congrats! now please repeat the question that still stands... i cound't figure out which one it was... ... View more

this is a safe place. (everyone: we love you DKT388448781utv ) ... View more

you can access any effects param values (anyone's. not only your plugins) using AEGP_GetNewStreamValue. you get the required streamRefH using AEGP_GetNewEffectStreamByIndex. you get the required effectRefH using AEGP_GetLayerEffectByIndex. ... View more

ok... there's a bit of a misconception here... generally speaking, "transformations" referes only to the layer transformation, which happens with the image that is the result of all the effects applied to the layer. each of these effects operates on the output of the previous effect, with the first in the stack operating on the layer's source. that texture is then transformed and composited according to the layer transformation params (and other stuff like parenting and camera).   when you'r talking about "effect transformation" you're talking about the ever-so-rare occasion where an effect applies 2d or 3d transformation within itslef, where it takes it's input buffer, and transforms it onto it's own output buffer. these transformations are baked into the layer's resulting texture, and AE is oblivious to them. for instance, or some effect internally does a 90 degree Y rotation which results in the layer facing exacltly sideways on not being seen from the front, then rotating the layer another 90 degrees on the Y axis won't reveal back the content. it's just a blank 2D texture at that point.   what does all that mean? when you're talking aobut transformations happening within some effect, that operation isn't "registered" anywhere, and is not considered a "transformation" by ae. it's all filtration/generation/manipulation. some effects do transformations in an obvious way, where there are clearly named params that do position and rotation changes. some effects, like card dance, break the layer to small pieces, each with it's own transformation. so in such a case there is no "one transformation value" for the whole image within that effect.   summing up: 1. if you KNOW an effect (like "transform" or "S_BlurMoCurves"), you may read it's params and deduce the transformation. but you need to set your effect up to read each such effect's param in advance. there's no gerneral way of knowing which param on some random effect does what exactly...   2. some effect (like card dance, or even fractal noise), evolve the layer in ways that can't be described by "a transfomation". in such cases the way to motion-blur them would be to:     a. sample their results at small time intervals and average these images to get a a"smear" between time a and time b.     b. compare the image of current frame with the image of the next one and do some "pixel analysis" on them to get motion vectors. in AE, you can't request a previous effect's result at dfferent times. you can only request a layer's source, with or without masks and effects at different times. so using this method your effect could motion blur the content of a comp, but not previous effects on the same layer. ... View more

i still don't fully understand what you mean by "detect the motion"... can you give some examples? ... View more

when the source of an effect is non changing over time, and the efect params are not animating, AE assumes it's safe to cache the result an not re-render it. the layer itself animating in the comp is irrelevant to that decision. you can do 2 things: 1. set PF_OutFlag_NON_PARAM_VARY on global setup. this will tell AE you might need to render regardless of the source or params not changing. 2. read up on GuidMixInPtr(). you can use it to let AE know during pre-render whether it can or can not use the cached output for the current frame. ... View more

there's no ready made solution that i know of. however, there's PF_EffectCustomUIOverlayThemeSuite, which should help you customize the look of anything you create to match AE's look. ... View more

there's an order to the locations where the loaded dll will be looked for: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/dlls/dynamic-link-library-search-order you can place the correct dlls in the same folder as your plugin, and make sure that this location is searched in first. ... View more

either ship your plugins with the correct distribuatable dlls, or compile your plugin's /mt. ... View more

most likely it's because these effects expand or contract the output buffer, so 0,0 on the input buffer doesn't always mean 0,0 on the source layer. either use the in_data->pre_effect_source_origin_x/y, or the PF_EffectWorld->origin_x/y to tell the offset from the source coordinates to the buffer coordinates.   while you're at it, read up on in_data->output_origin_x/y and in_data->downsample_x/y. you'll need to take them into account as well, to avoid similar oddities. ... View more

