David Bogie
Forum Replies Created
-
REinstalling AE or FCP is going to be a possibly dangerous waste of time. You could loose most of your third party stuff and prefs. PITA.
If we were watching over your shoulder, we could probably figure this out for you quickly. I’ve never, in many many years, heard of the alpha handler failing within After Effects. I do not even see how that’s possible although it IS possible for the alpha buffer to get clogged up. Shutting down and restarting the Macintosh will purge the memory registers.
>Great, at the moment its 100% white which should explain it, sorry how do I adjust the properties for this? To get it down to 0%? Am I missing something obvious again! haha… < If the alpha is opaque, you have at least one layer that is blocking it or you have a corrupt project file (which is highly unlikely). You seem to indicate that you have checked the alpha function with text and other items but I don't see where you tried starting from scratch with a new project. Please try that before you reinstall anything. On a Macintosh, with this symptom, it's just not likely to achieve anything. So, I default to suggesting this is going to be that DOH! Moment for you when you get it figured out. bogiesan -
There are keyframes for the fractal evolution. Just move them. However, if you make the effect ten times as long, it will evolve very slowly. So you need to boost the value of the end keyframe.
I’m not at my AE machine today so can’t look up the exact effect being used in the preset. It might be any of several fractal inputs. Use the U key to disclose only the keyframes that are changing.
bogiesan
-
Explore Mr Mercury, too. It is more advanced, has additional lighting enhancements and particle behaviors.
These effects assume a forward timeline. Getting them to work convincingly by reverse time keyframing can be tricky because the physics don’t immediately go backwards.
bogiesan
-
Start with the online help system. Look for Illustrator in the index then find importing paths. It is a simple copy and paste procedure but, as with anything so seemingly easy, there are a few gotchas. They are explained in the help files.
bogiesan
-
Hey, yikes, thanks for the link, I had not seen that one. Very cool.
Allow me to add that CC Sphere, a set of masks and CC Ligth Burst (or is Light Rays?) can emulate some of these effects. Of course, it’s not true 3D nor is it actually volumetric. But it’s fairly simple to build and control.
See any of the various Mirrored Ball tutorials (theanvel.com has one) and there is an effect preset in AE that has this illusion. I’m not at my AE machine today but it’s not hard to find in Bridge or Browse Presets,
bogiesan
-
There are several possible scripts you can use to link the objects to a master object and impart some spring and rebound physics. Highly advanced stuff. See the AE Expressions forum here but spend a few hours and search carefully before reposting the question. If you do not understand expressions and scripting, you’re going to need several days to work out how those features function. The concepts are not difficult but creating and modifying scripts/expressions takes unbelievable patience, trial and error. If you know Java Script it’s easier.
Apple’s Motion has several prebuilt behaviors that program objects to behave as you describe.
bogiesan
-
Never seen any of those, a link would be helpful if they exist online. But yes, if there are animated faces on thumbs or lounges or tongues, you can bet extensive motion tracking was used.
bogiesan
-
see theanvel.com, look for the fire tutorials/downloads and the ARSON project. Fire without particles. You also have several particle effects with fire capabilities already in AE. There is a huge PDF for effects help on your installation disk.
Be aware what you want to do is a combination of advanced effects. Creating the fire isn’t too difficult but it will be challenging to make the effect flow around and follow your figure’s form, especially if he is moving while burning. The trick will be deciding which of the dozens of possible fire effects you decide to use.
ONce you figure out the fire effect you want to use, post back later and see who can help you make the boundary move along your figure.bogiesan
-
thanks for closing your thread with a solution.
Welcome the DOH! Club. We’re all members, some of us won’t admit it.
bogiesan
-
> 1) How does one set the “start” moment… It naturally begins
at the beginning of the layer… Granted I got around this by
splitting the layer at the moment I wanted it to begin< 1. Be sure you have the effects help pdf on your system. It doesn't always get installed by itself. The section on Shatter is helpful but this is a v-e-r-y complex 3d particle system that is totally realword physics-based. The creator, Brian Maffitt, spent more than 2 hours in his Total Training series on Shatter alone. And that only covered the basics. Strength is not the facot you need to animate. You want to reduce the radius of the Force Sphere to near zero with a keyframe and then make it large enough to cover your layer at the second keyframe. Think of it this way: Any tile that is touched by the sphere has permission to fly. How fast it flies and how far it goes are functions of the Physics section of the filter. Splitting a Shatter layer is a total disaster unless you REALLY know what's going on. 2) How does one control the shatter speed? I want it SUPER slow Adjusting the air viscocity helped a little but not enough... < That's a good start; Viscosity can be animated so you can change how things move even after they've started. Gravity can be tweaked to a low setting but this has an effect on how quickly tiles are allowed to fall off the screen. Gravity inclination requires experimentation, too hard to explain here. Strength of the force sphere represents how much energy is transfered to the tile. The rest of the Physics controls affect the speed of tiles also. One of the coolest ways to slow Shatter down is to work in a 60fps composition (be ready for a huge rendering hit!) and then import the movie into a 30fps comp. Understand that flying tiles in Shatter do not work with Motion Blur. If you want them to look like other moving elements in your animation to which you have applied Motion Blur, you must use CC Force Motion Blur on the Shatter layer. This will cost your tremendously when you render. bogiesan