[Darby Edelen]

Right click your camera projected texture tag and use “Generate UVW Coordinates.” This will add a UVW tag with the camera projection baked into it.

The object will need to be editable for you to do that.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

To properly account for obscuration I believe you’d also want to apply a compositing tag with matte object enabled and set to black on the object you don’t want appearing in the reflection.

I really wish Cinema had render layers.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

It’s been a while since I’ve used R12 and there were a lot of changes and new features with regards to the grid in R14. That said have you made sure that ‘Grid’ is enabled in the Filter menu of your Perspective view? The easiest way to check this would be to enable ‘All’ in the Filter menu.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

Try increasing the “Steps per Frame” in the Expert tab of the Dynamics Tab in the Project Settings.

In order for a collision to be registered C4D needs to know how often to check for collisions. By default it does this 5 times per frame. If the object is moving very quickly it may not catch the collision.

The Maximum Solver Iterations per Step and Error Threshold values can have an impact as well but that’s more of a corner case. It essentially improves the quality of the calculation on each subframe step so it’s not appropriate in cases where NO collision is being detected and more appropriate if the force created by the bounce or collision seems inaccurate.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

You can apply expressions to time remapping but the implementation will depend entirely on what functionality you need and which limitations you’re willing to accept.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

Time Remapping may get you part of the way there. This gives you an animatable property that controls playback. It’s hard to know exactly what your end goal is so I can’t say for sure if it’ll work.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

I’d first shuffle the Alpha into the RGB channels using a Channel > Shift Channels effect with these values:

Take Alpha From: Full On
Take Red From: Alpha
Take Green From: Alpha
Take Blue From: Alpha

Then I’d apply the Time > Echo effect with these expressions:

Echo Time (seconds):

framesToTime(1);

Number of Echoes:

timeToFrames(outPoint - inPoint);

Echo Operator: Maximum

The image on the first frame of the layer will be black wherever there was no alpha value throughout the entire layer’s animation.

Note that this only works for the non-transform animations on a footage layer. If the position of the layer is animated then you’ll need to pre-compose before applying these effects or apply them to an Adjustment Layer.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

[Jake mendez] “I had originally told them to have a green screen on the phone, and the DP emailed back saying he likes white so theres no green cast off on the flesh tones.”

Green cast is incredibly easy to remove using spill suppression techniques. It will also allow you to create a spill matte that you can use to add color from the content you’re compositing onto the screen (the hand lights up with the color of the composited screen). Can’t do that with white.

Find a nice way to tell the DP to stick to DP-ing 🙂

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

Creating transparency may not be entirely necessary in your case. Usually transparency is useful if the footage is going into a digital pipeline (further compositing work). In the case of projecting or viewing video on a screen you can effectively think of black as ‘transparent.’ Projectors and displays work by adding or emitting light on a surface. Black adds no light (if you ignore the inescapable back light).

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

Use another “template” layer’s motion path between 0 and 1 seconds to define the path the layer should follow.


origin = effect("Origin")("Layer");
template = effect("Motion Template")("Layer");

start = origin.toWorld(origin.anchorPoint,inPoint);

t = linear(time,inPoint,outPoint,0,1);

a = template.toWorld(template.anchorPoint, 0);
b = template.toWorld(template.anchorPoint, t);

start + b - a;


You’ll also notice that I’m pointing to a couple of Effect > Expression Control > Layer Controls on the layer instead of to the layers directly. This allows you to easily apply different Origin/Template layers to each layer.

Darby Edelen