This is perhaps the biggest new After Effects CS6 feature, and yet, we haven’t made a tutorial for it. Why you may ask? Well, being busy making all of these other tutorials, it was very hard to spend the time to cover the in depth new 3D features found in After Effects CS6. Another factor in this decision was that all of our systems are Mac based. Not to say that the new feature is not compatible with Macs, that is not the case at all. However, it does rely heavily on NVIDIA CUDA technology, which most Macs are no longer sold with (hopefully this will change soon). Again, to clarify, that doesn’t mean you can’t use it on a Mac or PC system without an NVIDIA card, but it is quite slow to work with to say the least.
To summarize the new features, however, we WILL do a quick write up.
- To use the new 3D Raytraced Rendered, you need to open up your composition’s settings, Go to the Advanced Tab, and choose Ray-traced 3D as your rendering plugin.
- The new render is capable of refraction, reflection, transparency, casting and receiving shadows, motion blur, depth of field, and even using AE’s new environment mapping.
- Geometry is limited to extruded After Effects Text (no more using Photoshop as a go-between), extruded shape layers, and vector art (Illustrator files) that have been converted to shape layers (also a new feature!). This means, no fbx, obj. or other 3D objects at this point.
- There is no support for Photoshop’s new 3D layers at this point. Meaning, the two systems are separate.
- There is a new Fast Draft render to allow for more real time interaction with your scenes.
We are just scratching the surface of this feature, so we will be sure to update this post with some good articles written by other sites. I have some things that were shockingly impressive come out of this new system, but as you can guess, it is going to be mainly used for text and simple shapes at this point.
As for the state of the Mac Pro, only time will tell what Apple will be doing with its professional line of computers, but our Mac Pros are aging and Apple has been quiet, to say the least.
Update:
http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/cmg_keyframes/story/after_effects_cs6_preview/
http://vimeo.com/motionboutique/videos
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