Autodesk Combustion 4 gives After Effects a run for its money.

As a teacher of digital effects and animation at an art school that focuses entirely on Adobe’s After Effects, I have always been intrigued by the Combustion toolset from Autodesk (formerly Discreet under the new Autodesk Media and Ent. division). I have followed the software since its first release in 2000 and was excited to see the newest revision, Combustion 4, released recently for a price of $995. Autodesk/Discreet has been known to create some of the industry’s most compelling and powerful toolsets and their digital compositor/animator/painter/editor software package is no different. This new release focuses on both new tools and revisions to older tools and will satisfy users from casual to hardcore.

Starting off with some brand new functionality is the Gbuffer builder. Traditionally users could impart additional information from 3ds max into renders via the RPF (Rich Pixel Format). Now using the Gbuffer builder, Combustion users can generate simple or complex Gbuffer information from within the software package itself using the new Gbuffer builder Operator. Vfx such as 3D glow, 3D fog, 3D depth of field are now accessible and functional thanks to newly generated Gbuffer information. This in-package solution is one of the concepts that Discreet always got right with this software series. It is really interesting how two companies (Autodesk/Discreet and Adobe) could make such similar products but implement them in such different ways. Combustion users have always enjoyed the in-program, keyboard free style of the software’s interface. Specifically, Combustion is moving further and further into the direction of an all-inclusive, one-stop-shop piece of software. Combustion also has a wonderful workflow that they have designed so that the artist never (OK, almost never) has to move his/her hands to the keyboard. All parameters have a click-n-slide adjustment function (which Adobe has since incorporated into After Effects) and all numerical values can either be slid up and down or double clicked and entered using the super-cool popup calculator.

[Figure 1] The interface for the Autodesk Diamond Keyer. All screen shots courtesy of Ryan Lesser.

There is now a powerful Diamond Keyer included in Combustion 4’s keying suite, which is a relative to the keying solutions available in Discreet’s high end, award-winning Flame visual effects system. The Diamond Keyer (Figure 1) provides extremely fast and highly customizable keying functionality. With just a single click, most keying jobs will be complete. To do this, just click one of the nine presets listed in the keyer (R, G, B, C, M, Y, highlight, midtone and shadow), and you will find that your keying is either done or very close. Next, direct your attention to the color diamond and use the twp editable diamonds to manipulate your color groups to create a very clean key. This color palette and corresponding diamond selections are zoom-able and pan-able to make it easy to make very precise keys.

Forunately, this is all viewable (as are all edits) while in RAM playback mode. This in and of itself is something that After Effects aficionados will drool over since they will be used to the pause/edit/RAM render/RAM preview workflow that they are accustomed to.