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PACK ⬕ Astral Mist
🕑 Added 2024-10-02 15:55:08 +0000 UTCTORRENT DOWNLOAD
This pack contains 125 VJ loops (30 GB)
I've been wanting to revisit my love of nebulae. While working at the planetarium, my friend and coworker Wade Sylvester figured out how to use the fluid simulations in Maya to make some really beautiful nebulae. Some were realistic, others were abstract to the core, and his approach to making nebulae showed me what was possible for pushing a tool past it's original intent. But rendering Maya fluid sims is slow using a CPU render engine and it's tricky to explore different ideas quickly. I've revisited Maya several times over the years and it's hard to move fast and feel creative with it. So I got curious and did some research and stumbled across the 'Mettle Flux' plugin for After Effects. In the past I've never been a fan of fractal flames but something about these volumetric fractals are strangely beautiful, reminiscent of smoke, or maybe conscious gas from another universe. So I find myself playing with fractals again.
Due to the nature of fractals, many of the attributes in the Flux plugin are interlinked and so getting a nice starting point is step one. But then figuring out which attributes to animate and still keep it cohesive is delicate and it took me quite a bit of experimenting to nail down figure out a workflow. The Randomize button is useful for generating a start point for a new scene but often everything would be completely overexposed and blown out. So from there I needed to adjust the Threshold Feather (~100), Threshold (0-40), tune Density until it looked good, carefully adjust the Scale, and then determine if it's worthy of further experimentation. The Scale attribute is important since it determines the overall look of the fractal at a glance. But the brightness attribute of the various Mutations are also interlinked, which is sensitive when trying to nail down a particular hot spot.
It was difficult to create the gradient colors I had in mind since the colors mix differently according to the keyframes and so I learned to lean into the happy accidents. Also the Cross Section attribute is full of happy accidents, sometimes incredible and other times terrible, likely according to the fractal type. The "Slice Oscillate" scenes are when I animated the Cross Section attribute back and forth to cut through the volumetric fractal. Sometimes I wanted the fractal to feel alive and so I would apply a wiggle expression (with a unique seed) onto the Translation and Rotation attributes for individual Mutations and give it a long time duration. It's wild that some of these scenes looks as if I've applied slitscan FX but really it's just the look of these 3D fractals. Volumetric fractals are fun to explore and there are infinite variations to dive into.
Since I was already in After Effects, doing loads of experiments with compositing was easy. Adding some Deep Glow FX was super ripe for some of these scenes and really made them shine. I experimented with adding the Colorama FX and animating the cycle attribute to get gradients repeating within gradients of the fractals. For the "Congeal" scenes I experimented with the CC Blobbylize FX, which I normally loathe, but in this context it did some interesting things in making it feel like pseudo-3D abstract shapes. We are made of star stuff.
Comments
Stephen Johnson
thanks for the whole break down. most of my area of expertise is on the live side, but I've played with after effects and C4D very briefly. With the advent of LLM use in live shows though I've been thinking of upgrading my very dated machine i built...oh shoot years now, its just an i7-8700k, 1080ti, and 4x16gb gskill. I initially planned to have two 1080's, as the 20 series had just released when I started this, and do custom water loops but I quickly ran out of budget/motivation. the 1080ti holds up surprisingly well for a lot of things with 12gb of VRAM, its just slow. I have a new HP laptop I bought for live work with a 4070 and it works fine. The desktop on the other hand...could be better. I definitely want to build an AMD CPU, I've heard of threadripper's thermals being high, but I'd probably concede the CPU budget and put more into the GPU
Jason Fletcher
I built my tower for many different rendering use cases and so I needed a beefy CPU that offered both single thread speeds, tons of cores, and excellent thermals. But really I only went with the Quadro GPU cards because I got them at a significant price reduction since they are a few generations behind. 3D apps and AI tools can make use of multiple GPU cards, but After Effects cannot. Overall thermals is at the top of my mind since I frequently do renders for 2-5 days straight and so I don't want anything to cook. But After Effects uses a mix of CPU and GPU processing and finally makes use of multithreading and so the core utilization is quite good. Maya/Redshift is my combo of choice for 3D animation and rendering is almost entirely GPU focused. Blender can use GPU or CPU. AI tools are very heavy on VRAM and I'd say that 12GB is the minimum needed to run stuff locally, but 16GB is preferable, but that trend is only getting worse and feels like 24GB is becoming necessary. So if you wanna save some bucks then I've suggest the AMD 5800X (8-core) or AMD 5900X (12-core) since that is the last of the line to support the AM4 CPU socket and so the CPU cannot be further upgraded in the future but the cost savings are enticing. Sure it's one generation behind but it's an excellent CPU series and the thermals are amazing since it only needs air cooling, but the Ryzen 9 series runs hot and is difficult to cool without throttling happening. As for GPU, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 is probably the best bet currently for price to performance ratio. Or maybe the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 12GB if you can find one for a good price. Beware of buying a used GPU since it could've been used for crypto and the VRAM is typically the first thing to die due to prolonged thermals and NVIDIA pushing the envelope a bit too hard these days. As you can probably tell, I'm a DIY computing junkie. My dream for a long time was to be able to render my own crazy ideas from home and not need a render farm, and that era is finally here. Here's my tower specs if it's helpful to ya. --- AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16-Core Processor --- (x2) Nvidia Quadro RTX 5000 16GB --- MSI MEG X570 ACE ATX AM4 Motherboard --- G.Skill Flare X 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR4-3200 CL14 Memory --- Seasonic PRIME SSR-1300GD 1300W 80+ Gold --- Noctua NH-D15 CPU Cooler --- Fractal Design Meshify 2 ATX Mid Tower Case (metal panel) --- Samsung 970 EVO 2TB M.2 NVMe --- (x3) 4TB internal hard drives for scene storage --- (x1) 10TB external hard drive for backups
Stephen Johnson
phew. I was looking at building a newer rig, for exploring more creator avenues. but that's definitely more than I would have planned for. what is the core utilization while using those plugins? are you even able to tap into the multi-threading? I guess it doesn't matter at 7200 frames...as you said.
Jason Fletcher
I use an AMD 5950X CPU and it's amazing having so many cores, yet CPU speed or cores isn't the real issue. Maya Fluids are quite intensive to render at 10-30 seconds per frame using V-Ray or Mental Ray. So 2 minutes of footage at 60fps, comes out to 7200 frames... Hence the render times aren't pretty. Also the viewport preview is lousy and so there is a lot of guesswork of what it'll look like when keyframed. While the results are unique, it limits the experimental creative process for me and doesn't allow me to try out ideas quickly. So these days I try to rely on software which renders on the GPU as much as I can. I have (x2) Quadro RTX 5000 GPUs and together they basically equal a 3090 but run cooler and so I can render for days straight without thermal issues.
Stephen Johnson
I'm also curious about your computer, what kind of cpu are you using that you're running into issues?
Jason Fletcher
That's a cool idea. It'd be interesting to use Stable Diffusion or Flux to generate a few thousand images of nebulae and then train StyleGAN2 on it... I gotta chew on it!
Stephen Johnson
you've used machine learning for things right? I'm curious if you could use the James webb images to help with the fluidity things. idk. I know so little about these workflows.
Jason Fletcher
Yeah for real, Johnathan Singer takes the Flux plugin to a whole another level!
J-rod Timms
thats the same plugin singer uses for a good bit of his work, tryna play around with that as well looks so amazing
