August 5, 2009

Youveelizer filter for UV mapping in After Effects

Maltaannon released his Youveelizer plug-in for UV mapping in After Effects. It sells for about $30. In addition, there's a tutorial to learn how to improve your your 3D workflow in AE:

'From this day forward you are able to take your 3D render and replace textures or even add reflections and environment. In a nutshell all you need to do is to apply the Youveelizer to a layer with a UV render pass to apply a texture to a rendered 3d object, or to a Normal render pass to add reflections. All 3d objects should be rendered out from a 3d application such as 3d Studio Max, Maxon Cinema 4D, or any other 3d package capable of rendering UV and Normal render passes. However it’s sometimes difficult to render out a nice UV pass. A solution to that problem may be simply applying a texture that simulates a good UV map. That’s why I’ve included a nice 2000×2000 pixels “uvmap_texture.tif” in the product package.'

See also the article by Lutz Albrecht on Adobe Developer Connection, Integrating 3D applications with After Effects – Part 1: Working with UV data. More background and links are in the AE Help doc Importing and using 3D files from other application. Other options for re-lighting were discussed in the AEP post Normality 3 video tutorial.

Update: Among comments on ambient occlusion, mackdadd noted...
"RE:Vision's Re:Map also does this sort of thing [UV mapping & more], although I haven't watched Maltannon's tutorial yet to see if they work the same way. Always good to have more (and cheaper!) options!"

Update 2: Creative Workflow Hacks notes Pixel Bender UV mapping projects AE: Projecting a Movie Onto a Complex Surface and 3D Normal Mapping with Pixel Bender. See also Smart Normal goes Pixel Bender, "a lightweight normalmapper supporting condensed and sobel-filters."

Update 3: Motionworks' Unplugged 4 is an interview with "Jerzy Drozda Jr, the quirky host of Maltaannon.com."

Update 4: see also How to use UV Passes in 2D by Kert Gartner.

How to use UV Passes in 2D from Kert Gartner on Vimeo.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Still missing an Ambient Occlusion plugin for After Effects, any news on that issue?

Rich said...

I'll keep an eye out but you should mention this to Maltaannon and to Stefan Minning, who made Normality.

Sean said...

Re:Map also does this sort of thing, although I haven't watched Maltannon's tutorial yet to see if they work the same way. Always good to have more (and cheaper!) options!

http://www.revisionfx.com/products/remap/

Maltaannon said...

How would you see Ambient Occlusion plugin for AE? If you want to apply the Ambient Occlusion to a render you simply take the Ambient Occlusion pass and multiply it with the render. If you want to render an Ambient Occlusion pass from After Effects you can't really do that, since AE does not read 3d mesh data - only flat pixels, therefore it cannot generate Ambient Occlusion. However you can try to simulate that using Normality and a light, but the results will not be as accurate.

Stefan Minning said...

For anyone interested in ambient occlusion in After Effects, I'm currently working on a plug-in to do just that: http://www.minning.de/software/occlusionist