Alan Flood
Forum Replies Created
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I ran into this problem before – didn’t find an answer as to why particle world can’t be masked but I did develop a simple solution to my problem. It might not be appropriate for what it is you’re doing but hey, you never know 🙂 It’s really very simple – create an inverted vignette. Create a duplicate of your background layer and mask away the outer edges leaving yourself with a nicely feathered ellipse. You can then just throw this on top of your particle layer. Animating the mask on the duplicate layer works pretty much the same as if you were animating it on the particle layers itself so it might be an adequate solution for what you need 🙂
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Hi Zach. You’re welcome. To be honest with you I’m stumped as to what is happening there. If I had to guess though I’d say it has something to do with you rotating it on the y axis. I’ve never heard anything at all about compositing solids having to be oriented on the z axis but I could be lacking in some understanding 🙂 The only thing I’ve ever come across that sort of a must for integrating with AE is that you have to consider how AE treats null objects. When I said earlier that you need to be sure the null is located on the upper right that was a mistake. It’s actually the upper left.
In any case, from what I understand you want to be able to display some footage on the screen element of the display, is that right? Well, I could try and explain it to you here but reading the text probably won’t be as helpful as watching a video so why don’t you have a look at this excellent tutorial …….
https://www.cineversity.com/tutorials/lesson.asp?tid=1183
It’s exactly what you need if you’re only getting into C4D and thinking about integrating with AE.
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Hi Corrado.
The simplest way to do this would be to render two passes and then composite them together in post to get the desired effect. Render one pass with normal lighting to capture the sunlit side of the rings then render another with different lighting setup – set it up so that the rings look the way you think they ought to in shadow of the planet. Then it’s just a simple matter of layering the dark pass over the bright pass in something like photoshop or GIMP and masking out all those areas that lie outside the shadow area.
I hope that helps 🙂
Alan
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Hi Zach.
Seems to me as if your compositing file is from a previous render and you need to re-save it to match the current setup you’ve got going. If your models screen size has the same aspect ratio of your footage comp in AE then all you really need for this in Cinema is a locator null (on the upper right corner of where the screen will be) parented to the main model and tagged with an external compositing tag. Then, in AE, parent your footage comp to the exported null and scale it to suit. If your screen size isn’t the same aspect ratio as your footage comp you’ll also want to output a pass of the screen element in Cinema to an object buffer and use this a trak matte in AE to ‘crop’ your footage comp.
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You’re welcome Wilfried. Nice to see you got it sorted out in the end 🙂
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Hi Wilfried. Are you using the Vray bridge by any chance? I’ve found that Vray can’t/won’t save a .png sequence. It doesn’t save anything at all though – not .c4d – not anything. If I go and change my output to tiff sequence instead of .png it works fine.
Even if you’re not running Vray – try tiff and see how that goes. You never know.
Kind regards
Alan -
Hi Cory. Thanks very much for the breakdown – that really does help a LOT and I appreciate you taking the time to explain it 🙂 This sort of stuff applies across a whole range of stuff, huh? I mean, I can see how this applies to AE expressions now too – the if/else aspect of it anyway. Maltannon explains some of this stuff in his tutorials but I dunno – I just never grasped it. Sounds simple enough and it probably is simple to you guys who have been working with such things for any length of time but it’s powerful stuff to those of us who don’t know too much about it 🙂 Exciting. Many thanks. I can already see many ways to put this to good use.
Kind regards
Alan -
OHHHHHH!! Thank you soooo much Brian. That’s perfect!!! 😀 I never thought to use a cylinder as the boole object. And yeah, it’s an image for a poster – sorry I neglected to mention that in my initial post. The dripping will actually be a continuous flow from the upper object to the lower object and the lower object has to have one of those small piles that flowing paint makes too. I think I’m on my way there now however. Thank you ever so much for sharing this with me Brian. It’s been so so helpful and I really appreciate it. This is what you get for telling someone “Yeah, yeah, I can do that – no problem” without going off and making a few tests first 😀
Kind regards
Alan -
That’s quite an elegant solution Brian and thank you very much for taking the time to delve into this. It’s very much appreciated. I had entertained the thought of providing a texture based solution but I decided I will only do this as a last resort. This client is not only knowledgeable with regards to 3 production methods but also very picky and demanding the highest quality work.
I’ve modeled a rectangular speaker in the meantime to demonstrate exactly what it is I’m after – it’s a lot easier to do this on a rectangular object than it is a sphere. Take a look …..
Now, it’s not animatable but that’s not a problem on this project as the final result is a still image but like I said, because it is a still image the client expects the highest quality – hence my desire to find a way to model the desired effect. What I did with the speaker was model a wavy b-spline and then extruded it along the Z axis and threw it into a boole along with a slightly larger copy of the speaker and subtracted it. Then I rotated it 90 degrees into the X axis, adjusted the spline a little bit to make it different, and then threw it into another boole with the result from the last one.
This approach doesn’t work with a sphere however. Due to the curvature of the surface the first Z boole subtraction leaves these nasty slices in the X axis – unlike the rectangular subtraction which leave a nice straight cut in the X axis.
I’ll upload further imagery tomorrow to illustrate the point.
In any case, thanks once again Brian; thank you very, very much for taking the time to approach this 🙂 If the worst comes to the worst I guess I’ll just have to put my tail between my legs and settle for the texture based solution but hopefully it won’t come to that. I’ll try dragging the points around manually beforehand and if that fails it’s texture time.
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Hey Cory – that’s a very sweet setup there. Thanks for sharing it. I’m an intermediate xpresso user myself and always looking to improve my xpresso knowledge and things like this really, really help 🙂 I’ve always had trouble with setting parameters for degrees since there is no degree datatype in xpresso but now that I know that 1 radian = 180 degrees life will be a whole lot easier the next time some rotation related conundrum pops up.
There’s one thing I’m not %100 clear about and that’s the role of the condition node. Can I just check my understanding with you, if you don’t mind? It’s my understanding that this node is taking the result of the compare node and processing it in the following way: if the result is =>20 it switches from input 1 to input 2 and if the result is anything other than that it switched from input 2 back to input 1. Is that right?
Cheers,
Alan