Jon Okerstrom
Forum Replies Created
-
Hi Jeff,
The AE plane and the Invigorator text are actually in two different 3D worlds. Why not build the floor in Invigorator?
Jon
-
Hi Russ,
I’m still running PowerPC macs here, specifically because I’m waiting for Adobe to catch up to Apple’s chip switch. Hopefully that will happen early next year. I have no experience running PPC AE on MacTel machines but am also curious. If you do take the plunge, let us know how it goes.
Jon
-
DCompositor,
There are two possibilities:
If you render your 3D animation in Max, you’ll want to be sure to save it in a lossless format that includes alpha channel. Quicktime animation) codec comes to mind.
You can import the model(s) into Invigorator and animate them there. However, the texturing abilities of Invigorator are not as robust as they are in Max. Invig does support UVmapping, but you’ll have to break models apart by texture.
Does this help?
Jon
-
Glad you’re getting into it.
Needless to say, it’s hard to beat the combination of speed and power if you’re cranking out stuff for news departments.
I built an election night newscast open and election special opens using ProAnimator, 3D Flag, Gradientwerks and a couple of blur/shine type effects on a very tight deadline.
Jon
-
A couple more thoughts..
When you say you can only scale in Z direction, that means you’re working in the scene preview area. This scaling is meant to help animate scale of sets, not to resize objects.
Click on the red ball to get to the set-up area. Select the object. Go to the object stats diologue box. Increase all three scale numbers equally. Note that the scaling done here is NOT animatable.
Does this help?
Jon
-
Mel,
The material editor is the key to 90 percent of your questionns. Yes you can apply images to your objects (targa files work great) as simple image maps, transparency maps, bump maps and reflection maps. Click the large box next to the appropriate channel. If you’re using PA as a plug-in to AE, you can also use layermapping.. read about it in the docs.
If you want walls and floors, you can always add plane objects to your scene and apply materials to those planes. If you don’t want the background to move, look for the large square near the word background in camera mode. You can apply a background there.
Last, you can apply multiple 3D objects from other apps. You can move them to one object track if you want. Be advised that you can apply only one material to an imported object, so you may want to break your objects into parts.
Does this help?
Jon
-
Walt,
You need to focus on the material library and material editor. Yes, you can bring Illustrator files in using their native colors, but that’s really just the start.
Search the documentation for the word material. That should give you a start.
The next level of complexity (and power) is using layermapping. the cool thing about that feature is that you can apply anything you can put in an After Effects precomp or layer onto an object made in Invigorator.
Jon
-
Here’s a recipe from Zax in the forum archives, It’s not exactly looping but will get you there. Jon ..
The 3D Flag plug-in is a completely physics-based cloth simulation, so you can’t set exact start/stop keyframes. However, wind in this simulation is very very smooth, it doesn’t suddenly dip or turn unless you tell it to. So if you set the wind speed to be constant the flag will fall into a rhythm. You can then render out a few seconds of the animation and find a decent looping point to do a crossfade and, viola!, you have a looping segment of video. Here it is in steps. . . 1- Set up the flag. 2- Set the wind speed to 11. 3- Set Pre-roll to 8 (you want to make sure the flag is well into the simulation before you start to render) 4- Render out 10 seconds of animation. 5- Take the clip into an editing program. 6- Duplicate it and make the top layer partially transparent. 7- Slide the bottom copy back and forth in time, until you match up the wave patterns. 8- Set the transparency back to normal. 9- Do a short dissolve from one copy to the other at the match point. (“short” means something like half a second) 10- Render out the looping section of flag. There you go! -Zax
-
Try this:
https://homepage.mac.com/jokerstrom1/FileSharing58.html
Please post a note letting me know you’ve downloaded it. I won’t leave the page up for ever.
Have fun.
Jon
-
No problem.
Where would you like me to send it?
Jon