[Darby Edelen]

I’ll suggest the Reshape effect as well. Reshape allows you to define a source and target mask and then push the pixels in the image from the source to the target mask. The interface and feature set for this effect are quite different from most other standard AE effects so I recommend reading the documentation on it.

Primarily getting all of your shots transformed and retimed so that they line up spatially and temporally should get you 80% of the look you’re after.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

[Emil Straher] “Darby Edelen: I’m curious what type of light did you use in those samples? Also wondering how high is your light from the warehouse itself. I’ve tried your idea to with the Global Illumination, Detail Enhancement enabled, and Diffuse Depth. It did slightly change my render but nothing to a big degree with the problem already at hand.”

The examples I posted were all using only the Physical Sky which is found under Create > Physical Sky > Physical Sky. You’ll need to mess with some of the attributes of the sky to get the result you want.

Changing the time of day and location on the planet will affect the Sun light’s position. This can essentially be thought of as a very distant Area light. It’s what’s casting the light through the windows.

Read up on the Physical Sky object in C4D’s help system.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

You should reduce the Brush Spacing property on the effect. You could also apply a smooth() function to the Brush Position expression.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

You can convert keyframes to a path by copying all of the motion path keyframes and pasting them into a path property.

However, this may not work exactly the way you want it to in this case. The path should match if you set the eraser’s position property to [0,0] but you’ll have to use the Start and End percentages to animate the eraser. This won’t line up with the tracker temporally.

I’d recommend using the Generate > Write-On effect on a solid layer instead. Set the effect to reveal the layer and then use it as a track matte for your colorful footage. This comes with its own challenges but should work better for your purposes.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

I think Brian is spot on about those being windows rather than lights.

You could set up a Physical Sky for this, which would give you the benefit of a controllable sun light and sky light.

My guess is that in order to get reasonably good lighting in this environment you’ll need a combination of some sort of sky light as well as Global Illumination with a Diffuse Depth of 2 or 3 (any more than 3 would be overkill).

Here are some samples of various GI settings with a Physical Sky and a very simple warehouse model with a uniform gray texture.

No Global Illumination (Render Time: 3 seconds):

Global Illumination (Diffuse Depth: 3, Render Time: 21 seconds):

Global Illumination (Detail Enhancement enabled, Diffuse Depth: 3, Render Time: 47 seconds)

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

You can achieve similar results to the Shadows/Highlights effect by duplicating your footage, then on the duplicate:

1) Invert the footage.

2) Set the layer to Soft Light.

3) Apply an optional Blur (this behaves like the radius in Shadow/Highlight).

4) Apply Levels and tweak to taste.

The big difference here is that the nature of the Soft Light blend mode does not allow this technique to change the white/black levels of the image but instead reduces contrast in the midtones (like an inverted S-Curve).

Other similar methods can be used to only reduce highlights, such as Inverting the footage, setting the layer to Multiply, adjusting Levels and reducing the opacity (this will change the white level).

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

This may not be the answer you’re looking for but you can use the Layer > Transform > Fit To Comp menu option to fit a layer (or several layers) exactly to the size of the composition. The shortcut is cmd-opt-f on mac and ctrl-alt-f on windows.

If you need to do this to specific layers in different compositions then I’m not sure if a script will be able to help you there.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

[Stefan Hinze] “Maybe you can fool the audience by using a 3 or 4 frame loop, with different barres posission behind a blur and a muzzleFlash.”

That’s pretty much what they did in your linked clip. During the shot from the side it looks like they’re moving the barrels up and down very quickly with a lot of blur. The shots from the front they’re hiding the barrels with muzzle flash.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

[Vishesh Arora] “1. First motion track your footage.
Apply the tracking data to a Null Object.

2. Now Parent the buble to the null object.

3. Precomp all three layers and now apply wiggle expresiion to the precomp.”

Alternately, once the null has the tracking data applied parent it to the footage layer, then apply the wiggle to the footage layer and parent the thought bubble to the null.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

I like Angelo’s suggestion of having your friend dye his hair the best. I’d keep one side of his hair blue and dye the other red. This should make it fairly trivial to change the red hair to look green in AE if your friend really wants the green/blue look. It will be much harder to find a color you can key green & blue hair & mostly red skin against.

Darby Edelen