[Darby Edelen]

[LunarHoax] “However, every time she moves, her skin wrinkles, stretches, and her muscles contract making this look blatantly 2D.”

I’m confused, isn’t this the look you’d want? My fear in this scenario would be that the texture might look too static. I don’t understand what about the look is ‘wrong’ you might need to explain this a bit further.

[Darby Edelen]

[pixelhussar] “There were some layers with less than 100% opacity in PS and these weren’t transparent in AE at all. Or did I do something wrong?”

I just tried importing a PS file as a composition and it preserved all of the layer opacity settings and blending modes. Are you sure you’re importing the PSD correctly?

As I can’t recreate your problem I don’t think I’d be able to give you any more advice without seeing your problem for myself =/

[Darby Edelen]

You’ll have to have an expression on the layer you want to affect in order to use information from another layer. However, you might be able to make the expression more self contained like:

thisComp.layer(“MyLight”).transform.position.valueAtTime(index);

Where ‘index’ stands for the layer’s position in the timeline (1 is the top and it counts up going down). So your first layer would use the emitter’s position at 1 second, your second layer would use it at 2 seconds, etc.

However, as I think about this I’m realizing that each of your layers will probably have some keyframes driving the actual growth of the leaf, in this case you could determine the emitter’s position at the time that the first keyframe for the leaf’s growth appears (lets say they are scale keyframes):

start = transform.scale.key(1).time; //Get the time at which the first keyframe appears in the scale property

thisComp.layer(“MyLight).transform.position.valueAtTime(start); //Use the time of the first scale keyframe to get our position value

This is ideal as it would automatically use the emitter’s position at the time you wanted the leaf to start growing (if you want the leaf to grow a little farther down the vine then subtract a little time from the ‘start’ value).

[Darby Edelen]

[bill875] “I am building a 1 minute ad for my novel within a webpodcast I do and I need a model of the Earth (3d).
What format works best I will probably get it off turbo squid.”

As has already been pointed out here on the Cow, you can’t import 3D files directly into After Effects, they need to be rendered out of a 3D program as an image sequence or movie file.

That said, if you have the CC Sphere effect (which should be installed with AE7 Pro) you can manage to produce this effect yourself. Luckily the Earth is close enough to a sphere that I think you’d get away with it =)

CC Sphere will take whatever layer it’s applied to and wrap it around a sphere. This means that if you pre-compose an image of the earth and then apply effects to it to simulate this “12000 year difference” you can then apply CC Sphere to that pre-comp in your final comp and the effects you applied in the pre-comp will update on the Sphere (re-‘texturing’ it).

It’s a quick way to accomplish this, and you don’t get any fancy bump maps and the layer (the ‘texture’) must tile if you plan on rotating the sphere (as I assume you would in the case of a planet). I used CC Sphere to make an earth like this for a transition in the menus for Defenders of the Earth Vol. 2, it worked pretty well (even though you only see the planet for a couple of seconds).

[Darby Edelen]

[Milkman] “When I open a tga or any image with a transparent background, I get the drawing with a white background”

If the .tga is using an alpha channel I believe you’ll have to set this alpha as a layer mask to see the transparency. Photoshop doesn’t take alpha channels into account when determining transparency. I’m guessing this is because Photoshop documents can have 1, 2, 5, 10 or more alpha channels, which are often used for filters (Lighting Effects, Lens Blur come to mind) instead of defining transparencies.

To set an alpha to a layer mask you can cmd-click (ctrl-click) that alpha channel in your channels tab of the layer palette, then choose the layer you want to mask and Layer > Layer Mask > Reveal Selection.

This Layer Mask will give you a preview of how your .tga file will look in other programs that use the alpha channel as transparency.

[Darby Edelen]

[Airbrush Art] “Thank you for the help.But I have to say ,I guess I am not following the directions properly or not understanding.”

I’m sorry if it’s some part of my explanation that’s confusing. I tried my technique last night and it worked fine. Do you use layer masks regularly?

[Airbrush Art] “Open the image,copy it to a layer,take magic wand tool & click on 1 of the areas of the background,go to select,go down to similar,now every part of the backgroung is selected,then hit delete.Now there is no background & I can add a color to a different layer & put it behind it to show thru the line.
Thanks again”

This does work, but it doesn’t give you as much flexibility as a Layer Mask, erasing/deleting the data means it’s gone, masking it means it’s not visible. I’m not a big fan of using the magic wand, but even if you do decide to use it you can use Layer > Layer Mask > Hide Selection when you have your selection instead of hitting the delete key. This gives you more power to flesh out subtleties in your mask (you can use levels on the mask to increase or decrease opacity of a certain part, or you can use any filters on it… Gaussian blur comes to mind). It’s all about maintaining your source imagery and giving yourself flexibility.

I’m curious, did you get to the part where you can see the mask channel you created on the new layer? At that step you’re pretty much done.

[Darby Edelen]

I would really recommend Sound Keys again at this point, it takes all the hard work out of working with sound. You can graphically set the effect to only respond to certain frequencies at certain threshold amplitudes and set an output based on the amount above this threshold the audio reaches.

In this manner it becomes easy to set the effect to be sensitive to any or all frequencies and (after being applied) return either 0 or 1 (or a range of other values) depending on whether the audio exceeded the threshold value.

You can then use this value in your expressions. Takes all the labor out of it, and this is coming from someone who loves to hate on 3rd party plugs! =O

https://www.trapcode.com/movies/beat_explode.mov

[Darby Edelen]

[yikesmikes] “Methinks it only wobbles if you rotate a square pixel circle (like from PS or a square pixel comp) in a .9 comp, or visy-versy.”

Yeah, that was kind of what I was thinking he might be referring to. But it doesn’t apply when you’re working with in AE or PS as long as you stick with the aspect ratio that you’ll be outputting to throughout the project. Everything should turn out gravy.

[Darby Edelen]

[Dave LaRonde] “and if you have any thought of animating the rotation of these perfect shapes in AE, work in a square-pixel comp, rather than a non-square-pixel comp. The pixel aspect ratio in this situation needs to be 1.”

I don’t think this is true, unless you’re proposing rotating something I’m not aware of. Just to make sure I did a test in an AE7 0.9 Comp and rotated the mask and the layer, in both cases it maintains it’s perfect circle ratio.

[Darby Edelen]

Without knowing too much about what you’re talking about, I would say that you’d want to evaluate the emitter’s position at a given time like this:

thisComp.layer(“MyLight”).transform.position.valueAtTime(2);

Would give you the value of the position array for MyLight (this will be in the form [x, y, z] for a light) at 2 seconds in composition time. You could add the value of the the layer’s inPoint to 2 to use the value 2 seconds into the layer.

I hope that helps you in some way, let me know if I’m way off on what you’re trying to accomplish =)