While After Effects is a 3D environment, it’s generally used in quite a limited way, being comprised mostly of 2D surfaces moving in 3D space. Steve Kilisky (After Effects Senior Product Manager) has recently posted some great work by designers pushing After Effects’ 3D capabilities to the limits:

AE or 3D looks at a superb animation (44MB download) by Chris Zwar, who has in the past been a CreativeCow contributor.

In terms of what was AE 3D- the answer is practically everything. The curtains drawing back at the beginning were a piece of stock footage but everything else was done inside AE. Even the curtains which don’t draw back are solids with fractal noise. The bouncing balls were CC spheres (with expressions to squash and bounce them appropriately), the “gun” at the end was a CC cylinder, the wooden blocks which form the rings and the “Challenge” pattern were just 3D solids arranged by expressions, etc etc.

CreamyOrange - Extreme 3D explores a similar fairground theme. Putting together a ferris wheel, roller coaster and spinny chair thing using AE, Photoshop and Illustrator. The final piece was comprised of 7000 3D layers, and seems to have triggered a rendering bug in AE (which Steve has comitted to investigating).

It’s great to see artists and designers pushing the limits of software, but even more refreshing is that the developers (and product managers) are blogging publicly to acknowledge the work these people are creating and troubles they’re encountering.

I wrote today about the Critter Board DIY synth/controller board for CDMusic, but I’m even more excited about the Video Critter:

Video Critter DIY, open-source audio/visual electronics platform

US$74.95 buys you a fully customizable, programmable DIY board with video out. (There’s also a $45 “mini” board that looks equally tantalizing.) The video routines are already programmed into the board, so you can write really easy, higher-level video code to put stuff on the screen. Just as with the Critter Board, you can use C programming from any Linux/Mac/Windows computer.

Of course, it’d be great to go even further, and have a totally open-source video mixer / effects unit. It’d be pricey, I’d imagine, but imagine an Edirol V-4 you could program yourself. (Uh, Edirol — ever fancied getting into open source yourselves? After all, no one could compete with your sales and manufacturing volume. Yeah, I know — snowball’s chance of this happening — but I can dream.)

In the meantime, this is a brilliant way of creating some quick, retro-looking custom video effects, and it’ll be ideal for installation work. I have too many other toys to play with to pick one up for at least a couple of months, but if you get one, dear readers, send photos and video.

In October, we covered evolving support issues for Apple, Boot Camp Beta, and video output from Windows on Apple’s MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops. Boot Camp is still in beta, but it is widely used, and people understandably want to know if they’ll be able to output from Windows to a projector. It opens up possibilities like, for instance, booting your Mac laptop into Windows to run Resolume.

We’ve gotten lots of feedback since then (another reason to subscribe to the CDMotion comments RSS feed), but still no conclusive evidence. Al, for instance, has had trouble with his MacBook Pro:

I just bought a 2.16 MBP 15″ and plugged a walmart 15″ “balance” LCD (1024×768) via the DVI to VGA adapter and here’s what I get:

1) using the ATI driver under bootcamp XP with the monitor plugged in, the computer starts up and mirrors the windows startup screens. Once started up, the Balance LCD goes black and the MBP’s screen goes into extended desktop mode. (no pull-down menus) Can’t configure anything at this point. I can move the cursor toward the external monitor, but it’s black, so I can’t configure anything.

2) At this point, I pull the VGA adapter out of the MBP and its screen resets. I check the display properties and it’s set at 1400 wide or something. (just as under OSX) I try everything, but can’t get the external monitor to light up. The only thing that works is uninstalling the ATI driver where I can run mirrored at 1024×768 on both MBP and external LCD. Video performance is SLOW and MBP looks like crap.

3) I run Parallels too. A bit sluggish performance wise, but I’m able to run mirrored or exteneded desktop to the external LCD. To get it working correctly for me, I must set my internal monitor to 1024×768 stretched.

