?! im in r11 if that makes a dif
March 30, 2010 at 1:33 pm |
Sorry al,
can’t help you out with that problem.
March 30, 2010 at 1:19 am |
Wow thanks a ton for this great tutorial! It really helps enhancing our rendertimes!
March 30, 2010 at 1:27 pm |
Good to hear that!
March 30, 2010 at 1:30 pm |
btw AWESOME reel! Saw your work before and that are some great C4D skills there.
July 13, 2010 at 4:58 am |
it may be a nice thing that you are doin some tutorials, bad thing is that you are so not familar with rsmb vectors. check out google first entry for rsmb vector: http://www.revisionfx.com/support/faqs/motion_vector_FAQs/motion_vector_alpha/ to see how NOT to use the motion vector. vector passes are not supposed to have an alpha chanel!
July 13, 2010 at 7:32 am |
Thanks for the information Tobias. Shame you wrapped it in such an aggressive comment.
July 24, 2010 at 7:35 am |
Hey Tobias:
You might want to reread that ReelSmart FAQ.
That link you’ve provided appears to say the exact OPPOSITE of your assertion that the motion vector channel should not have an alpha. The way I’m reading it, areas of a motion vector image that have an alpha below 100% will be ignored by RSMB, and the plugin will properly blur the moving elements. If you don’t precompose with an alpha RSMB thinks the black or whatever color is behind the colored vector images contains valid motion data and creates a corresponding blur, which is wrong.
So you’re wrong. And Grischa is right.
I’ve been learning C4D, and in my initial experiments with RSMB Vectors I was using the basic vector pass without an alpha and got weird results; all of the objects had a glow-like blur around all of their edges.
Precomposing the vector pass with the alpha from the main render fixed that weird blur, though I’m not happy with how fast-moving foreground objects look over objects farther back. The blur around the alpha looks good, but I’m getting a sharp edge where the 3D objects overlap.
July 14, 2010 at 9:11 am |
ok, sorry for the agressive style of words, to much work, less spare time. keep on
August 31, 2010 at 8:45 pm |
Nice quicktip Grisha. There is one thing I can add and that is with big scenes you can use the single pass render output to create your 8-bit sequence in stead of rendering twice the multi pass. I have one question and that is if you don’t have an alpha in your 3d scene because the scene is full frame do you get artifacts because of the lack of AA?
September 2, 2010 at 7:46 am |
Thanks Jasper for the addition! That’s a clever way to deal with it.
I haven’t tried it yet but I would say it still works without an alpha. It should at least in theory.
Have you tried it?
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