3D compositing, Shake, Combustion or After Effects?

As we don't have a general compositing board I thought I would post it here. For 3D compositing which tool is the best among Shake, Combustion and After Effects? The 3D would be coming from Cinema 4D and a little Maya but mainly 4D.
There will also be a lot of keying, roto, painting and general compositing along with the 3D compositing jobs.

Thanks.

Yeah it seems After Effects is more of a swiss knife than Shake. What I'm gathering is that you need to add many other programs to Shake in order to have the features After Effects offers alone.
In 3D, the word on the street is that After Effects is better because Shake's multiplane node, which is it's 3D or rather 2.5D is very buggy and temperamental and can lead one to suicide if you try doing more complex 3D stuff with it (sarcasm). So it seems to go like that:

After Effects: Motion Graphics and 3D.
Shake: all the rest of compositing operations.

yeah - tho if motion graphics are important to you then consider this

Motion graphic is not that important for me. I think Motion can handle all the mograph work I ever get. My mograph is limited to title design, sign replacements in live action footage, matte paintings and 3D environments etc.

if you are on apple mac tho and using final cut studio 2- which shake runs very well with you may find that with Motion and Final Cut Pro and shake together you can do pretty much everything and more that after effects can do - and that has apple color thrown in too.


Yeah definitely, and I use Final Cut Studio 2, but for 3D work, if AE handles 3D better and has more features in this regard, then FCP+Motion+Shake can't save you right?

Maybe After effects is a better bet if you are avid editing based? I would say so.

I guess that's their only option in the affordable level. :D

Yes, I heard that. This might end up being an advantage in the process. But you can also use this plug-in which will allow you to export Maya data from C4d into Shake and Shake handles Maya really well I hear:
http://www.vreel-3d.de/plugins/CaMaya/links.html

Hi.

As one of my old friend once sayed it is not important what you use but what is the outcome mathers.

It generally depends in work flow and and what you have used to and how it calculates(renders) stuff you make. For example combustion you could net render pretty eazy. In other hand i'd say shake renders on 8 cores a bit better and feels more "industrial" and acts more like Scrach. AE has a bit more filters and effects but for me with combustion back it feels better with shake motion and color. Combution feels really good with its high end realtives inner guts.

So you just have to test it all out and see which one fits to your work flow and not so much worry what other people say.


--

Margus

http://iconstudios.eu

Hi again.

It is a bit confusing for me what is this 3d composition
?

Generally you can controll stuff in 3d space in motion and render it out in motion or with shake does not mather. For me 3d compositing means more like combining 3d work with video etc. If rendered 3d maches video it really is 2 sequences of images nothing more. You can use number of stuff to mach your 3d with video it does not concerne AE or combustion much as they do not do real 3d camera maching. You can use separate tracers to get camera data for 3d etc.
So you can have camera data to eny of these AE combustion or shake from separate maching app.

I see no speciality there from eny of compositing soft.

Probably you mean you want to take 2d flat psd and make 3d out of it ?



--

Margus

http://iconstudios.eu

Hi.

I'd say motion and combustion both are good on that also.



--

Margus

http://iconstudios.eu

Thanks.
I actually tried Combustion keyers before but I have to say I like Shake better for keying. Primatte and Keylight are very powerful and complex keyers and you can pull any key you want with them. By the way, a one click key is something I would never use. You have to go under the hood and apply multiple keys. :)

I have heard a lot of good things about Combustion's paint and roto and very often actually. I just never felt like buying it and learning it just because of the roto and paint when Shake's are very powerful and great as well, even if supposedly not as good as Combustion's. Now this is the first time I'm hearing about Combustion being great for 3D compositing. In the low end you always hear After Effects being suggested. Shake's 3D is really limited and it doesn't even have lights. I didn't know C* had lights and shadows. Can C* do camera projection? AE has sort of a work around for it.Does C* have intersecting planes?
None of the links you gave show C* doing 3D. I believe it probably handles it similarly to AE since they are both layer based. I know C* has a schematic view but this is not the same as node based. How does it handle panoramas? How matchmove and 3D tracking info?

Thanks. Although Combustion sounds good there doesn't seem to be enough to go for it over Shake in my opinion. As I said, Shake's roto and paint are great as well and the keyers are king. 3D in Combsution seems to have some things Shake doesn't and lack other things Shake has so it looks like a wash. I also heard some rumors Autodesk may discontinue Combustion to concentrate on Toxik or merge them both, although this has nothing to do with anything we are talking here and Shake is already EOL. But I don't like Toxik at all though.

Just a quick chime in, am busy at work (man i need to find time to go through these threads ;-).

In regards to what compositing systems work best with 3d (as in actually compositing in a 3d environment, allowing you to do camera projection onto basic geometry (be it curved planes or basic meshes), light, etc), hands down my pick would be Nuke (...now if I could only win the lottery to get a personal copy), ...second, which isn't noted here is Fusion (which also has the ability to generate particles in 3d) and from all accounts is very useable in the 3d compositing realm (again a true 3d environment).

Notes on the other apps mentioned.

Combustion - great paint, roto and color correction tools, but it has 2.5d planar compositing, not really different to the two apps below at a fundamental level

Shake - been an industry staple for donkeys years, the keylight/primatte combo kicks butt for keying, extremely powerful and if you do multipass 3d renders there are a number of tutorials on how to relight using these passes (and also macros to relight using normal map renders). Go to fxshare to find out more.
Something I hasten to add is you can do the above multipass tricks in any compositing application and techniques you should learn (why re-render a slow 3d scene when you can tweak things like material colours and basic lighting in 2d interactively and quickly render it off).

In the true 3d comping sense it falls down as it is really just multiplane 2.5d and is fine if you do basic things with it (i.e. bring in a matchmove camera and use some planes to do set extensions), ...but can get buggy if you make things too complex.

After Effects - lacking in the roto and paint dept, has great tracker in Mocha, integrates closely with C4D but likewise works with maya pretty well. Cs4 has made some progress in 3d land, you can now use 3d geometry in your scenes, ...the BIG gotcha is that you need Photoshop to convert your objects to its proprietry 3d scene format, ...and the render quality is not exactly Mental Ray/VRay/Renderman/etc

Motion - okay if you're an editor wanting to rustle something quick up but like chinese water torture if you want to get down and dirty with the tweakage (for serious mograph I'd recommend After Effects, Combustion or Fusion over it, ...and for compositing it would come last on my list)

Hope that helps.

andrew