Hey guys, I was browsing through the old Advisory board forum and saw that Chris was looking for some feedback on Awake. I posted it there, but I’m cross posting here, since i didn’t realize those weren’t active anymore (Thanks Chad!).
The only tools from Awake I’d consider porting to AE are depth blur and FFT blur (I can’t remember the new name, it’s been so long!!) FFT blur is STILL the only blur tool that I know of that allows you to plug in an RGB kernel into the blur and get those awesome rainbow bokeh’s. AE updated their blur tools for 5.5, but they’re still slow as hell, and don’t allow custom kernels. That being said, your competition is Lens Care, and it’s firmly entrenched into the AE community. frischluft.com/lenscare/index.php You could undercut them? 
Motion depth blur is another option too, which doesn’t have an AE equivalent at all.
On another topic entirely, if you found a way to license Krakatoa to Red Giant Software, and integrate it into Trapcode Particular/Form, people would go crazy for that. Particular starts to bog down at a few 100,000 particles, so being able to render millions of particles would blow a lot of AE user’s minds. If you can introduce voxel rendering into that tool, I think you’d have an incredible winner. The other option is to release Krakatoa for AE, but you’re going to be re-inventing the wheel to a degree, and fighting against a tool that basically has 100% of the AE particle market.
Chad mentioned that there might be an option to use the max/AE integration that was announced at Siggraph, but I don’t think that’s more than simply being able to bring in lights/nulls/cameras into AE from Max, like was previously possible. I could be wrong, but I think they’ve just streamlined the integration… Cinema 4D has such a strong integration with AE and it’s the tool most mograph artists go to for 3D. I think Autodesk is just fighting back since C4D has grown quite a bit in the last few years, especially in the US.
With Krakatoa being such an awesome tool, I think it would work really well in AE. Trapcode Form (another particle engine written by the same guy that does particular) has the ability to import animated OBJ’s into AE and do some really amazing things with it.
Check out the video here: redgiantsoftware.com/product … code-form/ Looks a lot like Krakatoa renders, doesn’t it? But with 1/1000th the particle count
Trapcode Form and Particular share a lot of the same fundamental tech (from what I understand and from having used both plugins), so if you can get Krakatoa rendering in one, I’m guessing it wouldn’t be hard to get it working in both tools. Both of those plugins have been around for years and are extremely mature products, so it would be hard to compete against them with your own plugin IMO.
Anyways, that’s just my $0.02, but as a long time AE user and knowing that community pretty well, I think it would be a pretty sweet collaboration if Krakatoa and Particular/Form were merged in some way.
hehe). I’m also Certified by Adobe in After Effects/Photoshop and on the current beta, if that makes any difference…