[David Bogie]

[Conor Smith] “What would be a good 3D rendering software for me to start out on? Is there one that is easy to understand yet able to create things that would impress? “

Look up Blender https://www.blender.org/
there’s a version for Mac OS10.

It’s free, open source, cool, fun and supports huge user community of whacky folks.

WARNING: 3D is a cubic affair, 2D to the third power: eight times as difficult to work with, eight times as long to render, 64 times as hard to make changes.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

You should be able to search google images for aerial shots of both crop circles and cornfield mazes. This will give you a nice idea of what you can fake and what is going to look terrible.

Here’s what a corn row looks like from about 10 feet in the air:
https://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https://farm4.static.flickr.com/3019/2640512952_6b0d6131a5.jpg%3Fv%3D0&imgrefurl=https://flickr.com/photos/11197122%40N00/2640512952&h=375&w=500&sz=239&hl=en&start=92&usg=__0i3l8A7wD3asXvgjBIiInpyS0K0=&tbnid=WosM9LpHCSrkAM:&tbnh=98&tbnw=130&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dcornfield%2Bmaze%26start%3D80%26gbv%3D2%26ndsp%3D20%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Dactive%26sa%3DN

images.google returned thousand of superb crop circle aerials.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

[Dave LaRonde] “I understand there are ways to fake stereo, but I haven’t used them. And besides, even if you tried them, you’d start with half the audio information needed to make it sound convincing.
“

Duplicate the layer, add a bit of reverb to both, set one a wee bit higher. Pan both about 80% to their left and right settings. Maybe add a bit of EQ to one channel.
It’s defintely fake but so is shooting snow off an analog TV screen.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

Option-drag doesn’t work with transitions. Select the transition, apple-c to copy. Select the next edit, apple-v to paste. You can also right click or control click for the contextual menus.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

I ran FCP5+ on my G4 and G5 for several years. FCP6 has hooks into Intel, I’ve been told, and the rumors suggest FCP7 is likely to require both Intel and 10.5+.

You can get some terrific used Macintosh computers from hundreds of dealers and Mac refurb houses. Your local Mac User Group may have several listed on their Web site form folks who have purchased new monsters and no longer need the old G5. You can also find used or refurbed Intels with a little work.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

Colorama will only give you the color for your water, which most people assume is blue, which is almost always incorrect.

You can use Foam to simulate a flowing liquid moving through your pipes if you have the alpha map. You wold then apply various blur or fractal distortion filters to the Foam particles to help them appear more like a fluid instead of particles.

There are also many tutorials to help you make text or other objects move along a motion path. I have not watched this one but it floats to the surface immediately:
https://www.viddler.com/explore/Thejedi/videos/4/

Once you have objects attached to your lines, you can again apply may different distortion and blur filters to simulate a fluid.

If you perform this animation using a grayscale instead of colors, you can push Colorama into the sequence and end up with beautifully tinted fluids.

Umm, re-reading this, I think it would be easier to hire a 3d animator who can do fluid simulations.

Luck. Hope you get better advice!

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

Motion offers easy and direct 3D particle systems that are, nonetheless, simply 2D layers toat are rotated and distorted as they rest in the 3D space.

I hope you get better advice but I’ve only ever seen Shatter used effectively to simulate what I think you are asking about. Multiple copies of the layer are rotated around the center point to simulate spatial ripples.

Radio Waves can also do this but none of these particle systems will react with other objects to simulate collisions.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

Needlessly pedantic post:
Real world heat-caused visual effects are caused by refraction between layers of air that are of different densities; the light gets bent. Heat haze is created in After Effects with fairly complex distortion effects and is not merely the application of a simple or compound blur.

You can get a handle on the physics:

https://www.mne.psu.edu/psgdl/psfvip2.pap.copyrightedimages.pdf

Nevertheless this appears to be partly a mental phenomenon: beyond a certain background blur level, the brain ignores the background and concentrates on the sharp foreground, yielding a pseudo-three-dimensional effect. One might call it “psychological schlieren imaging.”
Everyone sees, and routinely ignores, the background distortion effect caused by convection about hot objects in the sun. This is seldom clearer than the case of a hot car roof observed against a suitable background. The thermal boundary layer on the roof, apparently one or two cm thick, is hard to miss.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

There are now many sites featuring “tube-based” video sharing services. Some of the downloading tools are site-specific. Tubesock, for instance (at least the version I have), can only access and save YouTube clips.
Allowing for user error, I may be doing something incorrectly or not fully understand it can be customized.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

Ah, you had not mentioned the card or the iMac earlier. this is simply asking too much, I think, of your equipment.
After Effects handles 3D similarly but caches and renders completely differently.

There are simply some things you cannot do with an iMac, including upgrading the graphics card. However, I’ve heard of lots of hacks for iMacs. You won’t find any advice for changing the card on apple.com but I have heard there are numerous other iMac forums especially among kids who have tweaked their little iMac’s gaming capabilities.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”