Jon Okerstrom
Forum Replies Created
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There should be a Zaxwerks item in your effects menu. ProAnimator should be one of the elements inside that… assuming you might have some of the other cool plugins.
Jon
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Hi jj,
You can accomplish changing the scale and position of a movie by using the ProAnimator plug-in inside of After Effects. You would use a precomp to scale the movie and can adjust the x and y offset from there.
Jon
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It’s funny when this happens… two people writing answers at the same time.
Using a visibility action is a great idea, Zax. I hadn’t thought of that one. You could make it even more cool using the cascading visibility slider to cause the morph betwen materials to progress from one object to the next one during a pose. I wouldn’t want to try that any other way!
Jon
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Hello jj,
the short answer is yes and yes.
You said morph materials… in ProAnimator, the word materials means the surface attributes including color, texture, transparency, etc. If that’s what you mean, you can accomplish the effect in a couple of ways. 1) by creating a movie that transitions between two still images and applying that movie to the surface of the objects. Or 2) You could accomplish the same effect by rendering your animation twice… once with each material you want, and doing a dissolve between them where you want the change. It’s totally controllable and becauuse the animations match exactly, the only transition you see is in the surface attributes. This second way is probably easier and more flexible.
If you meant you want to morph the actual objects, that answer is also yes. You can morph objects overtime by using a technique called layer cycling. It works by creating a multi-layered Adobe Illustrator document with each layer representing a frame in the animation. You can use the blend tool to create smooth transformations, then break the blend apart and assign each version to a different layer in Illustrator. You could also do this work by hand if you need to. ProAnimator (or Invigorator Pro) can both use layer cycling to create a series of 3d objects based on the Illustrator art. You cannot use this technique with imported 3d objects.
As for mapping movies to objects, it’s pretty simple. On native ProAnimator objects you can also determine which faces of the objects get the movie applied and which don’t.
Please feel free to download a demo of ProAnimator and give it a try. If you get stuck, post a question and we’ll try to help.
Jon
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Glendon,
What you describe sounds absolutely normal.
The wireframe option can render normally or with the hidden line option. You won’t see lines across the front or rear faces of your objects, normally. If you DO want wireframes across the faces of your objects, go to the object stats area and enable meshing. Enter higher numbers and hit apply. Then watch the density of the mesh increase on your object. (This is with Invig renderer only – NOT with Open GL.
Also, take a look at the dark materials giving you problems in the material editor. Note that they may have some transparency enabled or may be used as a mask… you may not realize that.
Does this help?
Jon
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Hi Danny,
It does sound like a memory or caching error, though I’m not a programmer, so I can’t say for sure. You might want to investigate AE’s “schecret” settings. (Do a search for the word in the AE forum to learn more about them.)
What I would also suggest is breaking down your project to make it as simple as possible. In other words, render out the Invigorator globe object separately from any other things going on in the scene, then use the intermediate movie (alpha channel and lossless format) to continue on with the project.
Hope this helps.
Jon
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Hi Glendon,
What you describe sounds very strange.
The native Invigorator rendering engine should be able to handle all kinds of rendering, including wireframe, transparency and the rest.
Open GL rendering has always been somewhat limited. It has historically not been able to do transparency or wireframe rendering or hidden line rendering and won’t do those things now on ProAnimator 4.2 for me.
Please create a simple test project and run through the options to see what works and what doesn’t. It could be you have a corrupt preference file or a video driver issue, but it’s hard to say.
Jon
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Hi James,
It seems long, but I’m thinking Invigorator is actually resaving the imported objects every time, just as the project files include Illustrator art.
Lots and lots of polygons could be slowing down the save file process. If my theory is correct, there may not be much you can do in this case.
Jon
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Hi Bill,
Yes, you’ve probably stared at it, and there’s a little bit of irony in your comment. It’s the eyeball tab under pose presets. Click that, then you can choose to fade off or fade on the objects in that track during the selected pose.
Use the slider below it to adjust the cascade effect. You should see some great results now!
Jon
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Hi daveyg,
What do the fonts that don’t appear have in common? Are they post script, true type, open type?
Jon