[SaintEfan]

It seems like there's an interest in Processing and its potential uses in the motion graphics community. Many of you have probably seen the various experiments I've worked on with integrating Processing and motion graphics, specifically in After Effects. I've recently been developing a more flexible solution for using the motions and behaviors of objects from processing sketches directly in After Effects and I figured that you guys might be interested in taking a look.

I have a brief write-up of the project and a short video demo up right now and I look forward to cleaning up my code and scripts to share with the community. Let me know if this is a tool that you guys would be interested in exploring.

Processing to AE

[chroma_ghost]

Saint,
I was really impressed with your integration of Processing with After Effects. To save out your .txt file with the vector data, are you just creating a function like
saveStrings("data.txt", data);
for each variable output? This opens up many possibilities for some cool organic motion in After Effects. True, expressions could probably replicate many of the functions that Processing can provide, but it's a fun alternative.
Great work!
Cheers.

[KGB]

Nice tool, and a good presentation with the video examples.
It will be interesting to see where this goes, I'm sure down for trying this out.
Great work.

This post has been edited by KGB: 13 May 2008 - 01:39 AM

[SaintEfan]

Chroma -
Basically every object is derived from the same base class which has fields for all the objects properties and knows how to store the "keyframes" for that object. Upon the termination of the app each object dumps all its keyframes into the text file through some saving/formatting functions. This is not a particularly memory efficient method for doing things, but it is faster than writing to a file every frame. You're right that a lot of things can be done with expressions in AE, but for certian things, especially real-time interaction, AE is just not the best solution. My goal is to keep things fast so that framerates can stay interactive and still store all the necessary data.

KGB -
I plan to have the scripts as well as an explanation of the Processing classes up soon.

[pamunoz]

Oh this is neat stuff - great writeup too. Programming is definitely playing a more active role these days in the design process.

[chroma_ghost]

The real time interaction is a great aspect of this proposed workflow. Just with a few Pmouse functions, you could literally draw my animation in real time and kick that position, scale, etc data over to After Effects. It's a nice hybrid of organic creation mixing with After Effects.
Definitely keep us up to date on your progress and I look forward to future postings.
Cheers!

[mncrnich]

SaintEfan, thanks for the time and effort you put into this post. I appreciate it.

-m

[pixel_pimp]

AWESOME! I am still trying to read through the processing book and I had ordered and arduino but it hasn't come yet! Someone has to write a AE plugin Processing!

[Sao_Bento]

chroma_ghost, on May 13 2008, 06:03 AM, said:

The real time interaction is a great aspect of this proposed workflow. Just with a few Pmouse functions, you could literally draw my animation in real time and kick that position, scale, etc data over to After Effects. It's a nice hybrid of organic creation mixing with After Effects.
Definitely keep us up to date on your progress and I look forward to future postings.
Cheers!

You do know about Motion Sketch, right?

[pixel_pimp]

I wish Adobe would port the Spray Can tool to After Effects.