[Jim Scott]

I’m glad you got it sorted out.

The effects are looking good. Have fun.

[Jim Scott]

In my tests, keyframing the editor/renderer visibility works fine when rendering to the Picture Viewer. Can you post your project file (or a simplified version with cubes instead of the Tie fighters) so that we can take a look at your settings?

[Jim Scott]

Hi Nick,

Deselect “Mix Textures” in the material’s Texture Tag:

You can right click on Mix Textures and select “Show Help” for more info, but for your purposes I don’t think its use is appropriate.

[Jim Scott]

If you recently upgraded to CC 2018 I would suggest reverting back to a previously working version and waiting for its bugs to be ironed out. Otherwise, with such little information, it’s hard to guess what your issue may be. If you are working with an earlier version of AE that had been working fine, but may have become corrupted, you could try deleting it and reinstalling.

So that others may be able to offer better assistance, please provide more specific information about your hardware setup, what kind of video and audio files you are working with, which effects and plugins you are using, if the problem only occurs with this one project, etc. You could try simplifying the project, and then adding layers back in until the problem resurfaces. This process would hopefully uncover the culprit, but again more info would help.

Good luck.

[Jim Scott]

If it’s just a simple scene with a plane of grass and a camera, you can either animate the plane of grass horizontally towards the camera, or animate the camera forward along the plane of grass – the end result will be the same. For example, if your camera is looking in the positive Z direction, either move the plane in the negative Z direction (decrease its Z position) or move the camera further along the positive Z direction. Create a position keyframe at one point in time, move later in time and create another keyframe where the plane or camera has changed its position along the Z axis. Keyframing the zoom of the camera would also create a similar look, but would not work if you intend to have the character move in more than one direction. To avoid such issues, and especially if there are other objects in the scene, I would suggest animating the camera position, which is analogous to the motion of the character anyway.

[Jim Scott]

This is the After Effects forum, which is software used for special effects and compositing, but since you asked…

If you gut the old TV and replace its CRT tube with a PC monitor you can run whatever image or video to it that you want. You will have lost the look of the old, rounded CRT tube though. If you’re thinking about somehow dismantling the old TV and keeping the curved face of the CRT tube, forget it. If you break it, it will implode… making a neat sound but leaving lots of broken glass. If you want the guest’s name to appear on the face of a non-working TV you could use a program like After Effects to composite the text onto the TV, making it appear to be displayed there. This is something done in post production… meaning, after you have recorded the episode.

Good luck.

[Jim Scott]

I don’t know of any simple conversion process that will turn the extruded paths into tapered models as you suggest. You can round the caps of the extrude, or offset the different extruded paths to create layers of different depths, but in order to create one object that is thicker in the middle and tapers to the edge I don’t know of any other way than modelling it. You can convert the extruded paths to polygon objects, but you will then need to subdivide the faces in order to model them. If you want to go that route look for modelling tutorials, as that whole process is beyond the scope of a question and answer forum like this.

[Jim Scott]

If I understand what you’re asking, you can set different lights to include or exclude different parts of the logo in order to control the lighting on each part.

[Jim Scott]

Good stuff Brian. I have been experimenting with booles, but don’t do this enough to come up with your excellent solutions. Thanks for your expertise.

[Jim Scott]

Just to elaborate, the problem arises because the cross section of the parts is rectangular rather than arched. In order to have perfect intersections the cross section of the pieces would need an arched front and back that matched the curvature of the imaginary sphere which they are designed to form.

In the image below I have increased the width of the pieces to exaggerate the problem at the intersections. With narrower pieces the issue will be less noticeable, but always present.

Short of figuring out a way to design and draw a spline object that perfectly matched the curvature of the imaginary sphere, and then sweeping it to create the parts, it seems to me that the only way to avoid this issue would be to cut (model) the lamp out of a perfect sphere, just as you would need to do to create it in real life without resorting to grinding away the flaws at the intersections. As to how to go about that, I must leave it to the modelling experts to chime in, if it is at all possible.

I’m sorry that I don’t have an answer, but hopefully my analysis helped you to understand the issue better, and might lead you or someone else to a workable solution. I’ll keep thinking about it and let you know if I come up with anything and will be pleasantly surprised if and when someone shows an easy way to do this.

Good luck.