[Doyle Rockwell]

Yah, the X1900 is a single generation old. The X2800 (and friends) have been out for a bit on the PC. The thing is, except for the rare occasion where ATI has sold a card at retail, new GPUs only become available on the Mac as new machines are released. So if you want to wait for a new GPU, you’ll probably need to wait until Apple updates the Mac Pro. It all depends on your schedule.

[Doyle Rockwell]

Heya,

Emphatically, do not get the Quadro for Motion. While it may support a few extra features in Maya, the Quadro does not perform better than the ATI X1900 (and is slower in certain cases).

That, and the 4500 is two years old, at this point. Get the X1900.

[Doyle Rockwell]

You sure can, through the cunning use of the diabolically-named Reverse behavior 😉

Motion has a special class of behaviors called parameter behaviors. Instead of being applied to the whole object, they are applied to a specific parameter. For example, you might apply Randomize to an object’s Opacity to make it flicker.

In your case, just apply a Reverse behavior to the Position parameter of your animated object. Right-click on the “Position” parameter label in the Inspector and pick Reverse from the menu.

[Doyle Rockwell]

There’s a handy new aspect to the Motion Path behavior in Motion 3: the Path Shape parameter now has a Geometry option. This means that you can use any shape object in Motion as the source for a Motion Path behavior. And since a paint stroke is actually a shape, you just need to apply a Motion Path behavior to your particle emitter, set it to Geometry, then drag-and-drop the paint stroke into the image-well to assign it.

[Doyle Rockwell]

Heya,

In Motion 3, there’s a parameter called Control Points in the Inspector that acts as the keyframeable parameter for shapes. In the Keyframe Editor, though, it’s displayed as Shape Animation (kinda inconsistent).

In Motion 1/2, I don’t believe there was a parameter in the Inspector that represented the overall shape. There was one in the Keyframe Editor, though. And you should be able to use the Ctrl+K keyboard shortcut to speed up the work (sets a key on the current frame for the last-adjusted parameter).

[Doyle Rockwell]

Heya,

Just turn on Record (press the ‘A’ key or click on the Record button near the playback controls) and start moving the shape points around as you advance the playhead. You can view the resultant keyframes in the Keyframe Editor.

[Doyle Rockwell]

Heya,

Every version of Motion has keyframeable masks. To get the equivalent of AE’s “hold” keyframes, just choose the “Constant” keyframe interpolation type in Motion.

[Doyle Rockwell]

Heya,

Unfortunately, some filters in Motion, like Glow, don’t grow the size of the object they’re applied to. The easiest way to get around it is this:

1. Nest the text in a new 2D group (located at the same place as the text).
2. In the Group tab of the Inspector, enable Fixed Resolution for the group. This tells the group to be a particular size. By default, this size will be the size of the project.
3. Apply the Glow filter to the group.

This will give you the look you want, and you use the group’s Fixed Res property to make sure the filter has enough space to work in.

[Doyle Rockwell]

Heya,

Apple announced that The Pixel Farm is going to support export to Motion, and I would imagine that SynthEyes will follow suit. The Maxon folks have supported some Motion integration in the past, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they added camera export to Motion.

One thing to keep in mind is that Motion projects are straightforward XML, so it wouldn’t be much work to write a script to convert Maya cameras to Motion cameras and vice versa.

[Doyle Rockwell]

Heya,

What exactly do you mean by “flickering”?