Darby Edelen
Forum Replies Created
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[Rick Diamond] “16 or 32 bit actually looked like it created more banding”
Your display is not able to display 16 or 32 bits per channel of color information. For that reason these bit depths may appear banded on your display. If you render to an 8bpc file format from a 16bpc or 32bpc project AE will automatically introduce dithering to reduce banding in the resulting render.
All of that said I almost always add a little bit of grain even in my 32bpc projects because I like the control… and I like to look at pretty gradients 🙂
Darby Edelen
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Think of a shadow casting Light in AE as a sort of camera. Anything this Light “camera” can’t see should render shadowed.
The most likely explanation for these artifacts is that you have two layers that are very close to one another in space. The light is unable to properly determine which layer is in front and which is behind (which is shadowing and which is shadowed). You can fix this by any of the following:
1) Separating the layers more until the artifacts go away.
2) Setting Casts Shadows to Off on one of the offending layers.
3) Setting Receives Shadows to Off on one of the offending layers.In addition, these artifacts can become more pronounced as the path from the Light to the layer approaches a glancing angle. Imagine looking straight on to a piece of paper: you see a lot of it and in AE it would occupy a good amount of your shadow map resolution. Now imagine looking at paper from its edge: you see almost none of it and there is not sufficient resolution to accurately map shadows.
Darby Edelen
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[Bur Ci] “I thought that maybe i could key frame animate one shot next to another and stacking them on top of each other so one scene would slide in as the other slide out of frame.”
This depends somewhat on the objects you used to block the end of the shot and whether they move all the way through the shot or not. I imagine you want to use the objects essentially as a wipe which would require that the blocking object not only enter and block the frame but move off the screen as well.
If that’s the case then you should try motion tracking the blocking object.
Start the track while the object is blocking the screen and continue it through as far as you can. Then apply the track to a Null object and then parent a solid to the Null.
You can apply a mask to the solid and use it as a track matte for the clip. The solid may need to be bigger than the frame so that you can have the clip fully visible until the Null starts moving.
You may need to extend the motion of your tracked Null out farther to complete the wipe. In that case you can hand keyframe the last move or try this expression on the Null’s position:
loopOut("continue");This will cause the Null to move at a linear rate based on its last keyframed speed/direction.
Darby Edelen
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Set your candle and flame layer to 3D inside your pre-comp, then enable collapse transformations on each instance of that pre-comp in your main cake comp.
That should do it.
If you need to adjust material options as well (if there are lights) you’ll need to do this inside the pre-comp for the flame and candle layers. The material options don’t do anything on a composition with the collapse transformations switch enabled.
If you still need an alpha for some reason you can either use Knoll Unmult or Set Matte set to Luminance + Remove Color Matting to generate one for the flame.
Darby Edelen
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Option #2: Set Z-Scale to -100%.
Easy to copy & paste to new layers and leaves your orientation/rotation untouched.
Darby Edelen
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If you’re using collapse transformations on a pre-comp the adjustment layers inside it will affect any layers below that pre-comp. In such a situation I’d recommend applying the effects to the individual layers inside the pre-comp rather than an adjustment layer.
Darby Edelen
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Is there a specific reason you only want to use one particle group?
Darby Edelen
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If you wanted the individual letters to align to a circular mask there’s an animation preset for that titled “3D Rotate around Circle.” You can search for this in the Effects & Presets panel and apply it to a text layer. I had a “whoa, cool” moment the day I dissected that one 🙂
Darby Edelen
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[Paul Roper] “But there are so many effects and layers on that project, it will always be slow to render on even the fastest machines.”
The primary reason this project renders slowly is the use of CC Radial Blur at 100 Quality. Replace all of these with CC Radial Fast Blur and you should see a 2-4x speed increase.
For future reference I highly recommend enabling “Show Rendering Progress in Info Panel and Flowchart” in Preferences > Display and looking at your info panel as you wait for a frame to render. This is a good way to diagnose slow effects so that you can try to find a replacement or settings that will improve render speeds.
Darby Edelen
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[Brian Jones] “in Project/Dynamics/Expert the default setting for Collision Margin is 1cm you can take that down to zero (or close)”
While I wouldn’t rule out Collision Margin as a possible culprit, I wouldn’t start there either. Collision Margin doesn’t usually affect objects in such a dramatic way.
Darby Edelen