this is how i check it out, in a rather generalized apporach (fitting for extnetion to premier where other pixel formats are used as well). pass the input or output buffer as an arg to PF_GetPixelFormat (after checking them out, of course). PF_PixelFormat pixelFormat; AEGP_WorldType worldType; PF_WorldSuite2 *wsP = NULL; ERR(suites.Pica()->AcquireSuite(kPFWorldSuite, kPFWorldSuiteVersion2, (const void**)&wsP)); ERR(wsP->PF_GetPixelFormat(output, &pixelFormat)); ERR(suites.Pica()->ReleaseSuite(kPFWorldSuite, kPFWorldSuiteVersion2)); switch (AEInf.renderInf.pixelFormat) { case PF_PixelFormat_ARGB128: worldType = AEGP_WorldType_32; break; case PF_PixelFormat_ARGB64: worldType = AEGP_WorldType_16; break; case PF_PixelFormat_ARGB32: worldType = AEGP_WorldType_8; break; }   ... View more

well, motion blur is basically smearing the image from point A to point B. when looking at motion coming from animting the transformation properties, then reading the transform value of the layer at 2 points in time and rendering multiple interpolation - will do the trick. (alas, it's not doing anything AE doesn't do natively. S_BlurMoCurves does something similar, but with arbitrary transformations, and not the layer transformation. which makes sense as a plugin, because you wand just the "smear" and not the motion. as for making it "work on other effects", plugins operate linearly, each processing the output of the previous one. so technically, you could apply motion blur to anything... both sides are indifferent to each other. alas, when you say "work on other plugins" i bet you'd want to do something that correlates to the content. say you apply your plugin after a "mosaic" effect. what should the blur blur? left? right? zoom blur? that's up to you to figure out.   on another note, plug-ins can request their input at different times. if you apply your effect on a comp with content, you could request int he input at a serises of times between the current time sample and the next frame, and average these inputs. now you get a "motion blur" of that comp's inside animation, whatever it may be, without caring abount transformations. ... View more

most of the AEGP callbacks that ask for a plug-in id actually do just fine taking a null instead. i don't register my effects plugins with the register suite. (unless doing something VERY specific...)   as for using the motion blur on other effects, i must say i didn't fully understand what it is that you're trying to do that is different from AE's normal motion blur but still requires getting the layer transformation... ... View more

nothing much to it. you pass a layer handle and a comp time, and receive a 4x4 matrix of the layer's transformation after all parenting, expressions, ect, in relation to the comp's origin of [0,0,0]. nothing else to explain here.   if you choose to use AEGP_GetLayerToWorldXformFromView, you get the same result, but with the view (camera or custom prespective) factored in as well. that, however, doesn't include the camera or view's perspective matrix. ... View more

if you're indeed making an artisan plugin, then we're entring the twilight zone... first, let's tall 2 things apart: 1. the layer texture, where plug-ins render their output pre-layer-transformation, and the output is a 2d, untransformed image that's in the same coordinate space of the original layer image. 2. the layer transfomation, where the ready-to-use texture is then 2d or 3d transformed by the artisan and composited into the comp buffer.   now. "classical" motion blur, is where the transformation (clause 2 in the paragraph above) is repeaded multiple time in intervals between the transformation values of 2 points in time (usually the current time, and some point between the current time and the next frame's time). some effects, such as prticale systems or element 3d, are not transfomed by the artisan, but instead mimik the comp's perspective and output an image that looks transformed even though the texture gets compsited at the layer's "rest" position in 2d.   now we're getting somewhere. if you want to replace the comp's "built in" motion blur where layers move in 2D or 3D, then your can either write an artisan that does the WHOLE process of transforming and compositing, OR: 1. mimik the whole movement of the layer and have a simple layer plugin render the transformation along with the motion blur onto the layer texture, and the user would do that on an untransformed layer as he would with 3D effects. 2. ahve the layer transform normally, but you just add motion blur to the texture. that is tricky but possible. you'll need to deal with projections to tell what the next transformation of the layer would look like efrom the camera's point of view, and where that lands on the original layer at it's current position, and then blur the layer's image from it's rest position to the projected target position... if done correctly, you'll get a natural looking motion blur without forcing the user to work on a flat image and without writing an artisan. alas, in such a case i fail to see the point...   again, if you lay out the problem you're trying to solve, then parhaps i could help with a better strategy. ... View more

either AEGP_GetLayerToWorldXform or AEGP_GetLayerToWorldXformFromView will get you tra transformation for a given time, which you can use to calc motion blur. however, as for the rest of your question, it's a bit too broad. can you explain what you're trying to do in more detail? ... View more

