Doyle Rockwell
Forum Replies Created
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Howdy,
You can use the ‘Track’ parameter behavior. Just right-click on the Anchor Point parm name and select ‘Track’ from the menu. The behavior will put a single tracker onscreen and will apply it to the target parameter.
If you’ve already got a good track done in your Analyze Motion behavior, though, there’s no need to re-track. Just click on the little gear-icon menu in the Inspector for the Track behavior and it will allow you to select the already-existing Analyze Motion, grabbing the data from the other behavior. All tracking-related behaviors can share data with one another.
Good luck on your project!
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Howdy,
I made a project that has a Checkerboard generator and two simple 3D particle emitters in sequence (one starts after the other ends). Both emitters are located in front of the checkerboard (from the camera’s starting POV). The camera then does two orbits around the checkerboard.
On the first pass, you see the emitter set to Local 3D, which appears to always be on top (in front of) the checkerboard, because it’s on top of it in the Layers list.
On the second pass, the second emitter is set to Global 3D, so it’s checking for intersections and depth-sorting with the whole world (if possible). As the camera moves around the checkerboard, the checkerboard occludes the emitter. Now, if I were to apply a filter to the emitter, that would force it to rasterize (precomp) and then it wouldn’t be depth-sorted, anymore.
A movie of this project can be found here and the project file can be found here.
Hope this helps.
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Howdy,
This is why I keep asking for a screenshot of the Layers list. You have an image object (the video) and an emitter in your project. Are they in the the same group? What type of group is it? Are there any filters applied to the emitter? If the emitter is a preset, which one is it?
It’s possible that you’re encountering a bug, but since other people (including myself) aren’t having a problem with this, it’s likely something that is specific to your project. The more detail you can provide, the more likely we can figure out what’s causing the forced layer-ordering.
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Howdy,
This is why I asked you to post a screenshot or description of the Layers list. Do you have any filters applied to the particles? Is their blend mode set to anything other than Normal?
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Howdy,
This isn’t a bug: it’s a reality of 3D compositing. In certain situations, a compositor has to precomp parts of a scene, which can prevent them from intersecting or being depth-sorted. In After Effects, people refer to it as “police-taping”. In Motion, this is referred to as “rasterizing”. Rasterized 3D objects (3D groups, 3D particles, paint, replicators and text) will be composited into the scene in layer order. If you look up “rasterize” in the Motion manual (especially the 3D supplemental in the Help menu), you’ll get some examples and explanation of what can force rasterizing.
With regard to particles, they can do 3D in two modes: Local and Global. By default, 3D particles are set to ‘Local 3D’, which means that they don’t intersect with anything but themselves. This makes a huge difference in performance, because Motion has to do fewer calculations. If you switch the particles to ‘Global 3D’, then they will intersect with everything in the scene, so they can appear in-front-of or behind other objects, but will run a lot slower. Even ‘Global 3D’ particles can get rasterized (and layer-ordered), if you do something to force it, such as applying a filter to the particles.
3D replicators are always in ‘Global 3D’ mode. 3D paint strokes, however, are always in ‘Local 3D’. If they did Global, I can only imagine how long the render times would be.
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Howdy,
It sounds like the group contents are being rendered in layer order, instead of depth order. This can be done manually, but is sometimes automatic. What kind of paint stroke are you using? Is it a 3D stroke (i.e. Local 3D checkbox is enabled in the stroke’s Shape settings)?
Can you post a screenshot of your Layers list?
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Howdy,
AE plugins aren’t supported in Motion on Intel, only FxPlug plugins. Most current plugins are available as FxPlugs, Sapphire being a notable exception.
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Howdy,
I’ve spent some time with dvMatte Blast, keying DV, HDV and DVCPRO HD. It compensates well for the lossiness of those formats, and it runs pretty much in realtime on HD imagery.
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Howdy,
You can make replicators of the objects and have them replicate only along the object’s Z-axis, creating the appearance of an extrusion. Peter Wiggins shows an example of doing this with text in this tutorial.
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Howdy,
No need to move the anchor point. To make orbiting easier, Motion cameras default to the ‘Framing’ camera type, which places the camera’s pivot point at the focal plane. Just change the camera to the ‘Viewpoint’ type, which places the pivot at the center of the camera. To do this, select the camera and then go to the ‘Camera’ tab in the Inspector. You’ll see the popup to changing the camera type.