[David Bogie]

Try google for “lava lamp after effects.”
You can also search here, we tried this a few months ago. IRCC, the recommendation was to hire an experienced 3D animtor who knew how to do this in Maya or some such app.

The issue is faking it to your satisfaction in AE. You can build the bubble forms in Foam, Particle World, Mr Mercury but AE has no built-in clustering or flocking effects for the various particle systems. Given the right video clip and running it backwards, MrMercury can sort of do it for you.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Pretty basic stuff, really. But you have fallen for Apple’s hype without diving into the fine print.

Animation requires rendering because of the lossless nature ofthe media file being transcoded live to your sequence settings (which are probably highly compressed such as DV) and the fact that Animation carries an alpha channel that must be processed, too.

The only way you will get around this is to have hardware support for a proprietary alpha codec.

bogiesan

RTFM

[David Bogie]

The solution for this in AE’s 2d world is Foam. It has an alpha map input. You may need to create the layer to be four or five times as long as your car layer and then speed it up with vector and motion blurs to make it look like the smoke you’re after.

Your 3d app’s user support forums should be able to point you to many wind tunnels simulations, it is a common effect for 3d animators.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Your IT guy is an ignorant twit. He clearly does not have your interests in mind. All he wants is some new toys.
Let him do the research and proof of concept and budgeting for equipment improvements all on his own. He will not listen to you nor will he believe you have anything useful to contribute to his lack of knowledge of server-based video file storage.

This is a losing battle that only he can admit is lost.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[spinnerlys – human being] “But it is an irritating effect on the timeline, even when it works properly.
“

Oh, you haven’t seen anything yet. The FCP interface is full of such frustrating dumb design flaws. The transition icons obscure what’s underneath, really irksome when trying to do waveform edits on audio tracks. Then there’s autoselect.

Welcome to the family, FCP is not Avid, whatever that is.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

No idea what your comps look like.
Render each of the layers separately and reimport each as finished movies with transparency.
Or learn how to precompose/nest.

This is not a question for the professionals. In a few hundred more hours of working in AE you’ll be amazed at how simple this was.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

It would help us tremendously if you included the OS.
Did this ever work for you?
Did this break recently?

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Adobe’s products are much better integrated. You will find this far easier to do in After Effects with a layered AI or PS file than in Motion.
Umm, that’s what I have found. Mark Spencer or another powerful wizard may have better advice for you but I’d say the time wasted trying to force Apple’s Motion to correctly use Adobe’s files will be better spend simply firing up AE.

Aside: I’ve never needed to animate 30 layers of some dope’s logo. Certainly some of those can be combined.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Hope you get better advice, just a random thought: Lots of these types of spots are shot with real actors. Dunno if you will have good camera talent or not but the chromakey shots could be done in your studio if you emulate the location lighting carefully , place some green boxes to represent stuff on the set in the garage and have a nactor who can memorize his blocking.

“Morph” has, erm, morphed into a new word these days, not much of anything like what it meant back in the 80s. Can’t really tell what you mean by morph but, before you get all hung up on one particular shot/effects sequence, think about what you know you can do versus what you think you can do and see if there isn’t a stylization shift you can make in your heads. You want to look good, you want to do a good spot, you want to get paid, you want to do something cool. Practice the technique before you commit.

best of luck.

bogiesan

.

[David Bogie]

I’ve never tried this, guys, but used to work in AE in the olden days. Bring 30i footage into a 60p timeline, every frame should be a separate field. Hmm, does one deinterlace first?

bogiesan