[Greg Digenti]

Well I can see why no one jumped to help with this… I figured it out, but it ended up being pretty complicated. Probably not as complicated for someone better at math and coding, though.

[Greg Digenti]

I appreciate your attempts to help, but onion skinning isn’t the type of thing that works by looking over at another panel; you have to be able to TRACE over the previous image for it to be helpful. Jumping back and forth to the previous frame would be easier than trying to draw in one panel while looking at another.

Oh well… guess $100 for Paint & Stick is the only solution.

[Greg Digenti]

Except to use the roto brush feature in AE, you have to double-click on a footage layer, which opens it in its own window, and that’s what you paint on. So I can’t see any adjustment layers or any other layers for that matter, just the footage itself and any effects that have been applied directly to the layer.

[Greg Digenti]

I realize this is a question from 4 years ago, but just in case anyone else ends up here looking for the answer, the large round keyframes are called Auto Bezier Keyframes.

A decent definition can be found here:
https://www.austinsaylor.com/blog/keyframe-essentials

[Greg Digenti]

Two years after this post I came to ask the same basic question, knowing Dan Ebberts would likely be the man with the answer. I was wanting to do a face replacement using AE’s new face-tracking masks, but couldn’t figure out how to take advantage of the point data generated by it to get rotation and scale. But I just used the left and right pupils for the a and b in your rotation and scale solution, and simply pick-whipped the position of my new layer to the tip of the nose (after moving the anchor point to the corresponding point), and it works great!

[Greg Digenti]

I realize this thread is a few years old, but it was one of the first and only links to come up in a Google search when I was trying to figure out how to do this. So maybe this will help someone else out, since no one in the other threads I found seemed to know the answer either.

If you go into Preferences>General and check the “Return to Start Position on Stop” and put your playhead at the beginning of your selection, it will play just your selection.

[Greg Digenti]

This is a different issue than the one I was describing, but when trying to control multiple objects I usually put a null into the scene where I want the objects to pivot around, and parent them to it. Then I just rotate the null. If you’re just trying to change the anchor point of one object, just hit the “Y” key to get the Pan Behind tool and simply grab the anchor point and move it to where you want it to pivot around.

[Greg Digenti]

Thanks for the response, but I guess my original explanation was a bit unclear, because that’s exactly what I was trying to say that I was doing, only with a result I wasn’t expecting.

And let’s not worry about “natural animation” for the particular issue, because I’m not animating anything, I’m trying to have more precise control over placement and angle of 3D layers in a scene.

Basically, when I tap the R key and make an adjustment to the z rotation of a 3D layer, then the other two rotation values no longer behave the way I expect them to. Rotating it on its x axis now follows the WORLD AXIS and not the LAYER AXIS (try this yourself and you should see what I’m talking about).

But I think that’s just how AE works, as I mentioned in my follow-up post. That the actual rotation values of a 3D layer are based on world coordinates, not its own rotation values. So in order to rotate an object around it’s own x axis once its z rotation value has been changed, then AE must make adjustments to ALL of the axes.

[Greg Digenti]

I notice that by using the rotate tool (rather than rotating using the x, y & z rotate settings within the layer) and rotating it by hand, that the layer rotates as expected… but that the actual rotate settings seem to be based on the world axis mode either way.

Meaning, if a 3D layer has been rotated on its Z axis and I use the Rotate Tool to rotate it on its X axis, the settings for x, y AND z change while I’m doing it, rather than just x as I would expect.

Is this just how AE works?

[Greg Digenti]

Thanks Walter!!!

I was up to date on my updates, so I tried rendering without sound and it worked! Now I knew the problem had something to do with my sound export settings, I just had to figure out which one was throwing the monkey wrench into this thing.

–Codec? Nope. All of them failed.
–Stereo vs mono? Nope, both failed.
— Can you believe that changing the quality from 16kHz to 22kHz fixed it?? Yep. That was the problem.

I was trying to save a little space by lowering the quality, but for some reason rendering lossless with 16kHz sound killed any render over 400 frames at frame 123 exactly. Weird!

Anyway, thanks again for the help.

Greg