[Kevin Camin]

Ok, understood.

I don’t know what you want to use that effect for, but you could save your object as a texture and then use the texture fill command to fill a canvas with repetitions of your object.

What do you want to do?

Best regards,

Kevin Camin

[Kevin Camin]

Why don’t you find some general texture tutorials from somewhere and figure it out. It would be highly instructive to go through the process to learn about how materials react to light.

Also, if you don’t know how to light things, especially reflective surfaces, it makes it hard to know what your texture really looks like while you are working on it. You might want to study lighting too. There’s a book called “Light, Science and Magic” that teaches the principles of how light works. …imagine the bland lighting on a reality TV show, compared to the highly crafted look of lighting from the movie “Lord of the Rings”. If you put the costumed LOTRs characters on the set of a reality show, they would look very bad. Lighting is everything.

Best regards,

Kevin Camin

[Kevin Camin]

Just bring your PSD into After Effects and use that effect. I use After Effects all the time to work on photos.

Best regards,

Kevin Camin

[Kevin Camin]

It’s the x and y positions of an optical flare. So when watch my movie, the flare is roving around between keyframes to unwanted places.

Best regards,

Kevin Camin

[Kevin Camin]

Thanks, Darby for taking a look.

Adam, you’re right. Thanks for that. I’ll see how it looks in the scene and I’ll probably have to set up some white cards around it to give the exterior better reflections.

Best regards,

Kevin Camin

[Kevin Camin]

Thanks, Kevin!

And thanks, Joseph for the link to the script. I unfortunately am still working off CS5. But this will come in hand in the future. Thanks, again.

Best regards,

Kevin Camin

[Kevin Camin]

@Kevin: Thank you, that is indeed an elegant solution. Is there a way to copy and paste an expression to multiple layers at a time?

@Dave: I’m creating AE lights in conjuction with the Video Co-Pilot Optical Flares effect. There is no actual light being generate from the lights, but it being used as a position coordinate for the flare effect to impose on. It works extremely well, and is fast. If you want to create a nuanced wall of light, this is a good way.

Thanks so much everyone.

Best regards,

Kevin Camin

[Kevin Camin]

Thanks everyone for the great suggestions!

And, yes, I got the Channel Blur to work, but it’s not a straight forward process. If you blur just the alpha channel, but the R,G, & B channels are not blurred, it won’t create a soft edge because RGB channels are still “hard”. But if you blur all color channels and alpha, it works, but the entire image is blurry at that point and you’ll need to dup the layer and do a matte choker or some other technique on a top layer.

Best regards,

Kevin Camin

[Kevin Camin]

I 2nd Walter’s suggestion of ProRes. Yesterday I rendered out a 2-minute HD video in Animation and ProRes422. They were 12.5 Gb and 1.6 Gb respectively. ProRes comes in several flavors, and I think ProRes422 would be good enough to go back to Final Cut with, or I might use ProRes422(HQ) to just be on the same side (HQ=high quality).

Best regards,

Kevin Camin

[Kevin Camin]

Why don’t you just go to a community college? Or join the National Guard or Air Guard–I know the Air Guard is only 9 months of basic and then one weekend a month or something, and I think you get some type of GI bill out of it.

Anyways, great if you are joining the military, but sort of weird to me to do it just for that reason. To me it would be nice to hear ‘serve my country’ or ‘protect my country’, a higher value that is driving you. Because if you get killed in action because you want to learn After Effects its sort of not worth it.

Best regards,

Kevin Camin