Darby Edelen
Forum Replies Created
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[andrew donaldson] “Does anyone have any suggestions as to why it won’t rest properly on the floor?”
What ‘Shape’ are you using for the phone? Is your Size Increment set to 0?
Darby Edelen
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[Ryan Paterson] “Ya, no I know all of that. I just don’t want to see the particles emitting, wondering if there’s a way to run the particles, and then save them in their completed state. I don’t think there is though :(“
You can bake the dynamics and then use Current State to Object on either a Particle Emitter or a Cloner at the frame you want to save. This will create a separate object for each particle.
If you still want dynamics from that point you’ll need to apply a dynamics tag either to the null that the objects are now inside of or (for added mograph functionality) nest the objects in a Fracture and apply the dynamics there.
Darby Edelen
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[Tim Bentley] “Instinctively I always try to make them the same size as their actual scale in the comp, but does AE prefer the smaller, scaled-up vector, or one closer to the actual size (or doesn’t it matter)?”
This shouldn’t matter. When a layer is being continuously rasterized whatever size it’s scaled to represents the pixel data that needs to be stored in memory.
However, when you have limits on the amount of data that can be stored in memory (e.g. with render multiple frames simultaneously, or before AE was 64-bit) it is best to break large layers into separate smaller layers. This is not as big of a deal as it used to be, but may still provide performance/stability/mental health improvements.
Darby Edelen
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Alt+drag does not preserve the size of your footage when replacing. It preserves the scale of your footage. You should make sure that the solid layers you’re using to lay things out are the right pixel size and uniformly scaled (all scale values are the same).
In the example you posted the blue solid has a scale of [40,50,50] (x,y,z) so any image you replace it with via alt+drag will also be scaled by 40% on the x-axis and 50% on the y-axis.
Darby Edelen
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Setting up some Layers should also help you. You can disable or solo specific layers in the viewport to speed up interaction. I don’t actually do this all that often, but I really should 🙂
Darby Edelen
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[Alex Vlair] “Although the red part I wanted was showing through, there were some artifacts because there was apparently a tiny difference in size of the matte compared to the text underneath that I wanted to show.”
This is common in the workflow you described. Generally I’d either add a Generate > Fill effect with the correct red color to the visible layer if it’s a solid color, or try to remove the fringing with some combination of the Matte effects (Simple Choker is… well… simple) and Channels > Remove Color Matting. The latter requires generating an alpha on the layer, so either pre-comping your track matte with the visible layer, using the Channels > Set Matte effect or applying the effects directly to the keyed layer.
Darby Edelen
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Sounds like there’s some sort of black voodoo at work here. Sorry I can’t be of more help with your specific question.
What I would recommend is to break your illustrator file into several different layers if at all possible. AE will generally be happier with several small layers than one huge layer. That may not fix your issue, but it may improve your life in unexpected ways (no guarantees).
Darby Edelen
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I’m not really familiar with Maxwell but it could be that your surface normals are pointing in the wrong direction. Selected polygons should be tinted to show which direction the normal is facing. The defaults are orange (normal pointing toward you) and blue (normal pointing away). If you need to reverse them there is a command to do so (default shortcut: U-R).
Darby Edelen
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[chris amos] “Kind of difficult to explain, but I think I am just wondering how to copy this key and apply it to another layer.”
Check out Track Mattes in the online help:
That would be the most straightforward method. Most alternatives would involve pre-composing.
Darby Edelen
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Notice the “Renderer: Ray-traced 3D” button in the upper right hand corner of the composition viewer? Click that. Then in the Renderer drop-down in the dialog that opens select “Classic 3D.”
Darby Edelen