Not sure where to go from here, but a $399 ACER PC is looking like a better option than trying to run bootcamp beta. Considering windows is $100-200, $399 is a pretty good deal for the OS and a completely different laptop.

Hope they fix this problem soon. I was really hoping the MBP was the be all end all. I was previously using a MacBook and it worked fine with the mini dvi adapter to the same 15″ external LCD monitor.

Bart from the Resolume team, in contrast, says the mini-DVI adapter is working fine on the MacBook Pro. He also notes that DirectX and OpenGL support may soon be coming to Parallels, so this could also be an option.

I’d still be wary of purchasing a Mac laptop with the intention of primarily running Windows, for a whole host of reasons. But for those of us wanting to occasionally boot the Macs into Windows, hopefully we’ll have some more luck soon — and I’m holding out for an updated Boot Camp beta that addresses this issue. If I track down the right people at Apple at Macworld in just over a week, I’ll be sure to let you know what I find!

Anyone know anything about (non-pro) MacBook video out support in Boot Camp? Apple says it doesn’t work, but … maybe they’re wrong?

Holidays are fast approaching. Do you have enough new gear to keep your brain occupied while your body suffers though the inevitable food-coma? Peter and the CDMu gang have listed their choices for electronic musicans. So we’ve decided to follow up with some last-minute ideas for yourself or the visualist in your life. PK: I like to think of this as, rather than last-minute shopping — or, erm, after-the-fact shopping if you were looking for Hannukah — this as the Way to Cure the VJ Blues By Shopping For Yourself list. And, aside from having been raised half-Orthodox (Christmas isn’t for over a week yet!), my birthday is in January, and should also be a holiday. (Macworld stuffers?) So, without further ado…

Jaymis

VJ: Audio-Visual Art and VJ Culture
Sick of trying to explain what it is you do to random wrinklies at family gatherings? VJ, put together by the immensely talented D-Fuse gang. Pingmag interview about the book and the state of VJing here
US$26.40
Update: Reviewed on We Make Money Not Art

Nintendo Wii
Ok. So with the newest console on the block sold out everywhere, this item may be a little wishful. Unless you’re willing to pay whatever the scalpers extortionists scumbags fine chaps on ebay are currently asking, then it may be prudent to wait until the storm has passed. Of course, that doesn’t stop you from picking up a wiimote, making with the wireless midi for a while, then bringing in the console for some multiplayer boxing at a later, saner time.
Wiimote: US$61

Dan of Dansdata has recently started a more personal blog. Whereas Dansdata is generally quite focussed on niche tech gadgetry reviews and solving reader problems, his new blog “How To Spot A Psychopath” (named after this page) is a little less focussed, running the gamut from reviews of spam emails, to using lego for casting metal, to the release of Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather miniseries in the UK, and more recently: Light bulb diffraction.

This is important information for visualists, as the colour rendering of the lighting you use effects the quality of your final image. If your bulbs have a low CRI (Colour Rendering Index), then the colours in the images captured by your camera won’t be true to life.

Dan has tested a range of bulbs, and while the results are widely known - halogen and LED are ok, flourescent makes people look like corpses - it’s interesting to see images of why some lamps are such a great choice for zombie movies.

pure:dyne is a new free, open source, Linux-based, bootable, low-latency, high-performance operating system with Pure Data (Pd) as its main emphasis. Pop a CD, USB key, or bootable hard drive into your PC or Intel Mac, and you’re ready to go.

pure:dyne, the Art + Music Performance OS for PCs and Intel Macs [Create Digital Music]
pure:dyne Wiki

Now, needless to say, a big appeal of this isn’t just tuning the OS to your needs — it’s taking performance gigs wherever you go, ready to go, without having to worry about OS crashes. It’s installing a pre-built installation on a home-built Linux computer or Mac mini. It’s having a backup when your machine dies.

pure:dyne is completely tuned for Pd, the open-source cousin of Max/MSP. (Pd was created by Max’s creator, Miller Puckette, and Max and Pd have shared code and exchanged ideas since the very beginning.) Pd comes with an awesome lineup of Pd extras: PDP, PiDiP, Gem, GridFlow, RRadical, PixelTango — all the additional libraries that normally take some time and dependency-managing to install (and some of which just don’t work or don’t work as well on Windows or even Mac). So, if you’re ready for some free patching of custom visuals, you’re already happy.

