[Adam Trachtenberg]

[Bjorn van Oostrum] “Could you please explain what you mean with “ticking the refraction icon” and where I can find it.”

Now that you ask it’s occurred to me that you don’t have to use refraction at all — simple transparency will do. The settings are in the compositing tag’s Exclusion tab:

I’m referring to the icons to the right of the word “Disc,” above. The first (highlighted one) is transparency, then refraction, then reflection, then heirarchy.

In this case the compositing tag is on a cube that’s partially obscured by a disc, which has a transparent material on it. By excluding the disc and transparency, the cube won’t be seen through transparent portions of the disc.

If I had ticked the reflection icon then the cube also wouldn’t show up as a reflection on the disc, etc.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

It does sound like a QT issue, or possibly hardware. Hard to say….

[Adam Trachtenberg]

It isn’t clear to me if the stuttering is caused by the playback device as opposed to the actual frame rate. I’d load the uncompressed frames into AE and see what it looks like under RAM preview.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

You could do it by compositing, but that would require two render passes. Here’s a trick:

In your invisible/masking object’s transparency channel, add a tiny bit of refraction (1.001 or something like that).

Then put a compositing tag on your emitter (standard particles) or particle geometry object (TP).

Drag the invisible/masking object into the compositing tag’s exclusion tab and tick on the refraction icon (the arrow that bends as it passes through the plane).

That should do what you want. The only downside is that you’ll probably need to enable Best AA because anything that is visible behind the refracting object won’t receive geometry AA.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

As far as I know, the only way to do it is to make the primitive editable, select the inner polygons, create a polygon selection tag, and restrict your texture to the selection (drag the tag into the tex tag’s “Selection” box).

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Try using a target effector. Set the target very high above the scene, uncheck “use pitch”, and rotate the cloned object’s axis (not the object itself) to get the right heading rotation.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

If you click on your PLA track and look in the attributes manager you’ll see a slot for “Time Track”. Drag your time track from the timeline into that slot and you should be good to go.

You can also use the Bias setting for individual keys on a PLA track. Not quite as flexible as tangent handles, but it can do a basic ease-in/out.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

I would use a Shader effector with an animated noise or gradient in the shader slot.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Use a time track.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

It’s happening because it’s nested inside another object and you’ve scaled the other object non-uniformly with the object tool rather than the model tool. When you use the object tool you are in effect scaling the object’s world space, so the primitive (child object) is living in a distorted universe.

Solution is to scale with the model tool instead. But if you have to animate the scale that won’t work, so in that case you would pull the primitive out from under the scaled object and use a constraint tag set to parent mode instead of physically parenting to the scaled object.