I wouldn't call it a DreamWorks thing...rendering animation for compositing is pretty much expected at every studio I've worked at. (Thank goodness for Moho's Layer Comps tools and Moho Exporter! It's one of the many reasons I love this program so much.) For me, I've yet to find a single animation program, 2D or 3D, that could handle everything I needed efficiently, and I always wind up using different programs at various stages of production.chucky wrote:Anyway on the subject of shading in AE...Sure... but in some workflows I am loathed to run to another program for something as necessary as a bit of shading on characters.
...that scene above was a bit of a shading extravaganza for AS but timing was more controllable inside AS as there's no program' loop' that can slow everything down so...
I guess a DreamWorks things are a little different...
AE might have appeared to be overkill for the lighting effect described but I was actually doing a lot of other stuff for that scene in AE too. The fire for example was created using Trapcode Particular; yes, I probably could have done that using ASP particles but for me, it was easier and faster to do that in AE. And since I was playing around with the fire animation and cave lighting effects in AE, it just made sense to deal with the timing of the character lighting there too. For me, this was a more efficient workflow since it didn't require re-rendering any of the character animation just to change the timing and intensity of the lighting.
I really just brought the scene up to show that it's not necessary to do all lighting and fx where you do animation. There are other options available, and sometimes it's better and faster to do parts of your shading and fx in another program. (For me it is, anyways.)
That's a good question. I know my Companion 2 breezes through stuff like this using Moho and AE, and this computer is comparable to the higher end Surface Pro 4. The only area where my workstation really outperforms my tablet is for anything requiring a powerful GPU to render. (The Companion has an Intel Iris 6100, which is decent for a tablet computer I guess, but obviously nowhere near as powerful as a real graphics card in a desktop computer.)I wonder how quickly that WOULD render on a surface pro or how AE goes on it
For comparison, my previous mobile, an old convertible tablet computer with 6GB of RAM and modest ATI graphics, handled animating and rendering Scareplane with no trouble. But when I was created HLF on this computer, I found it could only handle the animation part. All the rendering and compositing for that project had to be done at home on my workstation. I think this was mostly because I had to render full HD and I was using AE to add motion blur and other optical fx. Even my workstation, which only had 9GB of RAM at the time, ran into some trouble with rendering that job at 1080p.
Hmm...I think I'll try running an HLF ASP/AE scene through the Companion 2 tablet and see how it handles. Wouldn't it be something if it actually outperforms my old workstation?