But this got me thinking. Processing runs under Linux, and one challenge is often tuning a distro with the right drivers and settings (think webcam support, for one) and different Java versions. It’d be a no-brainer, if Processing is to be as successful as it could be, to tie it to a perfectly-tweaked, bootable distro. Flash, now with the robust Flash Player 9 for Linux, which also promises video4linux webcam support for live input, could do the same. (In fact, for my own purposes, a custom Pd+Flash+Processing distro would be heaven for live visualist work.) And that’s just the beginning.

This also makes a nice bridge between commercial software (the comfort of Adobe Creative Suite for assembling visuals, for instance) and free software (a perfectly-tuned, custom performance and installation environment).

So, what do you think? Who’s with me? And what would you want out of such an OS — or do you know of some places to get started? (One obvious starting point would be dyne:OS, the core on which pure:dyne is built.)

I’m always amazed when I meet After Effects users who don’t know about or utilize expressions. I’m no scripting guru, but the few expression tricks I know get used constantly. A couple of simple expressions are extremely useful for visualists, allowing you to quickly pump out incremental clips by just changing slider values.

The creatively titled “After Effects Expressions” (Come on people, Google Juice isn’t the only rationale you need to consider when naming your blog) starts with the basics, but quickly gets into conditional expressions and slider-driven animation, which is visualist gold as far as I’m concerned.

In After Effects, an expression is a Javascript based script in that can either modify a parameter or drive the parameter entirely, like position, opacity, or perhaps a Gaussian blur level. We can add an expression to any parameter that has a stopwatch icon next to the parameter. The exclusion to this rule are Masks parameters like Mask Shape, Mask Feather, etc.

This stuff is coming from Graymachine’s Harry J Frank, who is also involved in AE Freemart, so you can expect plenty more goodness to come.

Has it really been 2 months since episode 1 of Steven Watkins‘ Backspace podcast was released?

Episode 2 came out on Friday. It doesn’t quite recapture the ethereal feel and technical polish of that first episode, but it’s still very impressive work for a one-man band (showreel here).

Previously:
Interview with Stephen Watkins.
Backspace Episode 1.

Electronics and physical computing is great fun to learn as you get tangible results from your progress. It’s simple and fun to grab a kit or a bunch of components and follow on with a blog or instructable. However, as you progress to designing your own projects and circuits (or to make following other people’s ideas easier) you’ll need some theory to explain what all the different components do and how to put them together successfully.

Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering and Electronics is an ebook primer available online or downloadable as an HTML help (.chm) file. The formatting is a little weak (inter-page navigation links would be appreciated), but the content is clear and concise (including an excellent analogy for Ohm’s law). The book is split into sections: DC, AC, Semiconductors, Digital, Reference, and Experiments.

I spent some thoroughly engaging hours on recent flights reading this, which I’m going to take to mean “FEEE contains interesting material presented well,” rather than “Jaymis is a big nerd.”

No, it’s not from Gridiron, and it doesn’t do any of the cool preview rendering, but BG Renderer, from the AE Enhancers forum, does do background rendering, for free!

Using the power of After Effects scripting, it opens a terminal or command line window to background render any queued items.

It also had the added advanced feature to launch more than 1 instance at a time. If you have a multi-processor machine, you can launch as many instances as you have cpu’s. In my testing, this cut render times in half on a Quad G5 using 4 intances. (having at least 1 GB of ram per instance launched is recommended).

There’s lots of error checking behind the scenes so I did some beta testing to make sure it doesn’t have any bugs, but as always please share anything (good or bad) that you encounter.