[Garret Layman]

Thanks Richard.

Using some of your advice I was able to come up with a satisfactory solution for the time being. Fortunately I’m only working with 20 squares instead of 100. Directly parenting the small squares to the main one created too much movement and didn’t have the right “decay” I was looking for. I ended up duplicating the null I’m using to control the main square and setting it’s rotation to 90° and parenting the small squares to that. From there I moved them all off screen based on their original positions (rotation is clockwise) and curved the motion path so they “fell” a little. To sell it a little more I used an expression to parent the rotation of the small squares to the 180° null at half the value so the small square rotate individually in the same direction as the main square albeit at half the amount. In the end I sped up the animation to hide some of the weirdness with motion blur. It’s probably 80% of what I was trying to achieve so any other suggestions would be appreciated.

Here’s a screenshot of the current motion paths.

[Garret Layman]

To follow up on this, I ended up using the 3d camera tracking data to apply to solids that I placed in 3d space around the scene (pre-comped and set to color transfer) and used the procedural matte as a luma matte to only apply it to the white areas of the flowers. This was much faster than my original method though I couldn’t quite get the level of variety that I was initially after. That being said it still turned out well and the director is happy so I’m happy.

Thanks Dave.

[Garret Layman]

I was able to create a procedural matte to single out the flowers and change them all in color and it looks pretty good. Where I’m getting hung up though is the multiple colors aspect. The director wants an assortment of colors that vary from flower to flower while still leaving a a few white ones here and there. Given the amount of motion in the scene I can’t think of a way to do this without some amount of tracking and masking. I may have to resort to groups of color or something…

Mac Pro
2×2.66 GHz 6-Core Intel
64 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
NVIDIA Quadro 4000 2048 MB

[Garret Layman]

The in points are the same between programs. As I mentioned the track works fine up to a point and then gets way off. After further experimenting I noticed that the master clip reference points under the Adjust Track tab were getting way off from the X spline and it seems that the exported tracking data was pulling from those reference points rather than the spline. I was able to work around by keyframing the reference points themselves but its not ideal as it isn’t much better than frame by frame tracking. Any tips on getting these points to stay with the spline?

Mac Pro
2×2.66 GHz 6-Core Intel
64 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
NVIDIA Quadro 4000 2048 MB

[Garret Layman]

Thanks Dave.

I appreciate the responses and the information. I guess at the very least we have something to look forward to, right? Let’s hope anyway.

Mac Pro
2×2.66 GHz 6-Core Intel
64 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
NVIDIA Quadro 4000 2048 MB

[Garret Layman]

That was my first inclination as well but I haven’t been able to think of or find anything that has changed, I haven’t run any updates or made any changes that I’m aware of.

I was however able to get AE to render with Multiprocessing after allocating my RAM to 32 for AE and 32 for everything else.

Any ideas why I would have a sudden decrease in the amount I can use?

Mac Pro
2×2.66 GHz 6-Core Intel
64 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
NVIDIA Quadro 4000 2048 MB