Photos falling on desk

Hi everyone!

At my workplace we are trying out Fusion as an alternative to Adobe Products. I have a few questions:
• How suited is Fusion for 2D motion graphics?
• Can AE templates and/or plugins be imported?

One of the things that I was tasked to do is recreate a commercial with many 2D motion graphic elements. One of these is having a bunch of photos falling and settling on table under an overhead camera. Since I cant post links yet, please search After Effects falling cards template in YouTube for a visual.

[Steve Roberts]

Fusion is very capable for Motion graphics. see the examples here:

Falling, with rigid body dynamics here:

Explore many video here
https://www.youtube.com/user/eyeonsoftware/videos

If you use AE's puppet tool you'll miss such a capability in Fusion. But search for the Krokodove plugin demos on vimeo or the Fusion 7 webinar countdown and the work of Dunn Lewis to see its capabilities.

AE templates or plugins can't be used in Fusion.

I doubt you need physics simulation for falling photos. In case you do PM me

I did not have time to make a macro out of this, but maybe the comments help. (See attachment)

There are certain limits to this approach, I think a much more advanced look is possible with Replicate3D (or Duplicate3D if it had the same ingenious multi-input support. *cough* feature request *cough* )

I still had some tea left....

This version requires more setup work, but you have more control and nicer renderings than Particle sprites.

... talking of feature requests: I don't know if the reason for leaving out id in the Custom Vertex tools was because of unique vertices versus points, but now that we have a weld tool please allow ids in custom vertex. This limits the power of the tool to 10% plus you have to make crazy workarounds like remapping the id to a channel or similar (compare the comp), which then again gets evaluated (=pain).

Three in a row: I know this one may be hard due to caching etc. but changing upstream requests opens a hole new world or possibilities. Compare Houdinis Stamp feature.

In a nutshell imagine that I had only one ImagePlane but could push the ID of the current processed vertex in a replicate or custom vertex upstream so that the ImagePlane or any other node could react to the id.

This is the future.

Actually in houdini you can stamp any attribute but the most useful is the id.

In Fusion think of this:

Code: Select all

[Points]->[Replicate]
             A    | (Hidden: Change the request to the current id)
             |    V
          [ImagePlane] (Evaluates each request with the given id)


Now I could make an expression in the ImagePlane which e.g. changes the position based on the id.
The result is that I generate multiple copies.
For a transform this doesn't make sense, since it is implemented in the Replicate, but you could use it to drive any procedural changes before hitting the replicate.

EDIT: Sorry for pushing the requests in your thread. Just had to let the brainfarts go

This is quite an amazing nifty expression!
Lots to learn...
Thanks!

Apologies for the late reply. This is all quite a bit to wrap my head around at the moment but I will get get here soon enough.

@Blazej Floch: Thanks for sharing this. I was already setting up a VM with AE since I could not figure out how to solve this in Fusion.


One question is left: I want to add more photos, so I add more instances, but how do you make the green connection between image plane and instances (never seen this before..)?

Figured it out:
Instances are displayed with a green cable.
Copy imageplane with CTRL+V and paste it with CTRL+SHIFT+V to create an instance.