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MillimeterReview: Apple Motion 4
Sep 9, 2009 2:30 PM, by Franklin McMahon
In Apple Motion 4, parameter panels are easier to navigate, as is the moveable pop-up, semi-transparent heads-up-display interface—which adapts to whichever tool you have just selected.
Apple Motion—now in version 4 as part of the new Final Cut Studio suite—boasts major advances in the areas of text, camera framing, depth of field, 3D shadows and reflections, credit rolls, and link parameter options. As Motion continues to be refined, the comparisons with Adobe After Effects (AE) become more and more inescapable.
As the program gains in feature set and sophistication, how does that affect its vaunted intuitiveness? After all, Motion has become the go-to tool for pros who want to get a 3D animation project up and running quickly, and with a minimal learning curve. While AE’s interface keeps you twirling out layers in your continually scrolling timeline in order to make adjustments, Motion moves the toolset up and to the left of the main window. In Motion 4, parameter panels are easier to navigate, as is the moveable pop-up, semi-transparent heads-up-display (HUD) interface—which adapts to whichever tool you have just selected.
Motion has been built from the ground up to be a realtime construction tool with realtime playback. In recent years, After Effects—with its OpenGL options—has caught up with it. This new version of Motion probably will not get anyone to give up AE, but it does offer some powerful new tools that seem ready to please higher-end motion-graphics artists who needed more from the feature set of the last version.
Parameter linking allows you to link animated elements to each other. For example, say you have a propeller plane flying through 3D space. You could animate the propellers separately to make them spin while they are connected to the plane, which is moving. Previous versions of Motion made this a perilous keyframing nightmare. Motion 4 does it automatically by linking animations, avoiding the need for keyframing calisthenics by calculating the speed, alignment, and movement automagically.
Motion 4 now officially has a depth-of-field command. In previous versions, simulating depth of field was a troublesome task. You had to blur objects or entire scene segments separately as a cheat. It worked in a pinch, but as soon as you moved the camera, the deal was off because you had to recalibrate everything to incorporate movement. Now it’s easy. Just set your focal point—that part of the scene you want in focus. You can actually just pick an object and with one click, keep that part in focus and bathe everything else in a soft blur. Pull rack focus effects by assigning multiple focus parameters to many objects. One of the coolest new additions is a focus camera behavior. You basically lock focus to a single object or element in your scene, then animate objects and the camera while the zone of focus stays on just what you preselect.
The program finally includes 3D reflections and shadows. Motion has long enabled creation in true 3D space (along with providing 3D object volume depth in areas such as particle emitters), but reflections and shadows in the previous versions had to be fudged. That is, you could simulate them, but it was a laborious process. 3D reflections, as you might imagine, make for very realistic effects, and the reflections offer a lot of control. Take the example of text sitting on a flat plane. You can turn on 3D reflections, and the floor will reflect as if it were a mirror or pane of glass. You can adjust the blur of the reflection to work toward a sense of realism and even simulate reflection falloff. Typically, a reflected image tapers off as the reflection extends, so if you were to look at the reflection of text on a floor plane, you would see the bottom of the text as sharper. The top would be a bit less sharp and more blurred. A falloff parameter allows you to set how falloff is displayed. You might usually set it so that the reflection begins to disappear around the halfway mark. An exponent option allows you to move the midpoint of the falloff. Imagine that the falloff reflection is a gradient blend. The exponent option would allow you to shift the bend interactively.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
