Combustion or AE

[muzzy]

I need advice from compositing gurus ...

I am an AE user , I can cut my job with it whenever I need minor changes or compositing needs for animations. But we are planning to do more compositing in near future to have better controls in animations.

Do you think should I switch to combustion just because vray 1.5 will output to combustion and max has a better integration with combustion.

or stay with AE.

I also use AE for keying green screen etc..

What do you think ? Please advice

[dapeter]

I'm personally a Fusion fan, but I'd have to say if AE works for you why switch?

And as far as outputting to Combustion, you can still use render layers and comp them in AE. Only thing you can't do is that 'combustion' material thing that I've never tried out.

[muzzy]

I'm personally a Fusion fan, but I'd have to say if AE works for you why switch?

And as far as outputting to Combustion, you can still use render layers and comp them in AE. Only thing you can't do is that 'combustion' material thing that I've never tried out.

Thanks dapeter,

i liked the paint function of Combustion and tight integration with max.

Those are the main reasons to make me think to switch but I don't know are those worth to learn new software ...

[studioDIM]

Paint, Keyer, Color correction, motion tracking and stabilisation, and RPF support (with channels and 3d post effect, including UV retexturing) are far superior in Combustion.

It's also, to a point, node based, has proper motion curves and can save complex effect pipelines as capsules to be reloaded and reused later.
Plus it's always been working natively to support float depth in bitmaps.

It has its own drawbacks and bugs, but it's not like AE hasn't.

I haven't tried 7.0 with the "new" (for them, of course) 32bpc support (or float, if you prefer) and motion curves.

Most plugins that work in AE do work nicely in combustion, provided you give them the same type of footage (ie. most won't work in float depth).

It ain't a "photoshop based" app, though, so the workflow is fairly different to AE, and more akin to Flame/Inferno (with shared LUT tables and Keyer technologies).

I'd suggest you to try the demo to you heart's satisfaction, and only then try and make the switch if you feel like.

Fusion's extremely cool too, with very good reasons to adopt it (incredible variety of file formats readable and writable, very nice toolset, full 3d particles, very good keyers and CCs, and on and on), but if combustion looks like a stretch from AE, fusion is lightyears apart.

It all boils down to what you do with your footage, and how best you like to work

Have fun choosing!

Lele

[panthon]

I agree with Lele. I you are working with max and vray, combustion is the way to go. Personally I love to benefit from the features of rpf with combustion, and i like the option of working with multiple viewports, while painting masks in one of them, u see the final comp on the other, and the possibility to use rpf 3d cameras in 3d space inside combustion is a plus...
Vector painting is very cool indeed inside combustion. Very easy to get rid of those nasty artifacts u could get from vray sometimes

Combustion is good for those who like to have it all organized, avoiding the annoyance of being hiding and unhiding windows to see what you are doing. Maybe some things are still possible with AE, and specially with AE 7...but it´s true that combustion inherits the spirit of those nifty highend machines as Inferno or Flame, which u will find in every expensive post house around...

But! Combustion is extremely slow when rendering locally, even for simple compositions. The good news is you can use backburner to netrender in combustion, fitting nicely in your backburner pipeline... Besides that, i find combustion evolution to be slower compared to AE, in the past versions u haven´t got any radical new feature....anyway i appreciate its stability has been increasing, especially when using these -awesome- particle effects combustion has.

[muzzy]

I agree with Lele. I you are working with max and vray, combustion is the way to go. Personally I love to benefit from the features of rpf with combustion, and i like the option of working with multiple viewports, while painting masks in one of them, u see the final comp on the other, and the possibility to use rpf 3d cameras in 3d space inside combustion is a plus...
Vector painting is very cool indeed inside combustion. Very easy to get rid of those nasty artifacts u could get from vray sometimes

Those are the features make me think about combustion. I downloaded Combustion demo yesterday and tested the paint function, it is really cool.

Looks like that will take sometime to get used to interface and operators...

Any good combustion tutorials rather than discreet videos ?

Thanks panthon and studioDim, Your posts shows that I am on the right tack to start switching combustion.