[Alon_a]

To harness “some of the power” of expressions you certainly don’t need to be a programmer, not by a long shot. Simple expressions have almost nothing to do with programming, and even complex ones require only a basic understanding of variables, arrays and loops. You can probably learn all you need to know by studying examples here at the Cow, and Dan Ebberts’ site (www.motionscript.com has returned from the dead!) has great tutorials, examples and discussions of how to approach practical problems.

AA

[Alon_a]

To harness “some of the power” of expressions you certainly don’t need to be a programmer, not by a long shot. Simple expressions have almost nothing to do with programming, and even complex ones require only a basic understanding of variables, arrays and loops. You can probably learn all you need to know by studying examples here at the Cow, and Dan Ebberts’ site (www.motionscript.com has returned from the dead!) has great tutorials, examples and discussions of how to approach practical problems.

AA

[Alon_a]

PNG is quite safe. You don’t lose image quality and you can keep the alpha channel if there is one (and there probably is, unless you have some background plane in Maya). Make sure you render at full 32bit (24 color and 8 bit alpha) or “Millions+ of colors”, not sure how the setting is called in Maya’s renderer.

Don’t use JPEG or GIF. I think TIFF is also fine but I don’t tend to use it, out of habit. Be aware that a 720×480 image with much detail makes a pretty hefty PNG file, so if you’re rendering a 60sec animation at 30 fps you’re going to eat up A LOT of disk space. I think Maya also lets you output to Quicktime directly; if you use the Animation codec at full quality you should also do fine, the file may be large but you’ll have a single file instead of hundreds of images.

I prefer to render straight (rather than premultiplied), Mental Ray has a setting for it but I don’t know about Maya’s software renderer. In any event you should be able to import either a straight or a premult sequence into AE, just make sure you check the appropriate option when you import (AE may or may not guess correctly). Premultiplying and then compensating upon import entails some loss of color dynamic range at object fringes and highly transparent regions, but it’s usually not a major issue.

It’s always safe to render large, so you’ll have some headroom to play with, but if the Maya shots are well planned without too much wasted space you may not need to do that. It all just depends on the composition, hard to give a general answer. Just think what are the chances that you’ll need to enlarge and reposition the 3D shots within your comp.

Hope this helps.

AA

[Alon_a]

Thanks Andrew, I went ahead and purchased! I just wanted to point out one reassuring sentence I found at the bottom of the product description page:

“Because of the size of this DVD you will not be downloadable.”

Thank god for that!

🙂

AA

[Alon_a]

Sorry harryjf, I’m getting:

“TOO MANY RECENT DOWNLOAD LOCATIONS

The URL you are using to download this file from has been used from too many different locations. Please wait a while before trying again.”

Seems like Streamload has a variety of mechanisms for preventing people from downloading files… I’ve used http://www.savefile.com on a few occasions and it seems to work well.

Thanks for sharing, anyway!

– A. A.

[Alon_a]

For a splash screen, your best bet is .swf, BUT you may need to seriously modify your comp in order to get a reasonably-sized file. Check out the swf-compatibility list in the AE manual; many layer types, and most effects, are not supported. What “not supported” means is that you can get them into the .swf alright but they get RASTERIZED, means that instead of a slim vector format that is being manipulated in real time by the Flash player, you just get a sequence of .jpg images. That’s why you’re seeing those huge files sizes.

Depending on the content and style of the composition, reducing the number of rasterized frames may or may not be feasible. You may have to make many compromises in order to comply with the non-rasterization requirements. Note that, after the export, you get a .html file along with the .swf which indicates which components in the comp have caused rasterization.

You may also control the .jpg image quality when things do get rasterized, which may help reduce the .swf file size (at the expense of quality, of course).

Anyway I would strongly recommend not to go with animated GIFs, they have a very limited color space (8 bits) and in general look terrible. I don’t think anyone uses GIFs for a splash screen.

Finally, you can wait X months until Adobe seriously merges AE with Macromedia Flash 🙂

– A. A.

[Alon_a]

Some possible solutions, none of them perfect:

1. With some care you may be able to achieve this with three Vegas effects applied to the mask – one for the middle, “thich” portion, and two for each of the tapering ends. Vegas has no width falloff control but you can diminish the opacity which gives a similar effect.

2. Search the archives for Dean Velez’ tutorials, he makes some wonderful stuff using text. By using the appropriate text “message” with special characters, an appropriate font, heavily edited kerns and some additional effects, you may be able to create a tapered stroke. Animeate the text along a path and there you go.

3. In the unlikely event that you don’t have 3D stroke but you do have 3D particular, You can fake a stroke with particles. Copy your mask to the position parameter of the emitter, set the particle shape to something simple and monochromatic like a circle, make the particles velocity 0 so they stay put (don’t forget also “velocity from movement”), and change the “Size over Life” to a tapered shape. You’ll get some nice tapered strokes with a lot of interesting control options. This may be the best method but of course you do need a Trapcode plug-in (but a different one…)

Hope that helps,

– Alon

[Alon_a]

BTW I noticed you also asked about a good source for 3D models. https://www.turbosquid.com is very popular and you can find many models in various formats, including some free stuff.

[Alon_a]

> But can I purchase a stock image with a .lwo or .lw or .lws extension once I have Zax??

Terminology: 3D models are not called “stock images”, since they’re not images. They contain geometry data as well as, usually, materials and textures. That’s important to realize since once you import something into Zaxwerks, there’s a pretty good chance it will not look quite the same as you’d expect.

Zaxwerks seems to read Lightwave 7 (.lwo) files, but I wouldn’t count on it being able to interpret the UV maps, textures and materials from Lightwave. You’ll probably need to recreate the materials in Invigorator, and depending on the model’s complexity this could become very difficult. Should be workable with dice though.

Information on supported 3D formats in Invigorator is pretty hard to track down, and I coulnd’t find an explicit description of what, exactly, gets imported. See here, for example:

https://zaxwerks.com/troubleshooting.shtml#Both-Imported-Objects

Also try the Zaxwerks forum here at Creative Cow. What I would do is download the demo and just try it out with a free .lwo model.

– A. A.

[Alon_a]

Heh. Silly me, I didn’t open your .aep when I made my comment, and I assumed you made the cube just using flat layers positioned in 3D space (I guess the reflections should have clued me on). That would have made the bevels almost impossible to make, I guess.

– A. A.