[John Mcmullin]

Thanks Brian.

This project was parked for a few weeks but getting back to it now. This site is great for filling in the gaping holes in my knowledge.

Best wishes,

John

[John Mcmullin]

Hi Steve.

I couldn’t work out how to trace between a chain of particles dropped from an emitter but I moved on to the spline dynamics and fairly quickly it’s working well. It’s a helix spline with a hair constraint that is following the reel. There are hair colliders on the reel and the floor plane. The helix is sweeped with a very narrow rectangle. I had to crank up the steps in the spline dynamics to stop it falling through the reel and change the spline to B spline to keep it smooth.

Needs a bit of finesse and tweaking of dynamic settings but it’s going to work so thanks for your response.

John

[John Mcmullin]

Hi Dan.

Sorry, I’m not explaining it very well. So I would send a real world edit to After Effects, either as an EDL, aaf, or direct from Premiere. That edit would have a total duration and each video or audio clip would have a duration that would be a fraction of that.

So I was imagining that I could use those durations to create shape layers (rectangles) with x dimension that represent the various clips’ duration in time. Their x positions would represent the time at which they start in the original edit.

So, for instance, if a video clip was 5% of the length of the original edit and came in 70% of the way through, that would determine how wide the rectangle would be and where.

The script would have to read the original edit composition and write a new composition composed of shape layers, in the widths and at the positions corresponding to the in and out points.

I hope that’s a little more clear.

John

[John Mcmullin]

Yes. I guess it has reached the end of its life. I was just posting in case there was some other reason why it wasn’t working anymore.

I’ll look out for a replacement when I hit a heavy project. Just working in 1080 at the moment and the system seems to be coping.

Many thanks,

John

[John Mcmullin]

Wow. That was actually so easy. I’d done it with Xpresso on the camera but that makes a lot more sense.

Thanks for your input.

John

[John Mcmullin]

Hi Amir.

I was trying to sweep a spline and then use that sweep inside a boole as the negative shape. But part of the sweep were not disappearing due to overlapping geometry on the sweep.

I rebuilt the spline in Illustrator and and it works better now.

Thanks for your help.

John

[John Mcmullin]

Sorry Amir. Another thing?

After your help I moved on to using the same spline to generate the cabinet door faces. So I duplicated the face frame sweep and then used the duplicate as the negative space inside a boole, to cut space out of a large flat volume and so create the doors. See this frame grab:

12775_doorsandspline.jpg.zip

Problem is the boole doesn’t subtract the volumes where the struts of the face frame intersect.

The concept behind this is to give me an easy, quick way to change the cupboard layout, but altering or dropping in a new spline. Maybe you know of a better approach if this one is problematic.

Many thanks,

John

[John Mcmullin]

Hi Emir.

That’s solved my problem perfectly. Brilliant. Thanks for fast reply.

John

[John Mcmullin]

Great Adam,

Got it and I now understand a bit more about manipulating weights. Pretty invaluable going forward.

My animation looks nice and smooth. Better than the one where I made my motext editable and gave them all separate effectors with offset keyframes. A lot less work as well.

Thanks so much for your help. Worked a treat.

John

[John Mcmullin]

Hi Adam,

I think maybe I haven’t explained myself well or else my approach is all wrong.

Currently I am using the random effector, randomising position and rotation and animating the strength slider from 100 to 0. This means that my letters all come to their final positions at the same time. If instead of animating the strength slider I use the linear falloff, the animation order of the letters all happens from one side. Clicking the index button changes the random start positions but not the time at which each individual letter resolves to its final resting place. Using noise means that the positions are constantly wiggling about, which isn’t what I want either.

I would like each letter to look as though it’s animated at a different time and the animation order to be totally random.

Many thanks,

John