[Greg Neumayer]

Hi Todd,
I’m not sure what you mean by
“you had re-enabled the deprecated formats”
Can you explain?

At any rate, the reason I don’t render from AME is that (in CS6) it frequently crashed, and my understanding was that it didn’t utilize the multiprocessor functions of AE. In short, I understood that it “could” do it, but the only benefit was that I could skip the intermediate render. I also felt like it spent far too much time on the front end establishing dynamic linking (or whatever it was doing).

That said, my experience may be outdated. Is AME the preferred way (by Adobe or by industry) to go when rendering AE?

Thanks,
Greg

Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezedesign.com

[Greg Neumayer]

Indeed. Upon a double-check of my caches, they weren’t set to where I thought I had them.

Unfortunately, this hasn’t cleared up the issue.
It spends 80% of it’s time on “Compressing and Writing”.
What part of the render is really happening here? This suggests that a different codec would make all the difference in the world, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Is “compressing and writing” really only that?

Thanks,
Greg

Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezedesign.com

[Greg Neumayer]

I’m making multiple “snakes” of particles (via multiple instances of Particular, and have around 150 particles on screen at it’s heaviest. I’ve never considered a DIY solution. I’m leveraging quite a bit of Particular’s features like multiple particle instances or color variances.

I would, however, be interested in taking a look at examples, tutorials, or other things that might get me started, or at least inspire. Do you have any leads?

Thanks,
Greg

Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezedesign.com

[Greg Neumayer]

I wish I were that good!
Does AE provide enough expression tools that I could DIY an expression that would replace ‘align to path’? Then I could add your idea to it? Would I start by capturing the vector between current frame and previous of my emitter (null)?

Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezedesign.com

[Greg Neumayer]

Thanks Dan.
That seems like it will get me there*, but first I need to capture the relative rotation of the particle. I don’t know if I can do that with Particular. I’ve got ‘orient to motion’ turned on, but I’m not sure where I’d capture the particle rotation so that I can query it with your line of code. That Y rotation slot in Particular sits at zero, as the particles rotate along the path direction, so it’s a bit of a “whatever your rotation is PLUS this” kind of dial. Where do I access the relative rotation (vector?) of a particle?

(*also note for the record: )
if (toCompVec([0, 0, 1])[2] > 0 ) value else value + 180
needs to use [0] in this case, since the X,Y,Z values are separated out, not in an array.

Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezedesign.com

[Greg Neumayer]

I haven’t found a way to change the default, but I’ve found a couple tools to make it more bearable:
Try aescript.com for a script panel called Keysmith. This puts the ease and some other tools right on screen in a panel, making it easy to click to apply.

Also try Animation Patterns, which will let you apply various preset patterns like ‘Bounce Out’ and ‘Rubber InOut’. It’s a little limited on presets, but quite expandable on your own if you watch the tutorials. I’d love for someone to build a more expansive library to apply to it. It’s similar to Ease N Wiz, which I used quite a bit, but it overcomes EaseNWiz’s biggest limitation and allows you to apply different patterns to various keyframes of the same property. (e.g. keyframe 1 to 2 uses bounce out, but 3 to 4 uses pendulum)

They’re all “name your own price”, so you can throw them some incentive if they work well for you.

Enjoy!
-Greg

Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezedesign.com

[Greg Neumayer]

Oh, just to be clear, they all link to the slider multiplied by their index to keep their numbers unique.

i.e: thisComp.layer(“control”).effect(“RefreshCache”)(“Slider”)*index;

Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezedesign.com

[Greg Neumayer]

Hmmm. Bummer. Yeah, I can’t get it to do anything refreshable. I’ve got a series of Particular emitters flying in unison, so as a stop-gap, I’ve linked all their Random Seed values to an external RefreshCache slider. Now I just change that slider value to refresh Particular. Not elegant, but it works.

Thanks for checking.

Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezedesign.com

[Greg Neumayer]

Tom,
Did you end up finding a solution for this? I’ve got a client interested in having me build some “fly-over” scenes, but It’s been a rats-nest trying to find a usable DEM and matching satellite footage (Middle-East). At this point, I don’t even know what I’m looking for in the DEM, which is probably where you were.

p.s. Do you still have/use PolyTrans? I need to convert a solidworks object, and have been told that’s the best solution. This is a one-off, so I’m looking for someone who can just do a couple objects for < $50.

Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezedesign.com

[Greg Neumayer]

I’m needing to look into this as well now. Any advise you have from your India project for creating a real-world map area I can fly through? (like Google Earth but for television production)

Thanks,
Greg

Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezedesign.com