[Jake Hawley]

I used a variation of this script to delay a mask that was fading up. the opacity of the layer was pick wicked to the ‘end’ property of the stroke effect. however the change came into have the mask fade in after the object was drawn on.

this is a sample of what i used.

didn’t set up variables because it just seemed like extra typing, even though its pretty messy.

Thanks!

delay = .05;
thisComp.layer("Layer 6 copy 3").effect("Stroke")("End").valueAtTime(time - delay*(index-thisComp.layer("Layer 6 copy 3").index));


[Jake Hawley]

awesome!

thanks dan. took me a couple of days to get back to this. and it works great.

[Jake Hawley]

Hi Dan,
One frame would hold for the entire clip. I’m pretty much wanting to create a still frame in AE with out having to constantly dup a layer, and set freeze frame. two actions i’m doing a lot of. also trying to avoid rendering out a still,importing and placing that still. does that make sense?

Thanks!

[Jake Hawley]

thanks!
not sure how i was going wrong. Think i was over complicating it.

[Jake Hawley]

Similar thing happened to me but it wasn’t the collapse transformations switch that worked for me. i was using a camera and its focus range was throwing me off.

i just double clicked the camera in my timeline to bring up it’s properties then unchecked the enable DOF switch.

[Jake Hawley]

hey jeremy,
usually when i know im going to be using both applications i’ll try and do all my main camera moves in c4d then add andy extra effects, color tweaks and other superfical changes to 3D objects in AE.

working with cameras in AE then trying to use cameras in c4d was a little awkward for me at first but its not too bad after a while.

to help with placement in AE, i will create a simple object in c4d (usually a plane) and add a bitmap to it. i will also add an ‘external compositing’ tag so that i have the location info for when i bring this project into AE. the i will just swap out the null it creates with my real asset.

for better compositing in AE you may also need track mattes from c4d. to do this you will need to add a ‘compositing’ tag (not an ‘external compositing tag’, enable the object buffer and in your render settings under the multi-pass tab, select the from the ‘channels’ pull down in the upper right, object buffer. these are slightly vague instructions but i can tell you more or i found the ‘bullet’ tutorials on videocopilot.net extremely helpful. being an AE user trying to use a 3d app.

https://www.videocopilot.net/products/the_bullet/

it might not be the exact effect you want to do but it covers a lot of c4d to AE stuff that comes in extremely handy.

hope this helps.

[Jake Hawley]

thanks guys. all good info. what i ended up doing was killing all shadows on the sketch and toon module in the render settings. this drastically cut down my render time by about 500%.

in my render settings under Effects, i selected Sketch and Toon, then selected Shading.
i then turned off shadows and illumination. this got the effect i wanted with reduced render time.

[Jake Hawley]

cool. this is my set up.

first comp in AE for 16×9:
NTSC D1 Widescreen square pixel
864×486

second DVD render comp:
NTSC DV Widescreen
720×480
D1 / DV NTSC Widescreen

so im doing all my work in the first comp then resizing in the second DVD render comp.