Wednesday, November 1, 2017

Jiggle & Grow 4

Off and on I've been working on J&G script 4. It's coming along quite well - at least the expression are.

This post is for those of you who want to try it out:

Beta Folder

You'll need both files. Keep in mind, this is just to test the expressions and effects, it doesn't have the script portion so this is literally just a file with fancy controls, you can't use it on your own image.

First: you'll need the newest version of After Effects (2018). This is because I'm abusing a new feature unique to this version. So yes, that does mean only the people running 2018 or newer will be able to run this script. Don't blame me that Adobe just now got around giving expressions access to mask paths.
Edit: This is no longer true for a couple reason I'll maybe explain later, but the short answer is now the script detects which version you have and will do different things accordingly.

What's new?

  • No more Precomposing. It's all handled up front.
  • All expressions have been re-written from the ground up, so they are better in efficiency and readability.
  • New Gravity feature. As the bounce amount crosses the threshold of the gravity amount, the bounce will transition into a more pendulum like movement to behave more like breasts.
  • No more 37 Smears. Instead, I've opted to use a displacement map to achieve a similar effect - way faster than before. (This uses a thing that was added in the early 2017 version of After Effects)
  • "Heftiness" has turned into Stiffness. Similar setting, but does a bit more.
and...
  • This version will support video! The reason is because I'll have access to the mask paths in the expressions, letting me control many more things on the fly.

I'd love to switch to liquify; however, I'm running into issues with that because with liquify there's no way for me to figure out how the user moved the "growth", so... I'm still using reshape for the main expansion effect.

2 comments:

  1. Is there a way to edit the displacement map to choose which parts of the layer the bounce effects will affect? For instance, I'm trying to use this script to adjust a body shape that includes non-breast parts (parts I don't want to bounce like the breasts do) and i want to 'mask out' those parts that I don't want to bounce so much

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    Replies
    1. There is and there isn't. The way you'd want to do this is mask out the thing(s) that shouldn't bounce and put them on a separate layer above the others. Do not apply any of the script's effects to this layer.
      This does mean that you'll have to use photoshop, or any paint based program, to create a new image that paints over the object that shouldn't move. Then use this new image for the script. That way it will bounce and move underneath the object that shouldn't bounce.

      To answer your question a bit more technically: There are two main effects going on, a CC smear effect and a Displacement Map effect. The displacement map effect is being driven by a precomposition called "DM [layer name]", where you could open that up and add masks to. However, the CC smear effect you really can't do that with without creating weird ghosty lines along the outline.

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