I wish Adobe had put their efforts toward making their renderer as fast as possible for all users. It’s a brute-force multi-sample renderer-the kind you’d write if performance in a massively-parallel computing environment (i.e. The After Effects ray-tracer has none of these. And yet, at the same time as the CS6 announcement, Autodesk announced a greatly updated Smoke for Mac, one of the primary features being that it works on just about any Apple hardware, including my iMac.īut surely it’s impossible that a ray-tracer could ever be as fast on a CPU as on a GPU, right? Maybe-but there are numerous well-established optimizations available to ray-tracers, including sub-sampling (where areas of sparse sampling are interpolated rather then allowed to be noisy), adaptive sampling (where the number of ray samples required for each pixel is adjusted based on scene content), and progressive refinement (where low-quality results are shown to the user rapidly, and then iteratively built-upon for higher quality). I expect Autodesk to ship something that requires esoteric hardware, but not Adobe. This binary hardware differentiation between the ray-tracing haves and have-nots is, to me, unbefitting of After Effects, which has always struck me as the “people’s choice” compositor-such a paragon of accessibility that I consider it a must-have tool for the DV Rebel. I mean, sure, you can try, but the render times will very likely dissuade you. If you have a CUDA card, you can use and enjoy the ray tracer. I don’t begrudge Adobe the decision to accelerate the ray-tracer for CUDA, but I do regret the seeming prioritization of that optimization over any kind of CPU usability. On my $3,000 iMac, one frame of the iPhone animation takes 48 minutes. And by no dice, I mean you would not want to try to render something as simple as a pair of dice. And my top-of-the-line, pimped-out iMac has an AMD GPU. My MacBook Pro has an NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M, but that’s not beefy enough for AE6, so I’m stuck with CPU rendering. The problem is, I don’t don’t happen to own one of these supported systems. The above iPhone animation rendered in 2 hours, 15 minutes on a machine with a $2,000 NVIDIA Tesla C2075 GPU. And indeed, on a supported system, After Effects CS6 can ray-trace pretty darn fast. Adobe decided to accelerate their new renderer using the NVIDIA CUDA technology, where the massive parallel processing capability of a GPU is turned to general computing tasks. The results can look amazing.īut ray-tracing can be computationally expensive. It supports motion blur, depth-of-field, diffused reflections, and soft shadows, all in 32-bit floating point color. The After Effects 3D renderer is a powerful and feature-rich ray tracer. So I’m happy to see true 3D geometry finally spinning in my AE viewport. But now it’s hard to imagine compositing without a 3D environment, and After Effects has been lapped several times by its competition in 3D features. At the time, adding 3D layers to a dedicated compositor was a somewhat controversial move. AE was way ahead of most of its competition (except flame, of course) in bringing 3D capabilities to a compositing environment. The ray-traced 3D renderer is the first major update to AE’s 3D capabilities since they were first introduced in 2001–2002. Global Performance Cache (sexier than it sounds)Įach of these features is worth its own post, so I’ll just pick one to start. The new version includes some exciting new features: While I was busy making Canadian Lysol commercial history, Adobe released Creative Suite 6, including a major update for my favorite creative software of all time, After Effects.
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