Very Hard Flythrough Animation (Ae+C4D+Trapcode Particular) in a starfield environment

[Cassius Marques]

[Ben Janowitz] “-The starfield is too small! Even if I followed this great tutorial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osQAT1ARIsM) to do a nice large starfield in Trapcode Particular, -since the first seconds of small movements (it’s a small rollercoster-like-shot) I end up very close to some stars.”

Is it because you move too far in Z space, or because you move too far back? You’ll have to adjust your scale either by increasing the particles distance and size or by reducing your cameras movement(try linking it to a null and scalling down). If your problem is big particles near the camera, remember you can cut them off in the visibility options of TC’s particular.

[Ben Janowitz] “and why my second camera doesn’t work…”

A few things the check: You camera must be active in AE’s timeline. Particular must be set to comp camera. Perhaps a Screenshot of your timeline would help narrow the problem.

Cassius Marques
http://www.zapfilmes.com

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[Ben Janowitz]

Hey thank you Cassius!
I Think it’s mostly a coordinates problem…
I’m at work so I can’t take snapshot of the project, but I’ll try to explain:
If I use the camera I’ve imported from C4D, I’m really close to the stars for the firs shot (no stars in the second), but if I use a camera from AE the distance is ok, like the video tutorial: stars are really far out. Same camera settings! So I guess it’s all about where my c4d scene is sitting, in space. No?

[Cassius Marques]

That would be easy to check and solve, twirl down your camera’s anchorpoint. It should center around [960,540,0] for a 1080p composition. If it aint the case, create a null, make it 3d, copy paste your camera’s position to it. Link the camera to the null and reset the null’s position.

Cassius Marques
http://www.zapfilmes.com

[Ben Janowitz]

Thank you!
I’ll try that when I’ll be back home.
In my case I have camera and 2 vector objects from C4D. Should I link them also to the null (with the camera)?
I’ have like 100K of keyframes in the 2 cameras, am I gonna loose them with the change of the position?
Thanks.

[Walter Soyka]

If you have a really huge move through a lot of space, your camera may be flying through the entire area where particles have been emitted. You’d need a very large emitter and lots and lots of particles to cover a huge big camera move.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Cassius Marques]

yes, you should link any 3d asset already in place to the null before reseting. And no, you won’t lose the animation (if you do it right).

There are several ways of repositining your camera while keeping the animation. I simply tried to tell the most user friendly way.

Keep in mind though that you still have the whole movement. So if the problem is the range of the fly through and not it’s initial (or overall) place in space, you’ll still end up with the same issues.

Cassius Marques
http://www.zapfilmes.com

[Ben Janowitz]

Hey guys, I’ve just take some days to run some tests.
So the situation is: I’ve solve the problem of the frozen 2nd camera by resetting its position with the NULL object, thanks Cassius!
So, to going deeply inside the video I’ll break it in steps:

-INTRO
Starfield perfectly far out, Camera flies into some vector graphics twirling down, inside, up and near and then surpasses that out.
(This shot is perfetc, DONE)

-LYRICS
Here i need the camera going straight and very slowly in the starfield. The animation of the camera was done in C4D. Although the movement here is really slow, the starfield (same layer of the INTRO, just copy/pasted and started at 17 secs, beginning of the 2nd shot) the starfield at almost 30 seconds finishes is life, can’t get that working well.

CHORUS:
I need the hyper space effect, were the camera is really fast inside the starfield. Again, I have the animation in C4D done, but it’s impossible for now get this working.

Workflow I used to create the large starfield:
0 to 3 frame: 100000 particles, 300000 of velocity and emitter: box and max of X,Y,Z.
from 3 frame I’ve stopwatched the particles to 0
from 9 frame I’ve stopwatched the physics to 0 to have the starfield froozen with a nice large dimension.

Thanks!