Darby Edelen
Forum Replies Created
-
[Derek Nickell] “AE is failing on “fast blur”. I have 6 layers with FB on it and have never had a problem with a built in plugin before… any thoughts?”
What kind of failing? Force closing? What kind of assets are your layers? Have you tried disabling them all and enabling them one at a time to see when it fails?
Any other details you can provide (a screen shot?) would be helpful.
Darby Edelen
-
[Eddie Cantle] “Hi I managed to get my front rotor working but the rear is giving me a hard time. Please check out my video to see whats going on…..I really need someone to help me out :)”
Freezing Transformations before keyframing your animation should solve this issue. Check the ‘Coord.’ tab of the object that is giving you trouble. Twirl down the ‘Freeze Transformation’ section and click ‘Freeze All’ (or ‘Freeze R’ as I believe that’s the only place you’re having an issue).
Darby Edelen
-
[Engin Osmanovski] “Can it do the job smoothly and with no hassle?”
This depends on the job. For C4D you don’t need a very high end GPU to meet basic OpenGL requirements. If you’re planning on doing Raytracing in AE or any CUDA simulation (Turbulence FD for example) then you should get the best GPU you can afford without sacrificing in other areas (CPU/RAM).
Darby Edelen
-
[Kyler Boudreau] “Problem: My lines in Photoshop have jagged edges when I draw. I messed with settings a lot, and can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong.”
Can you upload an example picture of what you are seeing?
Darby Edelen
-
[andrew donaldson] “I hope this doesn’t come across as naive, because alot of the time when I see work that’s done in the high end systems, I think i could probably do it in AE. But saying to a post house, “you don’t need Nuke I can do it in After Effects” won’t really fly!”
I’d agree with this.
I have experience in Nuke but I’m much much more comfortable in AE. Where I work there are those who default to using Nuke, and then there’s me 🙂 I have yet to see something done in Nuke that I couldn’t do in AE (and sometimes faster and better!). However, I think this has a lot to do with familiarity with the applications. If I had as much experience in Nuke as in AE then I’m sure it would provide more varied solutions. Ultimately though they are both tools I’d use every day.
All that said: I would definitely recommend learning Nuke. However, once you know Nuke well enough to get along in it, don’t discount AE either. Sometimes it’ll be easier, faster and all around better to go with AE.
Clients don’t care how the work gets done as long as it does, but your colleagues might care about interoperability. Nuke fits better into most high end workflows and processes and that is probably a big reason that it’s preferred in collaborative work.
Darby Edelen
-
[Tudor "Ted" Jelescu] “The technique I describe uses displacement maps (grayscale images)- so any other plugin that uses that may be of use, although I am not aware of any that does as good of a job as fast as the Mettle plugins do.”
You can sort of do it with the built-in Displacement Map effect and some expressions applied, but it won’t work nearly as well as Freeform.
Apply the Distort > Displacement Map effect to the footage you want to displace. Point it to the grayscale height map that defines the layer’s heights. Set the Horizontal and Vertical displacements to something large like 50, then apply this expressions to the Max Horizontal Displacement:
try{
h = Math.abs(value);
c = thisComp.activeCamera;
cp = fromWorld(c.toWorld([0,0,0]));
p = toWorld(anchorPoint);
v = p - cp;
x = radiansToDegrees(Math.atan2(v[0],v[2]));
y = radiansToDegrees(Math.atan2(v[1],v[2]));
linear(x, -90, 90, h, -h);
}
catch(err){
0;
}And this expression to the Max Vertical Displacement:
try{
h = Math.abs(value);
c = thisComp.activeCamera;
cp = fromWorld(c.toWorld([0,0,0]));
p = toWorld(anchorPoint);
v = p - cp;
x = radiansToDegrees(Math.atan2(v[0],v[2]));
y = radiansToDegrees(Math.atan2(v[1],v[2]));
linear(y, -90, 90, h, -h);
}
catch(err){
0;
}If you need more displacement you can change the underlying values of the Horizontal and Vertical displacements (these define the maximum displacement).
You’ll notice that this only really works if you’re looking at the front of the layer, and not close to parallel along its surface. These are just the shortcomings of cheating it with this technique 🙂
Darby Edelen
-
In general I would think any high end laptop would do the job just about the same as the next one. High end in this case means a quad core CPU and at least 8GB of RAM (the more the merrier).
Also a GT635M should be fine for most uses, but the GPU becomes more important if you’re planning on doing any AE CS6 ray-tracing, using Premiere Pro’s Mercury Playback Engine or doing any other CUDA work (Turbulence FD simulations in C4D?). I’d check in on specific user experiences with mobile GPUs in that case.
Darby Edelen
-
[John Hillman] “Is there a way to tell a light to point at an object, or some other method better than rotating each light individually?”
You can create a Target Light from the Lights menu. This is a Spotlight with a Target tag applied. You can also simply apply a Target tag to the lights you already have in your scene.
Personally I like to use the Character > Constraint tag set to Aim. This gives more options. Check these tags out in the Cinema 4D help.
Darby Edelen
-
[John Hillman] “If there is a better way to do this, I’d be more than happy to try it. I’d like to move the individual objects around without them losing their part of the video, which doesn’t look possible with Camera Mapping, but I figured I’d at least get to step one before I start worrying about that.”
If you look at the Texture Tag attributes there should be a Film Aspect edit field just below where you chose the projection Camera. If you change the Film Aspect it changes the ratio of width/height of the texture.
Once you have the projection as you like it you can right click the Texture Tag and use “Generate UVW Coordinates” to bake the projection into UVW coords. This only works on editable objects and not parametric objects.
Darby Edelen
-
Is the issue during playback after render, during RAM preview in AE or both?
Darby Edelen