Use this thread to report on any bugs that you've come across. Please include the version of After Effects you're using and any associated crash dumps that you can provide!
Hey Mographics!
What dither pattern/shape are you using when animating the "Offset Y"? Depending on the shape it may not have any effect such as if it's using a vertical line shape anyways such as with "Vertical 1x8" or "Vertical 2x2".
Do you have an image of what it does when applied to your fireball video? It should still show even if there is a lot of transparency as the plugin will only operate on the colors and not the alpha. What are your dither settings for it? Does it show in the viewport but not when rendered out?
Also you must click "Load Palette" on the top of the effect to load in a custom palette file.
The button under "Custom Palette" is for resetting the one you already have loaded in and the label on the left of it shows how many colors have been loaded in.
To enable the "Reset palette" button you must set the current color swatch setting to "Custom" so that it will use your custom colors rather than the preset ones and enable the additional options.
I currently don't have a video tutorial on the custom palettes but to create a swatch you can use something like photoshop and illustrators swatch window and saving the swatch for exchange so that you can get a .ase file to import. Another option is the online tool "Adobe Color CC"(used to be known as "Kulor") which allows you to create and save swatch files online.
Hello Wunkolo :) Thanks for the feedback it was very helpful. I have managed to fix my problem when rendering in after effects, it seems like when I had mu pattern on "Bayer 8x8" & palette on "Web Safe" and my rendering is to H.264 the effect doesn't render out when exported, but when I made my rendering setting to Quicktime Animation the render became successful.
It doesn't seem to detect that the .plugin file is an after effects plugin either.. Are you certain that it is properly extracted from the .zip archive? Also are you certain that your version is not actually "10.12.15"?
I will have to set up my virtual OSX on my new system so it might take some time to recreate this issue on my end unfortunately;;;
Hey!
So that's the latest OSX huh? Not sure hwy it wouldn't work.. This plugin is entirely 64-bit too.
I build against the 10.11 (El Capitan) SDK of OSX so it might be possible that Catalina has totally depreciated and removed the 10.11 runtime? Or it may be possible that you must manually install the 10.11 runtime now?
What do you mean by "stopped working"?
Hey! This seems to be a security feature that OSX has that some people here have been facing and that others have been dealing with as well in some other software.
Other people that have had this issue with my plugins have found that the solution is to just right-click the plugin file and click "Open" at least once and then the plugin will start working! Lemme know how it goes!
The plugin is using the latest Adobe After Effects SDK(22.0.0) to allow for multi-frame rendering which seems to sometimes break the much older versions of After Effects (CS6 11.0.2) in some ways.
I've found some opportunities to handle suite acquisition a little better so it is resilient to handling missing suites. Try the latest upload and let me know how it goes! I'd much rather maintain a singular executable that works on each version than maintain multiple different uploaded versions.
To install native plugins like PixDither, you have to put the .aex file into the correct directory:
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects (version)\Support Files\Plug-ins
In my case, this is: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects 2022\Support Files\Plug-ins
and then it will show up under the "Wunk Effects" category in the effects panel. Simply clicking on the .aex file will fail as it is not a file that can be trivially opened or installed as a script.
Hello Wukolo, absolutely amazing addon! One issue I have run into is that it seems that colors are not accurately sampled from the palette. For example, when I take an image that uses the PICO-8 color palette (first linked image) and apply PixDither to it with the PICO-8 palette swatch selected, the colors all seem to shift and some even get omitted (second linked image). This is consistent across multiple color palettes I have tested, both with pre-installed and custom-added ASE palettes. Is this an issue with the plugin or is there potentially a color space issue in After Effects I am dealing with that causes this? Thank you in advance!
Here's the original Pico-8 image
Here's when processed through PixDither with Pico-8 and Threshold selected
EDIT: Actually, looks like I was able to fix it! The problem was After Effects itself, I had "Linearize Working Space" enabled in the project's color settings. Turning it off gave me accurate color sampling again! Hope this helps out anyone else who may have this issue.
Hey! Thanks for bringing this up. After Effects definitely has a level of abstraction involving color-spaces before those color values get fed to a plugin. It looks like the original issue you described is from it feeding sRGB-colorspace pixels to the plugin based on how all the darker color values clamp over to black super easily. Linear space colors is definitely the solution in this case!
