Doyle Rockwell
Forum Replies Created
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Howdy,
Motion can export to EXR, which is one of the two common film formats that support full float values (DPX being the other). You could then use something else to convert the EXR frames to DPX, such as Shake, Glue Tools, AE or Combustion, though I don’t know how many of those support DPX+Alpha, which is an uncommon format.
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Howdy,
If you look at the links in my post, you’ll see that I linked to the ATI product page which identifies it as the “Mac & PC Edition”. As I mentioned, it’s only being sold by Apple resellers, so far, like Small Dog and Other World Computing.
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Howdy,
Motion uses the GPU that is driving your main display, which is the monitor that has the main menu bar on it (File, Edit, View, etc).
The X1900 is a great card (I have one), but I’d highly recommend getting the ATI Radeon 3870. It’s not sold by Apple, but you can get it from Mac resellers like Small Dog. You can see Motion benchmarks for the 3870 here.
It’s cheap and a generation newer than the X1900. I’d get the cheapest stock card in your Mac Pro and drop in the 3870 as your primary GPU.
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Howdy,
You can have a paint stroke’s cells be treated as already-emitted particles, but if he’s more interested in defining an emitter’s shape, he should use the “Geometry” option in the emitter settings.
To do this:
- Draw a shape in the Canvas that represents the size and shape you want your emitter to be.
- Create your emitter (or add an emitter preset to your project).
- With the emitter selected, go to the Emitter tab in the Inspector and change the Shape popup-menu to “Geometry”. Note the Shape Source image well that appears in the Inspector.
- Drag the shape you drew in step 1 into the Shape Source image well.
This will tell the emitter to use that shape object as the pattern for emission. You can turn off the shape so that it’s not in the way, but you can edit its points to alter the emitter’s pattern, if you like.
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Howdy,
It sounds like you’ve overcomplicated this. Motion deals with cameras the same way that most 3D-capable apps do: emulate the real world. Place you camera(s) where you want them and then animate the objects as you see fit. If you want the cameras to move, too, you can animate them as well. This is similar to how an actor might walk around a set, and the camera might move, too. But you don’t have to create the impression of the actor moving by moving the camera; you just move the actor.
When you have multiple cameras, you can switch the viewer to show you the scene from each camera’s viewpoint. When you go to export, however, the topmost active camera in the Layers List/Timeline will be rendered on any given frame. This makes it much like editing in FCP: you can cut between cameras by trimming them.
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Howdy,
It all depends on what’s causing your text object (or one of its parents) to get rasterized. There are workarounds, in some cases.
Just groping, here, but do you have the Opacity property of your text turned down, or maybe a filter applied? Or maybe you’ve selected a specific blend mode for the text or its parent?
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Howdy,
It sounds like you would benefit from creating some master templates in Motion for use in FCP. Basically, you can send stuff to Motion, do work on it, add drop zones as placeholders for any future footage, then use the template(s) in your FCP timeline. You just drop footage into the template “clips” in your FCP timeline, and it will plug the footage into the Motion templates. You can even edit certain things like text objects from the FCP timeline, without having to return to Motion. You can also decide if each template clip becomes its own Motion project, or if they’re all instances of the master, which lets you make changes to a single project and have them propagate across the project.
For more info on Motion templates in FCP, check out Appendix C (starting on page 1223) of the Motion Help.
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Howdy,
Without seeing your project layout in the Layers List, I can only guess, but it sounds like a police-taping (rasterizing) problem. Basically, when doing 3D compositing, something can force the application to have to render objects separately and comp them together in layer order, rather than 3D depth order. This happens in all 3D compositors (Motion, AE, Shake, Nuke, etc).
It sounds like your text object or one of its parent groups has gotten rasterized (also called “police-taped”), which means that the rasterized object and its children will be comped into the scene in the order you see in the Layers List, regardless of 3D position. So even if your pill image is in between the camera and the text, in terms of position, the text will always have to be comped on top or behind, depending on the ordering in the Layers List.
Does the text object have a small box around it like this:
That box indicates that the text has been rasterized. The same result would happen if the text object’s parent group was rasterized (though it would be the group’s icon with the little box around it). If you do a search on “rasterize” in the manual (or the 3D supplemental docs) you will find a list of conditions that can force rasterizing.
It may not be any consolation, but this is the trickiest concept that exists in 3D compositing. You wrap your head around this and everything else is small potatoes 🙂
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Howdy,
You don’t want to alter the tracking data; you want to turn the emitter off between letters. Keyframe the emitter’s birth rate value so that it goes to zero after each letter and jumps back to what it was at the start of each letter.
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Howdy,
That can be tricky to find, because animators post their showreels, but they almost never identify which parts were done with which tools. This is because you’re hiring the animator, not the application.