With the Mask Feather Tool, the individual points can also be keyframed along the timeline and adjusted with the object being masked. In earlier versions of After Effects, users would have to create multiple masks and stack them to obtain variable edge feathering, which is not only more tedious, but makes animating the paths over time a painful experience. This means that a single path can now be modified to accommodate both hard and soft edge surfaces such as motion blur in a moving object. You can apply then new Mask Feather Tool to any segment of a closed mask path, which creates handles that can be adjusted to determine the amount of feathering along the path in those regions. The tools provided only generate some more realistic results without the need to rely on third-party plug-ins for basic animations and motion graphics, but you will still need something like Zaxworks to produce 3D elements featuring bump mapping and sophisticated texturing.Īs a compositor, I find the new variable mask edge feathering feature extremely useful and something I’ve been waiting for. While these significant 3D enhancements have been made, it’s clear that Adobe isn’t trying to compete in the 3D modeling or application space. The new ray-traced 3D feature allows you to add bevels and extrusions to vector layers like text and shapes. Ray-traced rendering enhances the 3D objects with much more realism than ever before, with environment mapping and light refraction through transparent materials. And all 3D objects can interact with each other to cast shadows, reflections, transparency, specular and diffused light, and more. Text and shape layers can now be extruded with beveled edges, and footage clips, images, and solid layers or even sub-comps can be bent in 3D space. New 3D extrusions, bendable footage, and ray-tracingĪdobe has totally reworked the After Effects CS6 3D environment.
(Adobe says that earlier tests by Nvidia yielded acceleration by a factor of 1.5 to 2.5 times, with some graphic functions being up to 16 times faster than before.) Additionally, this cache contains frames from all projects you have opened in the same or earlier sessions, so disk cached frames from one project will be retrieved for reuse in other projects that use those same frames.Īfter Effects CS6 also better harnesses OpenGL and your video card, resulting in a more responsive and immediate playback of large compositions-especially on larger displays. Selecting a dedicated solid state drive (SSD) on your system-whether an internal drive on a tower or an external USB or Thunderbolt drive-to be used as your disk cache, will greatly boost performance without further taxing your system hard drive. With the persistent disk cache, you can reopen a project you had previously rendered and have the cache remain intact and ready for immediate preview playback.