[Jared Flynn]

SOLVED!

An update on this issue– on further prodding of my project and several simpler test-projects, I learned that EMITTERS can also be baked, SEPARATELY from dynamics and mograph. First I applied “Bake Particles” tags (I’m not entirely sure where it lives in the menus; I found it using Commander (Shift-C) in R14) to each Emitter in my scene, and once those caches were finished building themselves, I baked the scene’s dynamics via Project Settings > Dynamics > Cache > Bake.

The baking process took longer than in my previous attempts (maybe 25-50% longer) but the end result is exactly what I was after.

At first I thought it was a problem with the complexity of my scene (it’s a massively dense scene with lots of soft body collisions), but what was actually happening was some kind of conflict between the Emitters’ particles (which were not dynamic– just being used to clone objects onto) and the cloned geometry I was spawning with them. Each time I stepped back a frame, the clones would re-align to wherever the particles were, rather than obeying their baked positions. Weird stuff, but at least it’s fixed!

I hope this small detail, which swallowed the better part of my evening, turns around and helps someone else out down the line. Thanks for checking this thread!

Rock on,

Jared Flynn
Motion Graphics Designer
https://be.net/jkinetic

[Jared Flynn]

Thanks a ton Adam! I’d poked around with the idea of using an animated gradient in the Hair Length but I’d done a shoddy job managing the animation of the black & white gradient knots– my results were jumpy and awful. This is definitely much closer to what I’m after!

Good tip re: growing the hair on the un-animated Sweep too; I think this will do the trick nicely.

Thanks again!

Jared Flynn
Motion Graphics Designer
https://be.net/jkinetic

[Jared Flynn]

Wonderful! Great idea using the helix Brian. There are some imperfections at the seam as you say, but the Displacement on the stone material does an awful lot to mask that.

And as for the effect breaking when the offset passes 50%, for my purposes that ring will be spinning far too slowly for that to ever come up. This is just fantastic.

Thanks very much Brian and Adam for all of your help! I’ve learned a ton from this discussion!

Best,

Jared Flynn
Motion Graphics Designer / Lead AE
Lone Wolf Documentary Group

[Jared Flynn]

Oh no worries! Yeah, it might be too much for a parametric system to sort out, depending on what process the Spline Wrap deformer uses to properly join the seams in a full-twist. Bummer that there probably isn’t a way to “best-fit” vertices that are close together in parametric systems…

In the meantime, I’ve found a stop-gap technique that gets the look about 80-90% of the way there– changing the texture tag from UVW Mapping to Spherical, and then rotating the texture’s Heading. It’s not perfect because the projection allows the texture to drift across the twists in the stone, but it looks almost right.

The assumption I’d walked into the scene with– as a heavy After Effects user– was that I could animate the translation of the Noise shaders themselves, sort of like the Offset Turbulence property in AE’s noise effects. Alas, I couldn’t find an equivalent property in the noise shader. Might I have missed something similar to that? Seems to me, if I can tell the shader to offset on one axis, rather than telling the tag to offset, I might have better luck.

Thanks once again for lending your mind to the puzzle!

Jared Flynn
Motion Graphics Designer / Lead AE
Lone Wolf Documentary Group

[Jared Flynn]

Thanks a million Brian and Adam! Really great info here– now that you mention the texture space issue I’m smacking myself upside the head… that makes perfect sense.

I really dig the spline wrap technique Adam suggests since it would let me do some other cool stuff such as animating the Banking to twist the mesh in on itself. The only problem I see with it is that in order to get clean geometry with that idea it looks like the spline rotation needs to be set at a full 360-degree twist, whereas I need to achieve just a half-twist. When I adjust the Spline Rotation to 0.5, I get the crazy-twisted polygon problem at the seam, which in my previous attempt I needed to fix by editing the mesh (see attached image). If I do that here then I’d lose the working Offset property.

