[Jens Enqvist]

I think I know what you mean and I’m afraid that it is stretching the 2D option a little too much. There might be a way to get the hair to follow the rotation of the sphere but it would only move in 2D so I’m not sure how good it would look and it would require some work. My suggestion would have to be to do it in a 3D application if you want the best result.

[Jens Enqvist]

When adding flares and glows you can try darkening the footage slightly at the same time. It increases the intensity of the light, or contrast rather.

[Jens Enqvist]

Look for Shift-Paint in the manual.
There are different modes for recording paintstrokes painted while pressing the shift key. It is selectable through the VP context menu and the Comp view tool twirl thing.

Or, you can change stroke start time using (keyboard shortcuts) copy-paste (not sure about cut). Unfortunately it is no longer possible (CS2, CS3) to use the VP stroke inpoint and outpoint shortcuts for some reason (“[” and “]”).

[Jens Enqvist]

You can contact me, I think I have what you are looking for.
Go to cycorefx.com for contact info.

[Jens Enqvist]

One troublesome way would be to copy the stroke, paste it on a dummy layer – where it will become position keyframes. Copy the position keyframes and paste them on a mask and use the Stroke effect to animate. That will give you linear time.
You’d probably want to turn the mask into smooth bezier to get something closer to the bspline of Vector Paint.

[Jens Enqvist]

You can get sound preview in AE while scrubbing the timeline if you hold down the Cmd key on Mac (Ctrl key on Win?)
That kind of sound preview is not all that good but it can help.

[Jens Enqvist]

Yeah, I don’t post that often but COW is the one forum I visit daily.

The CS3 bundled CC effects have several improvements.
I don’t have the complete list but since we mentioned CC Particle World you should find several new controls such as Resistance which give you viscosity for any Animation mode. You can also use animated textures as particles and define how much particle sizes can differ.
I should check if we have a complete list of changes, could be a good thing to post on our site.

[Jens Enqvist]

The wobbling you are experiencing is most likely because CC Sphere has a rotation order of XZY. (Meaning that Z rotation takes place before Y rotation.)
To get a single static Z rotation offset, use the AE layer transform rotation.

The reason behind using an XZY order is to provide one extra level of control. If it used XYZ rotation, the sphere rotation of Z would be exactly the same as rotating the layer, which wouldn’t add much functionality.

I don’t have the manual available right now but I will make a note to check that this is mentioned there if not already.

[Jens Enqvist]

>I’m using AE Pro 7, hopefully this version of cc particle world isn’t too old?

Alright not so old then 😉
It’s almost 2 years since that version left our hands. Things have changed since.

It’s not very often we post on COW since there are so many experienced users on COW that answers CC questions before we have a chance!
We monitor COW constantly though.

Cheers,
-jens

[Jens Enqvist]

>I wonder if anyone at Cycore cares any longer about their
>orphaned effects.
>bogiesan

We certainly do!
They are constantly being updated.
Particle World for example, has changed significantly which you would notice if you could run the old FE version today! (which you might be able to do on Win?)

CycoreFX is very much alive and we are dedicated to keep on improving it.

-jens