[Adam Trachtenberg]

[Alejandro Torres] “High everyone, I have a project where some TP’s are aligned in the surface of a loft nurbs, I then make them fly away with a wind node and I want them to regroup in the surface of another loft nurbs object (I’m using a matrix object to generate the particles). Any easy way of achieving this?”

The most straightforward way to do it would be to keyframe your Matrix object’s “Object” parameter so that you start with the particles being generated on object1 and finish with them being generated on object2.

Then you would keyframe the Matrix object’s “Follow” and “Constrain” parameters to take control of the particles from TP and give it back to Mograph.

OTOH, you might consider doing the whole thing with Mograph, skipping TP altogether. In that case you would clone your objects directly onto object1 and create a matrix object generated on object2.

Then you would assign an inheritance effector to the cloner and specify the matrix object as its target. Set the effector to Direct mode, check the “Morph motion object” box, and keyframe the effector’s strength to move the clones from object1 to object2.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Okay, I’m not familiar with the program but this is *probably* what you need to do:

— make sure you’re using the track camera in Cinema;
— create a background object;
— create a new texture and place your footage in the color channel;
— place your material on the background object.

Now any objects you create on the ground plane should track with the footage.

If you want to cast shadows on the background you’ll use a plane or floor object in place of the background object. Put your footage material on the plane/floor and set the UV Mode to “frontal”. Create some lights to match the footage lighting.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

I was talking about LW export from motion tracking software, i.e., tracking the footage, exporting to LW format, and importing into Cinema. What software are you using?

[Adam Trachtenberg]

I don’t have personal experience with 3D tracking but I know that a lot of people are using SynthEyes, Boujou Bullet, and PFHoe. SynthEyes is supposed to be quite powerful and reasonably affordable.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

The major tracking packages can be used with Cinema, either by dedicated plugins or by using Lightwave export/import.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

OpenGL has a limitation of eight lights, so it’s curious that you can only see six. It may be a limitation of your video card. In any case, there’s no way to go over eight.

What you can do is the interactive region render function to adjust lighting. Not as fast as OpenGL, but better than rendering countless test pics.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

You need to attach your pyrocluster material to either a standard particle or Thinking Particle system.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

You have to use the File>Open Texture command rather than the regular Open command. That will open your bitmap in the texture window. Now you can Control+click on the image with the clone tool and paint on your texture.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Other options are Remotion’s PhyTools and Silver Bullet plugins: https://www.remotion4d.net/index_main_2.0.html

Very good and easy to use.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Can’t help you with European schools, but you might check out Cineversity.com if you haven’t already. It contains tons of video tutorials and the price is pretty reasonable.