[Bruce Rudolph]

Hey Cristian,
To achieve what you want with Modynamics is difficult. (it has its limitations). For more info on your particular challenge, look at
Cineversity.com : Tutorial Track>> Motion Graphics, MoDynamics : MoDynamics: Concave Shapes Part 1A (and 2 and 3 as well)

If I had to do what your talking about, I would try to fake it by maybe making the bottle opaque, and then Rendering the clone dynamics separate and comping them in after effects.

hope this helps

[Bruce Rudolph]

HI Robyn
Your definetly doing it the hard way.
Have a look at the file attached.
I used a mograph text cloner for a start.
Then shut off global gravity in edit/project settings.
Then used a gravity force (object/gravity) with fall off to linear.
The falloff cage is keyed and triggers the gravity as it runs through the letters. The axis direction is important.
I used a turbulence force to move em a bit because they fall dead straight. (keyed to 0 at the end)
You could do the same linear falloff setup with a random effector for the rotation only.
Hope this helps.

390_fallingletters.c4d.zip

[Bruce Rudolph]

Hey Nathan,
Im thinking that what you want to use is an inheritance effector.
It will mimic the animation of an object (not the cloned object)
in this case a cube growing.
You set the falloff to linear and then run the falloff cage through the grid.
Try to download this sample file with this link.

389_effector1.c4d.zip

[Bruce Rudolph]

Hey Adam, Thanks for the info.
I attempted to follow the first part of the instructions To get a multi shader to swap materials using a plain effector. Thats exactly what I need. I wasnt able to get it to work. There’s quite a few options in the shader as well as the effector. I was wondering if you could have a look at the project file that I attached and see where I went wrong.
Thanks again,
Bruce

File link

[Bruce Rudolph]

Thanks for the input. All good ideas!
Embarrassingly, my problem was the zoom level in the f-curves window.
It seems to change depending on what your viewing, some times its zoomed way out, making the f-curve look flat. I figured it out by selecting my parameter and going to view/frame selected.
Not proud of that, but I thought it would be good to follow up on the post in case another “new user” had the same problem.
Thanks again
Bruce

[Bruce Rudolph]

Hey ben, that sounds frustrating.
I would try moving the clouds back in z space first.
Are the grass layers much larger than the visible grass that’s on them.
Maybe crop them down as small as you can?
Are they pre-comped.?? Can you pre render them??
It could be a bug caused by soo many 3D layers.
(and always toggle the collapse transformations switches as part of any trouble shooting session.)

Thats all I can think of.good luck
Bruce

[Bruce Rudolph]

HI,
I would try:

Turning off open GL.
if you enable opengl for previews ae will not use multiprocessing to render previews, they are not compatible renderers and the opengl render engine override the multiprocessing settings. with a 8-core mac, you’ll probably find that the multiprocessing is faster than opengl acceleration. opengl can only accelerate the render of blending modes, motion blur and about a dozen standard effects, multiprocessing will accelerate pretty much all rendering.

And: you should be able to use proxies for those large stills.
check the AE tutorials here on the cow.

and maybe: Animating the camera instead of the stills. (if you can)

And: if something like photoshop is running and it has a big ram allotment, try quitting that. Sounds funny but I had to do this last night under a similar situation.

Good luck,
B

[Bruce Rudolph]

you need to export using a format that supports alpha channels.
Try exporting with the animation codec, colors set to millions+
(the + is the alpha channel)

B

[Bruce Rudolph]

One of Andrew Kramers first tutorials had an interesting alternate to the “separate fields/ interpret footage” approach.
It may yield better results by not loosing the info in the field that’s discarded.
Have a look here:
https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/deinterlace_in_ae/

Cheers, Bruce

[Bruce Rudolph]

Theres an excellent example of what you need at fxguide, achieved by Gareth Edwards for the BBC production of Attila the Hun, with after effects and 3DSMAX.

Have a look at the article here:
https://www.fxguide.com/article463.html
Dont miss the video breakdown (link above the first green screen image)

and this one as well:
https://www.discmakers.com/community/resources/edge/2008/NewModel.asp

Cheers
Bruce