[Dflamholc]

check out Joe Chao’s ribbon tute
https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=2&page=https://www.creativecow.net/articles/chao_joe/ribbonsandconfetti/index.html

i’ve just done a 3d looking ribbon flowing between houses with the effects>time>echo plug, using similar way as joe. getting text on it might be tricky at first but i’m sure it can be done, maybe with a displacement map, and a track matte mask with echo again writing out the text? haven’t tried that myself.
good luck!
/d

[Dflamholc]

cheers! will check out those links… and THANKS to all for your replies. no worries, I am backing up regularly and not running out of disc space yet – for a couple of hundred gigs on 🙂 just wanted to check that I wasn’t blindly heading into a some sort of well mapped out mistake of having too large projects. that’s all though. cheers again 🙂 /d

[Dflamholc]

thanks for telling me what I wanted to hear 🙂 keeping my fingers crossed /d

[Dflamholc]

wow, cheeers for that! it worked a charm getting those new settings into the drop down menues,.,.

my problem now is that i’ve already gone agead an created a bunch of graphic sequences in 1920×1080 comps that I now have to put my hdv footage into… if I choose the new 1.33 option they’re still stretched in those comps. however if I interpret the hdv footage as square pixels then they look fine? what do I do? is there a big quality loss if I interpret the hdv as square pix rather than 1.33?

sorry if I’m being thick and not seeing something obvious here, while struggling to hold back panic 🙂

thanks again, d

[Dflamholc]

I’d love to see an in depth tutorial on for example a classic plug like glow. it’s easy throwing glow on a something, everyone uses it, but there is quite a lot of messing about involved to really make it personal and give it character. it never seem to get exactly the super result that i was aiming for. how to get glow only on parts of logos and pics and to make glow travel nicely over material. I bet everyone has their own way of doing this, but it’d be nice to see someone who knows what they’re doing show some tricks. especially as it’s such an everyday plug. echo and matte choker are also two plugs that has shown to hide amazing possiblilties that i’d love to see a pro talk about.

big thanks!
/d

[Dflamholc]

obviously what John says is the clean way of going about it, what happens though is that you have a bazier curve going on between the two identical key frames (the one you copied and the new one) this makes the camera do a slight move before returning. to get rid of it shift to top view and klick on the pasted new keyframe with the transform path point tool and it will lose it’s bazier handles hence quit doing silly little moves.
it took me a lot of swearing a while ago realise what was going on 🙂
hope that helps, but again, you’ll get more control using hold key frames as john suggests above
/d

[Dflamholc]

thanks, mstleger! did that already though. didn’t help really. actually I couldn’t see any difference at all switching it on and off. funny, one of those settings i’ve never stumbled across before. a bit worrying… would you know when that is usefull. i’ve definitely renedred nice things out with that in it’s default pos.

i really don’t know why I’m having the problem with gradient wipe though, because if i just check the illustrator file out normally in a comp it looks smashing! i’ve now tried with a much simpler gradient from photoshop as well… everything looks great until I use the gradient wipe. it seems to be something inherit in the plug “alising” the edges for some reason. i solved my problem with a negative simple choker though… don’t know if there is another better way of doing it, but that’s what I could come up with in a rush… thanks for the help!

/d 🙂

[Dflamholc]

Thanks for the quick reply Dave! wow, i did search the archives and found alot on the subject of the blend tool in illustrator and how to get the gradient wipe to work at all, but nothing on exactly the problem I have. I will definitely keep looking, now with boosted moral, knowing the solution is out there somewhere and of course if you’d happen to stumble across the answer, don’t hesitate to tell me here or email me…

please anyone else out there who has gone though this and come out alive on the other end… 🙂

thanks again, d

[Dflamholc]

hi Matt, thanks, though i’d already checked the things you list above — however for some funny reason food in my belly was what was needed for the magic to happen.

i now got shadows (!) both with or without the shadow catcher material. i really don’t know what was the little trick that did it. but after playing with both the draft and best quality sliders in invig and flicking the draft quality box back and forth in AE it seems to have gone right somewhere. this is using using comp lights…
what I still can’t get to work properly though are shadows in AE while using lights from within invig. though i do get shadows inside invigs test render using invig lights… it never ends does it… anyway, i’m happy with comp ligths… i’d be using them anyway… one last thing. the shadows come out quite hard and jagged even with the quality sliders set to best inside invig and with best qual on the layer in AE. i have to put over 50% shadow diffuse on the ligth to get to something ok looking. is that meant to be… i think the computer i work on here is running the latest invig pro4. something.

thanks for all the help..
best /d 🙂

[Dflamholc]

oh oooops, i threw it out in frustration. it was only a test proj with solids to receive the shadow + a quick 3d text and a shadow catcher cube in invig. sorry about that. i realize that it’d been handy to be able to send it over, but is there anything i seem to be doing wrong from my post above? is there a general mistake i could have done? to begin with I was generally following the instrucitons on zaxwerks site for how to use the shadow catcher… i suppose there wouldn’t be some important detail needed in the process missing there?

it sounds so simple and even though 3d invig is quite a complicated plug it’s very intuitive and easy to use, so it surprised me quite a bit that I couldn’t make it happen with so much trial and error aplied…

thanks so much for replying and offering to have a look at the file and sorry for being such a (*)&%(*^&% and throwing it out

hoping for some advice anyway,,

thanks /d 🙂