At this point I may be gaining a reputation for ripping a little too hard on Digieffects products. It makes me feel bad. Digieffects is an After Effects plugin developer I really want to like. In concept, their plugins work as fairly inexpensive solutions to quickly acheive an effect that can only be created with exquisite mastery of the After Effects platform. These effects are meant to be time-savers. Working as a motion graphics artist on projects that run under extremely tight deadlines, the Digieffects plugins that I have tried in the past have not worked out as well as I had hoped.
To absorb the full training experience as DigiEffects intended, I decided not to dive right in and start haplessly fiddling with Atmosphere's controls. I took the time to watch the tutorials and read the documentation. I sipped my tea, cracked my knucks, and then dove into Atmosphere. Digieffects' tutorial made Atmosphere look super-easy to use. I was excited for it. Any plugin that offers freedom from keyframing and expression-building is more than welcome at my desk.
Then came the test. After an hour of tweaking 3D layer positions, and sliding sliders all around I still didn't find the results I wanted. I wondered: Why am I doing this?
The effect I was trying to achieve was fairly simple: a 3D camera pushes in as layers fade into focus from the background. What's so hard about that? Apparently, everything.
Again and again, I tried tweaking 3D layer positions but had the same lackluster results. Either the layer that I wanted to be fog-free was still somewhat obscured, or all of my layers would be immersed with fog. It was really tough to find that happy middle-ground between clarity and fog, and it resulted in alot of time spent tweaking layers just right.
Atmosphere has a simple interface with limited controls. This is something I typically enjoy. I like an effect's controls to be simple while directly getting to the "meat" of the effect. With just a few options it's fairly easy to get Atmosphere going. But for what it offered in simplicity I felt it lacked in real world functinalilty. For example, Atmosphere is supposed to offer FOG. However, the current fog options feel flat and stagnant, with one colored solid and no gradient options. The fog mimics your background color. But in a world where I use a gradient effect, at least to some degree, on almost all of my backgrounds it was frustrating that there was no gradient option built into the effect. In fact it might be even more practical if the effect used background layer mapping to create the fog.
