PSUNAMI WHAT IS PSUNAMI? Digital Anarchy Psunami is a plug-in for Adobe After Effects 4.0 or later, which simulates photorealistic oceans and skies. Psunami creates the illusion of real water and air by modeling the true physics of large-body water and atmospheric systems. This is accomplished by creating a genuine 3D environment within After Effects, with polygonal modeling, geometric displacement mapping, a 3D animatable camera, animatable light sources, and raytracing with reflections and texture mapping. Within this environment, you can fully animate the camera in three dimensions, precisely control waves and swells in the ocean surface, simulate haze and rainbows in the atmosphere, and animate two "suns" at once, for fine lighting control. Up to three still or animated image maps can be used to create your own skies, or to incorporate logos in the ocean surface with displacement mapping. 1 WHAT IS PSUNAMI? PSUNAMI Raytracing, the rendering technique Psunami uses to achieve its photorealistic results, is available in most of the professional 3D applications used for special effects production today. When a scene is rendered with raytracing, the computer shoots out virtual light rays from the camera's viewpoint, and traces the bends and bounces of these light rays around the scene back to the camera. If a light ray is visible to the camera, the surfaces illuminated by the ray are rendered in the final view. The renderer takes into account whether surfaces are reflective, translucent, or transparent, and alters the ray accordingly. If enough rays are sent out into the scene (potentially millions), the results can be highly realistic. Shadows, reflections, and refractions (the bending of the light ray through transparent surfaces) are calculated automatically as part of the scene, greatly increasing the realism. Raytracing is especially suitable for calculating objects and scenes with lots of reflective surfaces, like glass and water. As you might guess, calculating millions of rays can be a time-consuming process, and requires substantial computer horsepower to render frames in a reasonable time. Digital Anarchy Psunami has been specially optimized for speed in the After Effects environment, making it one of the fastest 3D raytracers available today. 2 PSUNAMI PSUNAMI PROPERTIES Parameters ­ or "properties", as they are referred to in Psunami ­ are organized into logical groups: RENDER OPTIONS, AIR OPTICS, and so on. You can open each group with the roll-down arrow next to the group name to access the category's properties, or collapse each group to free up screen space and reduce clutter. When you first apply Psunami to a layer in After Effects, the default property settings are used, in which the camera is positioned at an elevation of 10 meters over the ocean surface, facing east toward the sun, and angled down toward the water slightly. As with all After Effects plug-ins, you can return to these default settings at any time by clicking the Reset button next to the plug-in's name in the Effect Controls window. 3 PRESETS PSUNAMI PSUNAMI'S ABOUT BOX If you click the "About..." button next to the Reset button at the top of Psunami's Effect Controls window, the About box will open. In addition to the lovely underwater animation displayed in the About box, you can view Psunami's production credits, visit the Digital Anarchy web site by clicking on the Digital Anarchy logo, and also --this is the best part -- check out how long the last frame took to render. Psunami keeps track of your render times for each frame and displays the time for the last one in the Last Frame Render Time field. You can use this as a way to estimate how long any given Psunami animation will take to render by multiplying the Last Frame Render Time by the number of frames in your animation. Click anywhere in the About box to close it. PRESETS Psunami ships with a number of presets you can use as starting points for your own experimentation. When you first install Psunami, it creates a folder in the After Effects plug-ins folder called Atomic Presets. In that folder is a Psunami folder, and in the Psunami folder you'll find subfolders of preset categories, containing the actual presets. Your own presets and categories will be saved here as well. Be careful not to move or rename these folders, or you may not be able to load your presets. The first property group you will see is PRESETS. If the PRESETS roll-down arrow is not already down, click it to reveal the Presets control panel. The Presets Control Panel The Presets control panel lets you open and apply Psunami presets or collections of property settings; choose which properties will be affected when you apply a preset; organize your presets into categories; save, rename, and delete presets and categories; and reset selected groups of properties to the default settings without resetting all of them. 4 PSUNAMI PRESETS Note that the Presets control panel is divided into 3 panes: LOAD, SAVE, and RESET. You use the controls in the LOAD pane to load and apply presets, and to choose whether to apply all the property groups in the preset, or to apply selected groups of properties. To choose a preset, click on the Preset pop-up menu. You'll see a list of preset categories with sidearrows; drag down to a category to open the side-arrow submenu, then drag over to a preset to select it. To apply all the properties in the preset to your Psunami layer, choose All from the Property pop-up menu, then click the "Go!" button. Important: Your preset will not be applied until you click "Go!". To apply a single property group to your Psunami layer, leaving all other properties at their current settings, choose the desired property group from the Property pop-up, then click "Go!". You can choose other property groups to apply by simply selecting the groups and clicking "Go!" after each selection. The Preset Manager Once you've created your own Psunami settings that you'd like to save for later use, you use the Presets control panel to save and organize them. The SAVE pane in the Presets control panel lets you open the Anarchy Preset Manager, where you can save, copy, rename, and delete your own presets, as well as create, save, and delete your own categories. You can also use the Anarchy Preset Manager to rename and delete the default installed presets and categories, if you wish. 5 PRESETS PSUNAMI To open the Atomic Preset Manager, click on the "Options..." button in the SAVE pane of the Presets control panel. You'll notice three panes in the Anarchy Preset Manager window ­ Save Preset, Manage Categories, and Manage Presets. To save your preset, type a name for the preset, up to 31 characters long, into the Preset Name field, then choose a category into which to save the preset. To choose an existing category, select the category from the "...Into Category" pop-up menu. To save the preset into the existing category you just chose, click the Save button in the Save Preset pane. To create a new category, type the category name, up to 31 characters long, into the New Category field in the Manage Categories pane, then click the corresponding Save button. To save your preset into the new category you just created, select the new category from the "...Into Category" pop-up menu, then click the corresponding Save button. You can also use the Anarchy Preset Manager to copy, rename, and erase presets, and to erase categories. To erase new or existing categories, choose the category from the Erase Category pop-up in the Manage Categories pane, then click the corresponding Erase button. You'll get a warning that erasing a category also erases all the presets in the category. Think carefully before you click OK, because this operation is not undo-able. To erase a preset, select the preset in the Choose Preset pop-up menu, then click the Erase button in the Manage Presets pane. To copy a preset, select the preset in the Choose Preset pop-up menu, then click the Copy button. The preset will be duplicated into the same category where the original is located, with the default name PresetName1. To rename a preset, select the preset in the Choose Preset pop-up menu, then click the Rename button. You'll see a field pop up where you can type the new preset name. Click Save to change the preset name, or Cancel to cancel the name change. To exit the Anarchy Preset Manager and return to the Psunami Effect Controls window, click Done. Resetting Selected Properties The Presets control panel also lets you selectively reset Psunami property groups to their default settings. Once you've loaded a complete preset or one or more property groups from a preset, you may find it necessary to reset one or more of the altered property groups, especially if you're just trying out presets and don't like the results of a selected preset property group you've just loaded. You can always use the standard After Effects "Reset" button found in all Effect Controls windows, but this resets all properties in the effect to their default settings, which will wipe out other property group settings you may want to keep. The RESET pane lets you select individual property groups to reset. To reset a property group, select it from the Property pop-up menu in the RESET pane. All the properties in the property group will immediately be reset to their default values. Important: resetting a property group is undo-able. 6 PSUNAMI RENDER OPTIONS RENDER OPTIONS Psunami's RENDER OPTIONS control how the plug-in will display and render your scene. The RENDER OPTIONS let you render just the air, just the water, or both in your scene; display and render the final output version of your scene in two different qualities, or display a variety of grayscale and wireframe setup modes, grayscale depth maps, or light tracking dots for use with other plug-ins; control the amount of geometry Psunami generates; stretch or loop the animation time; and control the gamma and color scaling in your scene. Render What RENDER WHAT specifies which parts of your scene will be rendered and which will be replaced by a black (transparent) alpha channel. Both Air and Water Selecting Both Air and Water tells Psunami to fully render all the elements in your scene and keep the alpha channel fully white (opaque). The illustration below shows the results of RENDER WHAT set to Both Air and Water with the Psunami default settings ­ a normal render. 7 RENDER OPTIONS PSUNAMI Air Only Air Only renders only the atmosphere and light sources into the scene, with the water area replaced by black in the alpha channel (below left). This allows you to composite your own water or other imagery into the Psunami scene while using the sky generated by the plug-in. Water Only Water Only renders only the water in your scene, replacing the sky with black in the alpha channel (below right). Use the Water Only setting to composite your own skies into your Psunami scene. Air Only and Water Only are also useful for isolating the air and water for individual post processing. In other words, if you want to change the sky color or add a glow to the water, you can render two passes of your Psunami scene, one set to Air Only and the other set to Water Only, then composite both together into the scene as separate layers. You can then apply filters to each layer to affect the water and air separately. Water Only to Max Distance Finally, Water Only to Max Distance renders only the water, just as in the Water Only option, but in this case the water is rendered only to the maximum distance, as shown in the top left illustration on the following page. You set the maximum distance with the MAX DISTANCE slider. 8 PSUNAMI RENDER OPTIONS One use for Water Only to Max Distance is to allow you to composite your own layer into the water in a Psunami scene. To do this, duplicate your Psunami layer, and call it "Max Distance Layer" or something similar. Set this layer's RENDER WHAT option to Water Only to Max Distance, and set the MAX DISTANCE value very low. If you're using the default Psunami values, a MAX DISTANCE setting of 0.1 or less is a good starting point. Position the Max Distance Layer above the original Psunami layer, and composite your own layer between the Psunami layers. Your layer will appear in the midground, with the foreground water from the Max Distance Layer matching the background water in the original layer (top right). Water Only to Max Distance is also useful for eliminating the bright line you sometimes see at the horizon when rendering using Water Only, as in the Water Only illustration on the preceding page. With Psunami's default settings, using Water Only to Max Distance cuts off the extreme far range of the water layer, removing the bright horizon line, as seen below. Note that Psunami's RENDER WHAT options apply only to Wireframe, Texture, Realistic, Too Realistic, and Depth Map RENDER MODES. They have n ...