[Alon_a]

Not sure I understand the situtation. You mean you want to have a whole mask get translated along a motion path? Perhaps you can just put the mask/s on a separate layer and animate that layer’s position property to follow the motion path?

to make the layer follow the footage, of course you’ll need to track the footage – either draw the motion path manually or use AE’s tracking feature.

Hope this helps, sorry if this is no what you meant.

– A. A.

[Alon_a]

Serge – as usual, you silence the naysayers by simply providing a beautiful working model, for free… You are awesome.

Still, as you are probably aware, one important feature of a true 3D model is a simple beveling and rounding of the edges. I imaginge this would be much harder to achieve in AE… I’m afraid to say “impossible” since the next thing we’ll get is another link to a .aep from nyc-visual 🙂

Of course it all depends on the intended application and required look, for many purposes your dice would be perfect and much easier to manipulate than a 3D model.

– A. A.

[Alon_a]

> I think you’d agree that my suggestion is much simpler and much more efficient.

Sure I agree 🙂 Makes much more sense. I responded to the original question (“how did they link…”) without thinking of alternatives.

– AA

[Alon_a]

> I think you’d agree that my suggestion is much simpler and much more efficient.

Sure I agree 🙂 Makes much more sense. I responded to the original question (“how did they link…”) without thinking of alternatives.

– AA

[Alon_a]

Here’s one way, with a plugin:

https://www.digitalanarchy.com/toolbox/toolbox_sampler.html

This lets you sample the color at a given coordinate; once you have that, it’s pretty straightforward to connect it to other stuff like a circle’s radius. To get the effect in the video you’d have to apply this multiple times at various points in an array.

– AA

[Alon_a]

Here’s one way, with a plugin:

https://www.digitalanarchy.com/toolbox/toolbox_sampler.html

This lets you sample the color at a given coordinate; once you have that, it’s pretty straightforward to connect it to other stuff like a circle’s radius. To get the effect in the video you’d have to apply this multiple times at various points in an array.

– AA

[Alon_a]

NEVER use GIF for transparency. It doesn’t have an alpha channel, only a single transparent color, and that’s bad bad bad for aliasing and anything else thas to do with transparency. Always use PSD as suggested above or PNG which is a great format for any situation where you can’t use the original Photoshop layers. Make sure the PNG is set to “millions of colors+” or 32-bit or whatever the app you use calls it and you’ll be good to go.

[Alon_a]

Yup – that’s what I meant by “as long as you have the OpenGL support”… obviously I wasn’t being clear enough. Anyway the numbers you mention are incredible, I’m going to have to upgrade pretty soon myself. Dual Opteron… droooool….

– AA

[Alon_a]

Start here:

https://www.adobe.com/products/aftereffects/opengl.html

Most cards nowadays have dual output, just check first. As long as you got the OpenGL support, your speed is much more likely to be determined by your CPU and memory than the card. If I’m wrong here, someone will probably correct me 🙂

– AA

[Alon_a]

The point about network rendering is well taken, but to be fair let’s remember that, conversely, XSI Foundation provides several things for which you need to pay quite a bit of extra in C4D. XSI FND has a complete and highly sophisticated particle system, soft/rigid body dynamics, cloth, character animation tools, mental ray rendering (certainly on par with C4D’s Advanced Rendering), toon shaders and probably more.

But of course, it all boils down to whatever one feels comfortable with. C4D is a great app and many people are creating amazing stuff with it. It’s best to try for some time and decide, that’s really the bottom line.

I also agree with your other post about integration with AE not being the major strength of C4D it is sometimes made up to be. There are plug-ins for XSI that provide similar functionality, it’s not such a big deal.

BTW I was indeed wrong about TrueSpace – I did not follow its progress recently. Looks interesting, I just downloaded the demo version…

– AA