I tried making the twist using the Spline Wrap’s Rotation property (between Banking and Spline Rotation) but then the Offset seems to rotate the whole model, which is undesirable for my purposes…

Do you folks think there’s any way to correct the twisted-polygon problem using the Spline Wrap deformer with a half-twist, or would I be better served just adjusting my material to make the Noise shaders work in a 2D UV space? I won’t be heartbroken to lose the parametric freedom of the deformer, though it would be super cool to keep those options open if at all possible.

Thank you both again for your help!

Jared Flynn
Motion Graphics Designer / Lead AE
Lone Wolf Documentary Group

[Jared Flynn]

Great to know! I can only assume the problem’s rooted in some kind of resource load or memory issue, though that would seem kind of off-base with your specs. Cinema must– in select few environments, apparently– just get overwhelmed by the task of parsing out a compositing file from a large, complex project.

Weird stuff, but I’m definitely thankful there are so many ways around the issue.

Cheers,

Jared Flynn
Motion Graphics Designer / Lead AE
Lone Wolf Documentary Group

[Jared Flynn]

Hi there David,

I’m a little late to the party here but I’ve had the same problem several times in my projects, and I’ve managed a workaround in my situations.

For me, the problem NEVER happens when I’m saving compositing project files of DRAFTS (Standard renderer, no bells or whistles, usually with a resolution of 960×540), but when I go for the final compositing pass (often the Physical renderer, 1920×1080, AO, motion blur, DOF, etc), that’s when Cinema pooches and hangs.

My current specs, for the record:
Lenovo ThinkPad W701 on Windows 7 Professional SP1
1.60GHz Intel Core i7 (quad core / hyperthreaded)
16GB RAM
nVidia Quadro FX 2800M

I’ve found a couple of different techniques have worked around this problem, depending on the scene. Hopefully this will work for everyone!

-If you’re using the Physical Renderer, switch to Standard just to save out your project file. This was the most recent fix for me (today, actually).

-If you’re already using Standard and are still having problems, try disabling several (if not all) of the geometry in your scene. Leave only the components you need active for the project file– things like lights, objects with External Compositing tags applied, cameras, etc– and disable everything else. I find an easy way to facilitate this is to put every object I add an External Compositing tag to in its own layer, so when the time comes I can Solo it.

This doesn’t even begin to explain why this problem could be occurring– certainly not to someone like me with no software engineering experience– but it has brute-forced the export for me with perfect results every time I run into this problem. Tested rigorously using a steady mixture of the scientific method and pure unbridled IT rage. 🙂

Good luck!

Jared Flynn
Motion Graphics Designer / Lead AE
Lone Wolf Documentary Group

[Jared Flynn]

Wow, thank you so much for this Adam! This is incredibly close to what I’m after, leaps and bounds beyond where I’d arrived on my own.

It looks like the only real limitation of this is that the strokes’ weight isn’t affected by the view angle, which is part of why I thought S&T would be the way to go. I would rather like it if the placement of the hatches could be relative to the camera position rather than the object’s UVW.

All the same, this gets me WAY closer than where I started, so thank you very much for taking the time!

Jared Flynn
Motion Graphics Designer / Lead AE
Lone Wolf Documentary Group

[Jared Flynn]

Hi there Dan,

Thanks for your thoughts! Both ideas seem like they’d do the trick… I will see what I can hack together. I am leaning toward your latter concept, of developing a check inside the next target selection. I bet that approach would save me some significant retooling on what’s already been done.

Thanks again! I’ll try and post my result if I get it working.

Jared Flynn
Motion Graphics Designer / Lead AE
Lone Wolf Documentary Group

[Jared Flynn]

Thanks again Dave!

It’s true, I definitely sacrifice some significant upgrade options running on a laptop (I’m pretty sure my RAM is maxed out at the moment, though I can jockey for a few proc upgrades from what I’ve currently got, as well as a twice-better Quadro if I ever have the money). For the moment it’s really essential that I be extremely mobile with my work, and to that end I can definitely say this Thinkpad beats the pants off the other kits I researched hands down.

That said, rest assured I’m using what power I can muster from this wee beastie to save up for a killer desktop. 🙂

Jared Flynn
Motion Graphics Designer / Lead AE
Lone Wolf Documentary Group