[Burt Hazard]

[Aviv Vana] “Can 3d objects made in a 3d program be brought into Motion3 and then used freely (rotate it all around or have the camera rotate around it)?” Nope, at least not yet.

What you can do, however, is render your 3D animations with alpha channels and do the rest of your animation in Motion. Likewise, you can do multipass rendering (diffuse, specular, reflection, shadow, etc.) in your 3D app and then do multipass compositing in Motion (using blend modes and lights, etc.)…actually it’s a pretty good marriage.

[Burt Hazard]

And usually of course you need to decide on a theme for your animation…since it is a hair expo maybe go with a sort of Maurice Binder/Daniel Kleinman type of quasi-abstract, ethereal piece with models interacting with fancy backgrounds, highlighting the glamor of the event, i.e., pretty upmarket (but without the nudity, of course!). Motion’s Particle Emitters, Replicators, Filters (like the slit-scan stuff), Paint Strokes features are ideal for this kind of thing.

(I help run a media science-fiction convention and I do the videos for them and I’ve done stuff like creating title graphics of the guests using Shake and Motion. For the last two batches I’ve rotoed the guests and composited them behind Motion backgrounds. In one, I even did a sight-gag of Claudia Christian blowing a kiss to someone in the audience and used animated Motion sparkles to complete the effect.)

[Burt Hazard]

Well if you have Motion 3 the new paint stroke features would be a good place to start (they even have “light brush” presets). It could also be done with a particle effect. (And then of course use Screen, Overlay modes, etc.)

[Burt Hazard]

Also as a follow-up, remember that you can also switch between Local Axis, World Axis, and View Axis in the particle emitter’s HUD (which allows you to change the way the 3D transform tools act on the objects).

[Burt Hazard]

Not totally sure of the final effect you’re trying to achieve but you’re right, the only way to get a 3D orbit around of a particle emitter in Motion is by using a camera orbit and having the “face camera” option selected. Pretty much this is because of the way Motion creates the effect. As has been said many times before it is really a 2.5D app and of course really all the particle cells are still 2D and Motion cheats a volumetric effect (pretty well actually).

You could create a second camera in your scene and do a separate orbit and render of your fire emitter (with other layers temporarily turned off)which you could export (using the Animation codec) and reimport as a movie file with an embedded alpha channel that you could composite back in (it would sort of be the reverse of a motion control/matchmove operation!).

[Burt Hazard]

Yep, good stuff.

Also you can check out:

Books:

MOTION GRAPHICS AND EFFECTS IN FINAL CUT STUDIO 2: FIELD TECHNIQUES FOR EDITORS AND DESIGNERS
Mark Spencer and Jem Schofield

MOTION 3: DESIGING AND ANIMATED MOTION GRAPHICS IN FINAL CUT STUDIO 2
Damian Allen, Mark Spencer, Bryce Button, Tony Huet

Other websites with free tutorials:

http://www.applemotion.net
embryo.me.uk

DVDs:

MOTION 3 FAST FORWARD
MOTION 3 3D DEEP DIVE
Mark Spencer, http://www.rippletraining.com

MOTION 101: CORE MOTION 3
Michael Wohl, http://www.macprovideo.com

MOTION 3
Jem Schofield, DMTS JumpStart series, http://www.digitalmediatraining.com

[Burt Hazard]

You’ll probably have to use a cheat, i.e., create an animated white shape on the bottom of your screen (or multiple shapes if you want the “snow” to accumulate on different objects in your comp). (The snow presets use Random Motion bahvior, so even if you use aan additional drag behavior, the particles will still “dance” around a bit.)

[Burt Hazard]

Select Transform tool>Adjust Points tool

[Burt Hazard]

There is a way and it involves some Julia Child-style baking and “The Sensational Reverse Brothers” from RED DWARF’s “Backwards.”

1) First, you’ll need some “baked” (i.e. raster) text (your title) from Photoshop or a program like it and it needs to have an alpha channel
2) Then bring into Motion and put it in the Media Tab
3) Bring your “rock” object(s) into the project and add a Replicator to it
5) Change Replicator shape type to image (leave on Tile Fill)
5) Make sure text is straight alpha type (or change it in Inspector) and drag text into Image Source well of Replicator
6) Increase Columns and Rows and play around with Scale parameter
7) Add behaviors like Repel, Random Motion, Wind, etc. to the Replicator
a)check Affect Subobjects for Wind
b)check Affect Subobjects for Random Motion
c)Set Repel’s Affect parameter to “specific objects” and put Relpicator in the list well
8) This will create a title composed out of “rocks” that will disperse
9) This is where you use a good ol’ fashioned reverse gag: then export project to a movie (i.e. more baking), make another project and import your movie into it, then Add Behavior>Retiming>Reverse

[Burt Hazard]

And if it’s something you do a lot of you might want to check out EffectsLab Pro from FXHome: https://fxhome.com/effectslab/pro

There is a lot of overlap between Motion and EffectsLab, but EffectsLab, as the name suggests, is specifically geared towards doing visual effects work for independent filmmakers, hobbiests, etc. and does have a dedicated muzzle flash engine as you’ll see from the link. (It’s one of the “secret weapons” I have in my software arsenal along with Silhouette Roto and Studio Artist.)