Did After Effects Just Beat Blender?!

as you might know Adobe recently released an update allowing you to import 3D models into After Effects but how good is it really and can it compete with professional 3D software today we're putting it to the test comparing it with blender using pych render engine we start with an easy shot and work our way up all the way to a difficult one and the best part you get to guess which renders from which software before reveal it so without any further Ado let's Dive Right in I've prepared four shots for you let me know how many you got correct in the comments down below before we start though I want to clarify that after effect is a compositing software normally you would Rend on the 3D software like blender and then do the compositing and after effects so both software usually work hand in hand however with adobe's new features we might not need 3 software anymore so let's take a look at the first shot all right which one is which take a look at them side by side okay so the first shot was Ren out in blender and the second one was run out in After Effects if you're an active viewer on this channel you might have seen the shot already because I did a tutorial on how you can add this rock in After Effects so if you're interested check it out I will l it to you at the end the difference is actually a lot bigger than I thought especially if we compared with some other tests that I've done for later in the video which are actually a lot more difficult so let's see where that is if we look at the Shadows they are actually kind of similar in both renders blender actually rendered the Shadows all by itself after effects currently can't do that so I had to add them in manually with a mask but as the rock is kind of far away from the ground this was not really a problem if we We compare both rocks though we can really see the difference in render quality that's just because pych is a r traced render engine and therefore calculates the Shadows here way better than After Effects which is not R traced and uses a rather simple render engine and therefore the Shadows doesn't look as good it's missing some depth I feel like it's like one thing which all Blends in together and you can't really see what's closer and what's further away which is way different to the Ender render where you can clearly see everything if we talk about workflow though it was a lot more fun to do it in After Effects because it rendered a whole lot faster and I didn't have to switch any programs while working on it and could do everything in one go so the workflow goes to After Effects but if we look at a shot as a whole I have to say that blender would be the best choice here so the next shot should be a little bit harder but still doable for After Effects so to find such a shot I went online and found the promo video by Adobe themselves where they presented some 3D models in a studio like environment and it looked really good so that's exactly what I recreated for the second [Music] shot the B look really similar so take a look at them again side by side [Music] so the first shot was run in After Effects and the second shot was run in blender this shot really surprised me both renders look almost exactly the same and you really have to search for the differences so if you really want to get a good-look shot out of After Effects the studio environment really seems like a great option it's still not perfect though and I noticed three major differences so let's take a look at them the first first one I noticed is motion blur After Effects currently doesn't support motion blur and you have to add in a pixel motion blur effect but this of course doesn't look really good you really notice it when it rotates here it looks kind of janky and really weird and that's just very different when we compare it with the blender render where it looks really clean and pretty much perfect the second difference is light if we compare both renders we can see that the blender render is lit a lot more evenly it becomes the most obvious if we look at the strawberry here in the after effects render there are this Dark Shadows at the edge and if we look at the blender render that's just not the case he has just lit a lot more evenly like it also would be in real life and the last difference is depth of field I could hide it pretty well by adding a camera lens blow effect to everything that's close to the camera and sort of fake it in that way but if we compare to blender it looks a lot cleaner as I literally just selected the right object to focus on and blender just took care of the rest and calculated everything perfectly but still I'm very surprised by the end result so good job Adobe if you're an active viewer on this channel you also know the next shot because I already did a blender tutorial on how you can do this shot yourself but I now also recreated the same shot in After Effects so let's take a look at it take a look at them again side by side so the first shot was created in After Effects and the second shot was created with blender now this one is kind of obvious blender just looks way better than After Effects the Shadows look way better the glass material looks so much better the environment reflect reflects a lot better in the car really there are a lot of differences some are okay some are not like come on Adobe please let me change the color of my materials or let me at least import an animated 3D model so the driver doesn't look that creepy also if we look at the workflow it was a lot nicer to do in blender like to animate the car I could just create a path and the car would follow the path in After Effects that's not possible and I had to do some guessing and I couldn't really make it look good what's positive for After Effects though is that I was able to create a scene a lot faster in there compared to blender and also the render times a lot faster so it's not just all bad but overall I definitely recommend to use blender for this one so the final shot is obviously the most difficult one but I still didn't do something super fancy which artifact just can't handle at all but still a difficult shot which really shows the limitations so take a look at them [Music] and here's a side by side comparison so like you probably guessed the first shot was rendered in blender and the second shot was rendered in After Effects this shot really shows the limitations of After Effects but to be honest it still looks a lot better than I thought when I imported the model it looked horrible and I thought yeah this looks exactly as bad as thought it would but then I added some lights in the scene and it looked a lot better after that but still it's a day and night difference and everything we discussed for the shots before also applies for this one I tried my best to make it look good so like I said I added in a lot of lights and I also split the model apart and made two separate models out of it so I could import The Head and the body only and move each part individually because in the current version of After Effects you just can't use Collections and every model just comes in as one thing so you can't animate it but if you split it up into two models you can still do it and the same goes for the shadow After Effects just didn't calculate the shadow so I had to add this one in manually and in general I had to work a lot around after effects limitations but to be honest it's kind of a difficult shot and it probably was not Do's aim to make shots like this possible but rather simple shots like you saw in the beginning and if you consider this this actually doesn't look too bad so what are your thoughts on After Effects new 3D workspace share your opinions in the comments down below personally I'd suggest sticking with dedicated 3D software it not only looks way better but also offers some essential features like modeling and simulation tools these tools are crucial if you want to create your own models for example however After Effects 3D workspace is a nice addition and can be quite useful in specific scenarios such as Studio environments or Holograms so I'm glad they added this feature and hope they're going to continue improving it in the future so click on the video here to learn how you can use it yourself

Channel: BSP Studios

Views: 12,266

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Id: g5C-_UYaJ6c

Length: 9min 13sec (553 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 21 2024