[John Cuevas]

Can you precompose the entire wing, duplicate it and flip the duplicate?

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Particular & Form won’t work together like that as you probably have discovered. While they both can use and interact in AE’s 3d space, they are both 2d effects and they don’t have the ability to measure the distance a flowing form shape is from the camera, or what direction it is flowing. All Particular will see is a white alpha channel that indicates it should put particles at that location, it can not discern which way the particles should be moving based on the movements of another layer.

This is something you might be able to accomplish in a 3D modelling application like C4D, but not truly in AE.

Perhaps you could fake it with multiple form layers, using the same fractal patterns. The top layer would have a lot less particles and the fractal could displace them quite far in distance.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

You would have to precompose the layer with form.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

I’ve created 1920×1080 for theatres and it looked fine.

That being said, call the client and ask who/where this is going to be delivered to and if he can get the exact specs required. That’s your best and easiest option that will save you the most headaches down the road.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

If I were asking for objects like the smiling head at 10 seconds my biggest criteria would be that the designer give me layered files with each layer clearly labeled. Hat, Head, Eyes… Then save it as an RGB .ai file. Gives me the ability to import as a comp and have each layer be seperated, and this way you can take advantage of the ability to use continous rasterization on the vector images(no scaling issues)

Too many times I get files that will by CMYK with 100’s of elements thrown into one layer, which I have to manually seperate to work with them in AE.

So that’s my .02 cents.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

It’s not an text effect/vector based effect, so it won’t rasterize. You could use a text effect with an expression to count if need be.

To get you started here’s an easy one: Create an empty text layer “cntl+shift+alt+t” and add a slider control effect to the layer. twirl down your text controls and “alt + click” the source text stop watch. Now just pick whip to the slider control. Now you can just keyframe the slider control and you have counter.

If you need something more than that, I encourage you to search the expressions forum, there are a lot of counting expressions there.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

I think your smoothness problem is because shatter can’t anti-alias.

As for the artifacts, I started messing with shatter and I’ve been getting the same issue just using a 4 colors in my custom map. I threw a threshold effect on an adjustment layer and it fixed the problem, but I don’t know if that’s practical for you. Making my custom map greyscale actually made the problem worse. Not sure what is causing it, I haven’t had this problem before, but it’s been awhile since I’ve used shatter, so perhaps a 64 bit issue, I don’t know.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

So I’m about 99% sure it has to do with the Automatic Duck import I used once when I started this project, but I still can’t figure out exactly how.

Today, I was wrapping the main body of the project, saved – closed – and went to reopen and kept getting the same error over and over. Project would not open. Based on my hunch I moved the project back to the original system where the .AAF file was and it opened up. I reduced the project(though I don’t see any links/connections to the .AAF file), moved it back to the problem computer and now it opens again.

Anyway-that seems to be a solution if you have automatic duck and are getting the (26:35) error.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Couple of methods you might want to try. Instead of creating a new solid, duplicate your layer and set the bottom layer to use the top as it’s track matte. Then you can delete it’s mask. Pretty much the same approach, cept you won’t have to move the solid into it’s place and scale it everytime.

Or you could precompose the video layer/picture have and leave all it’s attributes in main comp. Open up a 2nd comp window, open your precomp and set your scale and position keyframes in the precomp while you watch the results in your main comp. This method might be more work than it’s worth though.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Another tutorial showing the technique: https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/virtual_3d_photos/

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.