[Doyle Rockwell]

Hey Les,

When you say that you can’t access the points on the mask, do you mean that you can’t see the points, or that they’re there, but you can’t interact with them? The two typical methods for going into the points-editing mode is to either double-click on the mask in the Canvas, or right-click on the mask (again in the Canvas) and choose ‘Edit Points’ from the menu. Pressing Tab repeatedly will cycle through the editing modes, eventually arriving at the ‘Edit Points’ mode, as well.

[Doyle Rockwell]

Hey Ian,

Good idea, having a public repository of changes we’d like to see. It’s a little negatively titled, though, if you want it to be a positive influence. I couldn’t help meddling and added a couple of edits about existing stuff.

Thanks for putting this up!

[Doyle Rockwell]

Apple announced that the PCI-Express version of the Nvidia 7800GT would be coming to the Mac. The Quadro 4500 is a fine card, but at a $1650 upgrade price (vs. a likely $500-$600 for the 7800), it doesn’t have a high power/price ratio. The 6600 is a decent card, but I’d upgrade to the 7800GT when it becomes available.

[Doyle Rockwell]

Hey Donovan,

After you enabled Fixed Resolution for the parent layer, did you move the filters from the clip to the layer? If not, the order of operations means that the filters still process on the larger image (resulting in hitting the max texture limit and getting cropped) before the layer gets cropped in Fixed Resolution.

For a more complete explanation, check out https://homepage.mac.com/specialcase/articles/sizematters.html

[Doyle Rockwell]

Hey Mike,

There were a few good posts about this over on the Apple discussion forum. Nipsey’s seems the easiest:

https://discussions.info.apple.com/webx?13@798.WvA9akJqRDH.1@.68b707f5/0

[Doyle Rockwell]

Heya Gregg,

It’s a pretty simple effect to do if you have the man and woman isolated: you just have multiple copies of them, offset in time, comped in temporal order. The tricky bit is the isolation, which could’ve been done a number of ways: brute-force roto (ugh), newfangled optical-flow-based motion keying, or even using a motion-controlled camera and shooting them separately on a stage. Shooting separately is likely, but requires some good color-correction for matching the drive-away shot at the end. Of course, that’s why you pay that guy sitting at the DaVinci console $1K an hour 🙂

[Doyle Rockwell]

Hey Lu,

What do you mean when you say that Basic 3D doesn’t work in 16-bit? Can you be more specific?

[Doyle Rockwell]

Hey Anna,

It sounds like you can just sequence together the behaviors you already mentioned. Using Edge Collision and Throw, you can have the ball bounce around; when you want it to stop, just trim the Throw’s outpoint to that frame, and the movement will stop. To kick the ball offscreen, just add another Throw (that starts on the frame you want the kick at) and point it offscreen. You’ll need to trim the Edge Collision to end before the final kick, though, as you don’t want the ball to bounce right back. Behaviors can be edited in the Timeline, just like video clips, so you can sequence them to create a series of movements.

Also, turning on motion blur can help your kick look more forceful.

Good luck!

[Doyle Rockwell]

Hey Mark,

if it’s Light Rays that you’re running, then try adjust the Expansion setting. If that doesn’t do the trick, nest the object in a layer, turn on Fixed Resolution for the layer (found in the Layer tab of the Inspector) and apply the filter to the layer. Basically, a pre-comp 🙂

Good luck!

[Doyle Rockwell]

Heya Joachim,

The project file should just download as a Motion project (.motn), if you’re using Safari. Can’t speak for other browsers. Motion project files are XML, so if your browser just shows you a bunch of text (the contents of the project file), just do “Save As…” and save it as “projectname.motn”. It’s all done just using shapes, and yes, I knocked it together right after reading your post, not because I’m clever, but because Motion makes this kind of stuff easy 🙂

As for the egg rejecting all sperm cells after the first one: you can just duplicate the first Repel (the one that kept the sperm out in the beginning) and have it start just after the first sperm cell arrives. You might want to break the sperm up into two groups: one group with the lucky sperm cell that makes it into the egg, and a second group (the replicator) that mills around, gets attracted, and then gets repelled after the sperm from group 1 goes inside. This way you can trim/kill the lucky sperm so that it disappears after entering and doesn’t come back out when the Repel comes back on, driving away the losers.

At some point, you’re just going to have to noodle this a bit to make it look right. Otherwise you’ll be writing simulation expressions for a particle system in Cinema4D or Maya, and that might take longer than you’d like 😉