[Brian Jones]

make them be a child of the head (or place head and eyes into a Null and animate the Null)

[Brian Jones]

Arial Black is loaded on the Mac in 11 (but not 10.5) they have apparently been doing work on the font routines.

[Brian Jones]

Were you using splines with Intermediate Points set to Uniform?

[Brian Jones]

with mograph – grid your cubes, apply the movie texture to the cloner – probably with Flat Projection, resize the texture (Texture Tool) to fit your whole screen.
In Cloner Object/Object set Fix Texture to Straight – now the texture will stay with the cubes as they move

[Brian Jones]

https://www.room61.com/down.html

Target Zero by Christoph Fuchs, old but still works (in 10.5 anyway)

[Brian Jones]

Solver Object/Main/Energy Loss – 0%
Rigid Dynamics Tag on objects – Aerodynamics – all 0%
Rigid Dynamics Tag on objects – Collision – I don’t know what settings are going to be on a bunch of objects but if you bounce a ball on a floor and set Floor to elasticity – 100% and the ball to 101% it’s pretty close to no energy loss, both at 100% will still lose energy.

[Brian Jones]

A couple simple examples the first which just activates the dynamic at frame 41 (it stops dead and drops) and the second with some xpresso to pass the speed of the test object to the Rigid Dynamics Tag Start values from the last frame before the dynamic takes over.

Something not obvious in the prebuilt examples is to animate first and then bring the object into the Solver, then move to the frame where the Dynamic is to take over and Initialize the object in the Dynamics menu so it will start there and not back where it was on the first frame. Getting the velocity to be a smooth transition looks like it will be a matter of getting the curves right in the F-Curve manager so it passes off smoothly

[Brian Jones]

no, that should be fairly easy. Excepting the edges of the continents would jagged (because of the polys). You could also do it with the same black and white map you use for the alpha in the displacement, that too would give one height for all the land. Are the continents going to have a back to them?

[Brian Jones]

what are you trying for? An extrude would all be the same height (or very tedious to do) if that’s what you want then great, otherwise if you want the ‘bumps where there really are bumps’ look then displacement is the way to go but you need sub-poly displacement and a good hi-res bump map.

https://www.celestiamotherlode.net/
https://celestia.h-schmidt.net/earth-vt/
https://www.planetscapes.com/maps/
https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_set.php?categoryID=2355
https://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/stars.html
https://planetpixelemporium.com/index.php

[Brian Jones]

you can use black and white version in the alpha channel of a material to get land only (like it sounds like you want, and later a bump map in the bump or displacement channels to get relief. Don’t need an .ai file, it is usually done with a bitmap (save the illustrator as a psd file) just save with enough resolution in the bitmap that you get smooth enough results – there is no magic number, it just needs to be high enough resolution that it looks good as close as you are going to zoom in to the final object.