i'm guessing you constructed the original matrix somehow. you fed it some position, rotation and scale values. so you do the same for the other matrix, with position rotation and scale values representing the moment in time you want the motion blur to stretch to.   if you didn't construct the matrix and got it ready made by some other means... you could either multiply it a a new matrix represnting the change from one position to the other, or you could decompose the original matrix to get the original position scale and rotation. that, however, is not reliable as a matrix can have more than one valid decomposition...   if you got a ready made matrix by some call to AE that fetches the layer matrix, perhaps you could get the second matrix using the same call with a different time value. ... View more

transform_world does indeed offer motion blur via the api. not some much a "general" motion blur for the entire api, but rather just for that one callback. anyways, given or more matrices, transform_world will to a linear interpolation between the matrices and render multiple intances along that polygonal path. if a straight a to b motion blur path is good enough for you, then a "beginning" and an "end" matrices should be enough. if you need a more "curved" motion blur, then create several intermediate matrices breaking the path down to smaller linear segments giving a more "bezier" look.   as for the syntax of placing multiple matrices instead of 1... if i recall correctly, instead of "&matrix" put "(&matrix1, &matrix2)". i never used more than two, so i guess we're all relying on you telling us if using more is just as simple as adding more mtrices to the parenthesis... ... View more

usually, motion blur is an average of the full render of multiple time samples. meaning, between the time of frame 1 and the time of frame 2, you make multiple renders at times 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 ect... and then add up each corrsponding pixel from each time sample render and divide by the number of time samples. that's what AE does whe you activate motion blur on a layer. that's why you select the number of samples. the more samples, the smoother the result (but lower the render). by adjusting the "shutter angle" you tell AE what's the time span of these samples. 180 = from 1.0 to 1.5, and 360 = from 1.0 to 2.0.   some software (such as lightwave 3d) did a "deithered" moion blur, where each pixel comes from a slightly different point in time. the result is a "noisy" blur, but it's much faster than rendering the whole frame multiple times.   more advanced blurs such as re::vision's notion blur effect AE does on footage, is actually much like an mp4 works. the image is bobarded by a TON of trackes, and "smearing" each segment to where it's going to move int he next frame.   that's it in a nutshell. most implementations use the first method of rendering full frames at multiple time samples. users are accustomed to having significantly longer render times when motion blur is activaed. ... View more

well, i'm out of ideas. ... View more

or pehaps use the wide char equivalent. i'm not sure which string format AE uses for the pipl. ... View more

try adding "u8" before the string. example: u8"\u8c03\u6574" ... View more

have you tried using universal cahcarter names / surrogate pairs? i.e. "\U0001F607" or "\u0067" ect'. ... View more

there are no AE specific doct for ExternalObject. all the external object docs and sdk samples are installed along with the old extendscript tools at "C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe Utilities - CS6\ExtendScript Toolkit CS6\SDK". are there any other docs lurking in the deep dark web? i haven't a clue... ... View more

I don't know of any "standardized" method for such intercom, but of all the ways you have suggested, i would go with AEGP_ExecuteScript() polling. before going into WHY i'd suggest that way, i'll say that CEP is being deprecated for UXP. the main difference being that UXP communicate with AE synchronously. back to the "why". ae doesn't like to be talked to at just any time. ae wan't to be talked to only during certain times and only on the main thread. as Alex White said, you could write an ExternalObject plugin and find a way to trigger it directly. alas, that component woulnd need to talk to AE only during certain time slots which AE triggers, such as the idle process callback. that already becomes a polling mechanism, but it involves an extra component instead of just using extendscript as the intermediate. ... View more

intersting... are you absolutely sure your're cheking the correct layer? can you check that on a project with just one layer? ... View more

i don't know what the RECORD_ERROR macro is, but it it's similar to ERR then it won't execute the enclosed command if the value of err is not 0. so, what is the value of err before hitting AEGP_GetLayerNumMasks? what's the value of err after? ... View more

the code looks ok. is the layer handle valid? does AEGP_GetLayerMaskByIndex return some error? ... View more