[Jeremy Allen]

also maybe some sort of Fractal Noise with settings to produce large blocks, mixed in with blending modes maybe..

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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6

C4D 11.5
AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1

[Jeremy Allen]

Hey glad I could help. And good for you to keep at it and figure it out! Yeah, C4D can be tricky to get a handle on sometimes. Imagine my struggle, I come from a design and video editing background and have never touched any 3D program before I started playing with C4D a few months ago. Lots of long nights and head scratching for sure. But you gotta admit, when you finally figure something out and have that “I’m a genius” moment, its pretty satisfying 🙂 Until 5 minutes later some other problem makes you feel like an idiot again! haha

———————————————
8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6

C4D 11.5
AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1

[Jeremy Allen]

I’m not sure about opacity, but you could use a plain effector set to scale -1, with a long falloff as a child of your camera. So as you get closer to the particles, they would get smaller. Or as you got farther away, they would get smaller. Depends on what you are wanting to do..

I haven’t played with the particle system in C4D too much, so someone else may be able to help you more..

———————————————
8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6

C4D 11.5
AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1

[Jeremy Allen]

So nobody has had any of these problems? Was my post too long to read, or is everyone too distracted by the CS5 announcement today?

I would really appreciate advice on any of the problems I mentioned earlier. I’m usually pretty good about figuring out problems, or at least work-arounds, but it’s a little more difficult to pinpoint certain problems when they seem so inconsistent.

Thanks again for any help..

———————————————
8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6

C4D 11.5
AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1

[Jeremy Allen]

Hey, glad I could help.. It plays fine for me on the first load, but I have a pretty quick connection. If its choppy for you, its most likely a file size issue. So how big is the file? Generally you would want to put a preloader on the front end, depending on the file size, and depending on what you think your average audience’s connection speeds are. Its your call if you want a preloader or not, and as I said, it played fine for me the first time. Using video on the web is always a balance of quality vs. filesize, so you could also try tweaking the compression settings to make sure you get the smallest filesize with acceptable quality.

As a sidenote, that animation could have been created entirely in Flash, with the blurs and all. That would save a lot of hassle with AFX and compressing files and all. But I guess if you don’t know Flash, you gotta create it the way you know how.

I’m not sure why you’re having that little problem with the “I”..

———————————————
8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6

C4D 11.5
AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1

[Jeremy Allen]

As there always seems to be a million different ways to do something, I might try a slightly different approach. I would create the first line(blue), duplicate it and change the color(red). Now make a rectangular mask for the red layer. Drag it all the way to the left so you don’t see the red layer. Set a hold keyframe for the mask path. You can hold command to hear the music while you scrub the timeline. As each word is sang, move the playhead to that point in time and reposition the mask so the red words appear. A new hold keyframe will be created automatically. Now you have blue words turning to red whenever the words are sang. Obviously you can use whatever colors you want.

Once you have the first line complete, you could either start from scratch for each new line, or duplicate the previous line (both layers), change the text and tweak the mask keyframes on the red layer. Instead of duplicating layers, another option might even be to use only the first two layers, with a source text expression that changes the line at the appropriate times. You could also have a source text expression on the red layer that gets the text from the blue layer. Then you only have to change the blue layer for every new line and the red layer will change automatically. You will still have to re-animate the mask for each new line of course.

This method will eliminate splitting layers and having to animate the opacity of every single red word. Its still a bit tedious, but as the others have mentioned, there is just no good way to automate this kind of thing.

———————————————
8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6

C4D 11.5
AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1

[Jeremy Allen]

If I were doing this, I would render the full 8 second animation, compress it to FLV, then import that into Flash. Put the FLV on the timeline. Create a layer for “labels” and one for “actionscript”. Create a blank keyframe on the Labels layer at the starting point of the loop, and name the keyframe “loop”. Now go to the last frame of the animation. On the Actionscript layer create a blank keyframe. Then write this code for that frame: gotoAndPlay(“loop”); ** Note that proper capitalization is very important in Actionscript.

Now your animation will play through once, and when it hits the last frame, it will go back to the loop label and loop infinitely from that point on. Since the animation loops within one source file (the FLV), this will produce the most seamless loop, assuming you have correctly created your loop points to be seamless.

Normally you wouldn’t put the FLV on the timeline. You would instead need a streaming video player or really know actionscript to create a streaming player that would load the FLV from the server. Since your animation is only 8 seconds long, it should produce a fairly small file size.

I hope this helps.. It’s been a while since I’ve worked in Flash, so I may have left out a few small details, but this should get you most of the way there.

———————————————
8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6

C4D 11.5
AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1

[Jeremy Allen]

Did you select “connect splines” on the pop-up box when you imported?

———————————————
8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6

C4D 11.5
AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1

[Jeremy Allen]

Did you have any luck with it? I was gonna mention a couple other ways to make your scene look a little more interesting, and then I saw this picture today, which is pretty much exactly what I was thinking.. Just using the lights and darkness to add some interest and really showcase the trophy itself…

———————————————
8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6

C4D 11.5
AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1

[Jeremy Allen]

In the viewport, go to Filter, then find Axis. The filter option lets you show or hide different interface items.

———————————————
8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6

C4D 11.5
AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1