[Christopher Handrick]

Thanks Dan!

That worked great. Perhaps one day I will master these crazy expressions, but until then I’m glad great people like you are around to help!

– Chris

[Christopher Handrick]

Microsoft Expression Blend. It’s a program for making silverlight applications.

I’m working on a sporting event animation that would introduce players, and they want to use a silverlight application to pull all the information about the players from a list.

I did some more research and found that the program can create some limited clipping masks, but it turns out my problem isn’t limited to masking. My animation contains several rotating elements and a cylinder that enters, pauses in the middle while all the player information is played, and then leaves. The real problem I’ve discovered is that in expression blend these would be three separate animations that would be played back to back driven by code. However I have no way of knowing how long the middle section would need to loop for all the player information to be displayed. So while I can easily make a very long looping version of the middle animation, the big problem is that when it finishes and tries to play the animation of the cylinder leaving, it isn’t properly synced and all the objects that spin throughout the whole animation have a noticeable twitch from the wrong keyframes being played next to eachother.

I can’t think of any way to avoid this, so right now I’m more or less starting the whole project over again.

Again, I apologize if this post is hard to understand but it’s gotten to the point where it’s hard for me to even properly think about the problem myself much less explain it.

[Christopher Handrick]

You’re right, that would solve the problem.

Upon further reflection I’ve come to realize the source of my grief lies entirely in the program I have to assemble all the animation in.

Thanks for the help

[Christopher Handrick]

Awesome, thanks!

That is rendering much more as I expected, and I can’t see much difference between the GI still renders I did and these new ones with the physical renderers indirect illumination.

I appreciate the help everyone!

[Christopher Handrick]

I am using GI and the physical renderer. I figured that might be what was happening, so I let it run for an hour and forty five minutes. It seemed to finish calculating the GI prepass, but then it just sat at a black screen and continued to say “preparing” without making any progress.

I then went back and disabled GI and it rendered just fine. So while I’ve narrowed the problem down to something with GI, it still seems to be getting locked up after it finishes the prepass. I’ll have to look further into the GI settings, but I will admit I’m a bit lost in there, in my past work I’ve always used mental ray and final gather rather than GI so I’m fairly unfamiliar with it.

[Christopher Handrick]

Tried compiling the script with no success. I can’t for the life of me figure out why this isn’t functioning, but running the script just doesn’t seem to be doing anything.

I really appreciate all your help none the less.

Thanks

[Christopher Handrick]

Hi, sorry it took me so long to respond, but I only have access to After Effects to test this script on my work computer.

I tried changing it to Sendmode Input, but that had no effect. I then switched it back to Sendmode Play and it’s not even flashing my cursor anymore.

Also yes, I’m clicking on the playhead, pressing and holding tab, and then releasing the mouse button.

Is it possible the script is being blocked by the antivirus installed on this computer?

[Christopher Handrick]

Hey Ben,

I installed your script and gave it a shot, but it doesn’t seem to work for me. While I hold down the Tab key it does make my cursor rapidly blink between black and white, but it doesn’t seem to be scrubbing the playhead at all.

I’m also running a windows 7 pro 64 bit machine, so I’m not sure why it’s not working for me. I’ll try to look into it more in a bit when I have more time.

Thanks for your post.