[Adam Trachtenberg]

Xpresso would work but it might not look realistic. Do you have any modules? You could do this easily with the Hair Module’s spline dynamics, or you could do it with Mocca (soft IK chain), or you could do it with Clothilde. Even if you don’t have Mocca it might work okay using standard bones/IK.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

The only thing I can think of is to render a shadow pass and invert it in post.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Yes, you can display the render area (and safe area) guides in the viewport. Check in the viewport configuration menu.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Welcome Mylenium! Good choice Kathlyn. 🙂

[Adam Trachtenberg]

The most effective flicker-reducing measure you can take is to disable strokes, but of course that limits a lot of what S&T can do.

Here’s a post I archived (I think by Tim Clapham)discussing ways to minimize flickering with strokes:

“if you need strokes, and have flicker issues, you best bet is careful tweaking and lots of tests. the options to best tweak are:

1)Join limit
2)START + Angle
3)filter
4) END + length and angle

These all control how the Strokes are created from the lines detected in terms of angles and such. It’s a sort of guessing and test game figuring out the ideal angle for the optimal results. While a test on a still may show no difference between a single degree angle, it could make a huge difference in an animation between a line joining another line or not.

Also, be really careful of the combine function in the lines tab of the render settings and sketch tags. This setting combines lines of different detection methods with the same shader. While this I once thought was always a good thing, I’ve since discovered a lot of popping is cause by a line from the outline meeting a line from the folds making a single stroke when at just the right angles when using combine that of course wouldn’t if not combined. this can cause popping as well.

If your using distort, be really careful to test whether closing strokes will work or not, neither closing nor opening is perfect so its really dependent on which is less worse in terms of popping. This isn’t a huge contributor to flickers and pops, but it can be on occasion.

A good piece of advice is to also try to avoid strokes that don’t match on both ends. like a stroke that is thick on one end and thing on the other. The less contrast before the start and end of a stroke, the less distinct two unconnected strokes will show.”

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Another option: give your object a Sketch style tag, enable Shading, and select “Off” in the Object dropdown menu.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

You might be able to speed up the rerender by deleting any slow-rendering textures/materials and/or rendering at a smaller size and upsampling in Shake.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

If you’re on a PC you might try Darksim’s Simbiont plugin. It comes with a pretty good plasma ring explosion material. One thing to be aware of is that the plugin won’t work with r10, and apparently won’t for some time.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Sorry Christophe, I missed that you wanted to do a time offset. Here’s the trick to baking Cloth animation to keyframes using Mocca>Cappucino set to PLA (only):

*select your cloth object;
*activate the axis tool;
*go into scale mode (use scale tool);
*click the Cappucino “start realtime” button;
*click and hold the LMB until the end of the animation (do not drag the mouse during this time!).

That’s it!

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Right, use the Mograph text object. Then you can apply any effector to letters, words, lines, or any combination. When you select the text object you’ll see the relevant tabs in the AM. Drag your effectors into those boxes.