[Jon Okerstrom]

Hi Yvonne,

Search the forum archives for Sphere. The recipe essentially involves creating a very, very small circle in Illustrator, applying half pipe to it, and turning the smoothness setting way up… something like .01.

If you need more help, say the word.

Jon

[Jon Okerstrom]

Hi David,

I’m going to be very direct here. To make the most of Invigorator, you really should get Illustrator. Not just to create text, but to manipulate and create logos and other elements which you can “Invigorate.” You can use other vector-based drawing programs, so long as they allow you to save the files in native Illustrator format. The Photoshop option which you mention is useful in very limited circumstances.

You can create 3D text without Illustrator very easily using either Invigorator Pro AE or ProAnimator.

Hope this helps.

Jon

[Jon Okerstrom]

Hi ccsmith7,

You said you had AE Pro, but didn’t mention which version of Invig you have – Classic or Pro. Invigorator Pro allows you to import 3D models from other aps.

Jon

[Jon Okerstrom]

Hi Bill,

Go to the download page at http://www.zaxwerks.com, fill out the form and you can download Glintwerks to try it for yourself. You’ll be impressed, I think.

Jon

[Jon Okerstrom]

Hi Bill,

Yes you can, in a variety of ways.

One way is to manually keyframe the position of the flare over time. I’ve done this to have a small lens flare follow a highlight glint as a 3D object moves before the camera.

Are you using Knoll Light Factory or something else?

Jon

[Jon Okerstrom]

Hi Bill,

Check out the Zaxwerks site for all the details on the Werks Volume 1, which includes Glintwerks. It’s downloadable software from the Zaxwerks site. https://zaxwerks.com/2004/thewerks.html

I can tell you from personal experience that Glintwerks is light years ahead of my old tried and true Light Sweep, which began its life as part of Final Effects Complete. I often used light sweep as a way to pass a diagonal soft bar of light across text or invigorator animation movie, but find Glintwerks is a whole lot more powerful, yet easy to use and fast to render.

Essentially, you get a powerful Photoshop-style gradient editor that includes both color and transparency, with a library of cool presets to get you going quickly. You can animate the resulting gradient across the face of your After Effects layer, whether it’s text or something else, but that’s just the beginning. You can add some extra special effects like texture maps revealed in the animating glint, and using the glint to reveal or hide the layer. You can add a glow to your traveling glint with one mouse click. No traveling mattes required! All of this and many more features in a fast, easy to use plug-in.

I ‘m proud to say I spent several days as part of the team demonstrating Glintwerks and the whole suite of Zaxwerks software at NAB last week. Very cool stuff!

Jon

[Jon Okerstrom]

Hi Dante,

Another method – simply drag the flagpole position slider to move the flag to the center of the screen. The flag follows the pole. It’s a pretty awesome plug-in!

Jon

[Jon Okerstrom]

Hi Jay,

Matt offered some good ideas about creating water-type materials.

If you’re looking to create a ripple effect in the actual 3d objects, use layer cycling. You can distort your objects over a series of Illustrator layers. If you need help with that, let us know.

Jon

[Jon Okerstrom]

Hi Nir,

My hunch is that Invig does not support the method used to apply the texture to Poser models and/or that your model does not include the information required to apply those maps to the objects, once imported into Invigorator.

The Zaxwerks troubleshooting page says:

At this time, the Invigorator supports UV-style mapping. Projection-style mapping like Spherical, Cylindrical and Planar is not yet supported. If a model has UV texture coordinates in the model file then a texture map can be applied to these models. At this time the file formats that contain UV coordinates are: Lightwave v7, and OBJ. Remember, the UV coordinates have to be created in the host modeler first, then saved into the model file.

Jon

[Jon Okerstrom]

Hi arash,

ProAnimator is a standalone application for Mac and Windows, as opposed to Invigorator, which works inside of Adobe After Effects. Both aps are great, and as you may know ProAnimator has some very powerful motion controls, which are not available in the current versions of Invigorator. You can, however, render out movies with alpha channels, which you can further manipulate in After Effects.

In answer to your question, I know for certain that ProAnimator and Invigorator are both are being developed further by Zaxwerks, but can’t speak to which elements from ProAnimator may be built into Invigorator or when that might happen.

I can tell you that I was working with a pre-release version of ProAnimator 4.0 at NAB this week – and it ROCKS!

Jon