[Darby Edelen]

[Per Sverre Wold-Hansen] “I tried now, but couldn’t make the exclude work. For me no light (-effect) would show when inside/centered in the “light-dome”-object when using the “Exclude” in the light Tab.”

When excluding the containing object from the light the only important thing to exclude is the shadow, so make sure that’s enabled. You can disable the others.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

[Per Sverre Wold-Hansen] “But I think it does make sense to make the “Fade if Behind Object” ON… The others were OFF.”

You’re right. It does make sense if the light will be going behind any additional objects beyond the self-illuminated surface. I’ve just found that the Exclude list in the light also applies to these settings so it was unnecessary to disable them to begin with.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

If I were you I’d avoid this issue by changing some of the attributes on your light object instead.

For example, make sure that all of the “Fade” attributes in the Lens tab are turned off then add the self-illuminated geometry the light is associated with to its Exclude list. Center the light to the parent geometry.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

I should’ve include this note as well:

…parent all 3d layers including cameras and lights to the 3d null.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

Let me start by saying I totally agree with you. That said, what is it you’re hoping to achieve? Perhaps there’s another route to get there.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

Parent all 3D layers to a 3D Null layer and scale that Null.

There will be no discernible visual difference but all of your 3D position values will increase relative to the scale of the 3D Null (which you can see if you unparent your 3D layers from the null or delete it).

Ultimately scene scale doesn’t generally matter that much in AE. It’s all about relative distances and those don’t change as you scale up the entire scene. In your example you could’ve gotten the same result by changing the keyframed values of the null instead of scaling the scene. All of that said it is nice to have your position values in a reasonable range.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

I’m a little confused about what you’re attempting to do. Do you want to save out the color information of the rendered object to a texture? If that’s the case then bake the “Surface Color” from the Bake Texture tag.

It’s important to keep in mind that this will bake all of the lighting on the object as it is lit in Cinema 4D. If you change the lights, the object, or the camera (if you’re using specular or reflections) then the lighting will be different and the texture will not respond to those changes in lighting.

If I’ve gotten things mixed up please let me know in more detail what your end goal is.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

[constanti dinu] “The number to change = thisComp.layer(“got a slider here”).effect(“slider”);
thisComp.layer(“position” + the number to change).transform.opacity”

Have you tried using something like that?

Of course you’d need to rewrite “The number to change” as an actual variable like “n” and “slider” as the name of the slider. You’ll also need to add a space after “position” to format the name of the layer correctly (“position 1” instead of “position1”). Lastly you’ll need to make sure that the slider value is an integer (e.g. 1 or 2 instead of 1.46213), but in essence I don’t see any reason why what you’ve spec’d out wouldn’t work. Here’s the code with my suggested modifications:

x = Math.floor(thisComp.Layer("got a slider here").effect("Slider Control")("Slider"));
thisComp.layer("position " + x).transform.opacity

Optionally you might want to add some error checking in case the slider accidentally tries to select a layer that does not exist:


try{
x = Math.floor(thisComp.Layer("got a slider here").effect("Slider Control")("Slider"));
thisComp.layer("position " + x).transform.opacity
}
catch(err){
value;
}

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

Can you share a screen capture of what you’re seeing? I haven’t experienced what you’ve described but it’s very possible that I haven’t done exactly what you’re trying to do either 🙂

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

[Michelle Christena] “I set the first keyframe to 0% opacity, set the next to 100%, and then the third to 100%, and the fourth to 0% so that the mask was only visible in the short amount of time I needed it to completely obscure items beneath it. Any time I would change the mask opacity at that point, it would change it for all of them so I wasn’t sure what I was doing wrong.”

Did this change all of the keyframe values or change all of the mask opacity values?

If the former then make sure you don’t have any keyframes selected (or only have the ones you want to modify selected).

If the latter then make sure that you are animating the “Mask Opacity” property (not the layer’s “Opacity” property) and also that you only have the one Mask Opacity property you want to modify selected.

Also, here are some shortcuts you might find useful when working with masks. With a layer selected press:

m – To reveal Mask Shape properties
f – To reveal Mask Feather properties
tt – To reveal Mask Opacity properties (tap t twice as opposed to tapping t once for the layer opacity)
mm – To reveal all Mask properties (includes all of the above + Mask Expansion)

Darby Edelen