[Matthew Woods]

Did you make any changes to your project before your first preview? If not, you are probably just loading from the disk cache which is why its quick. Once you make changes that require a re-render, you will be rendering at normal speed.

-Matt

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

My advice would be to stick with Mac, if that is what you are comfortable with. I try to keep an open mind and not be a fanboy. I am not happy with the direction that Apple has taken their mac pros. Several years ago, I thought the grass might be greener in PC land, but my foray in windows was a total disaster. Part of it may have been the fault of the hardware. We got a Pro-Max One because they are advertised on the cow, and I thought it would be well tuned for Premiere/AE. The machine was trouble prone from day one. I don’t think there was adequate ventilation in it, and it had a number of hardware failures. When it was working, it was nice and speedy but not appreciatively more so than my new iMac with specs not that much better than yours. (my iMac does have an SSD, which is the best speed upgrade you can give a computer these days.) That, on top of frustration with Windows prompted us to finally write it off as an expensive mistake, and we have moved back to mac for Editing/AE, using the Pro-Max as a test machine. (anyone want to buy a used, trouble prone Pro-Max one?)

If you are looking to replace with a laptop, Apple makes some of the best laptops around. Personally I want screen space to do After Effects work. You might feel cramped on a laptop, especially coming from a 27″ iMac. I haven’t tried one of the apple Retina laptops, but I think I would need something like a retina display on a laptop to make it bearable.

-Matt

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

I have this problem with certain plugins. The main culprit is Element 3d, but it may happen with a few other plugs as well. It usually happens when I have a pre-comp linked to element as a texture layer. If I change something in the pre comp, Element doesn’t necessarily know that anything has changed so it doesn’t tell the renderer to re-render, thus keeps the cached version.

The only way that I have found to fix it, is to place the playhead on a frame that doesn’t have the problem in question, then go to preferences, and clean the Database & Cache, then Empty the Disk cache, then choose purge all from the Edit Menu. You lose all cached information, but it fixes the old frames.

-Matt

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

I can tell you what is wrong, and that you will need to use Maya or some other 3d software to fix it, but I can’t give you specific instructions because I don’t use Maya. At least you will know the problem and the terminology to find your answer.

The transparency problem is because the normals on many of the faces are reversed. The normal is the vector that the renderer uses to tell what direction a surface is facing. OpenGL which element and many game engines use usually renders only one side of a polygon. If the polygon is facing the wrong way, it is transparent. This is a common problem with a lot of free 3d models because a lot of modeling software display both surfaces of a polygon, and the modeler doesn’t know he needs to flip some of the faces.

There is an option in an element material to display both faces of the polygon, but I would recommend against it. If the normals are wrong, then your lighting will hit the surface wrong even if you display the back face. The best thing to do is to use your copy of Maya (or other 3d software) to flip the normals. This can sometimes be quite time consuming depending on the model, because often this isn’t a global change. Usually there is a mix of correct normals and reverse, and you only want to flip the reversed normals. This can sometimes mean a laborious selection of individual polygons, but for this model it doesn’t look like it should be so bad.

I would google flipping normals in Maya.

The texturing problem is because the model hasn’t been UV mapped (texture mapped). If all you want to do is apply a tiling Element grunge metal texture to it, a simple cubic UV map should work fine for this model.

Again google cubic UV mapping in Maya.

Good luck!

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

Would it maybe be easier to 3d track the pivot points for the wipers in your dolly shot, then animate the windshield wipers in 3d space? It doesn’t seem like it should be too hard to animate the wiper movement. You would have a side benefit of having more control over the timing of the wipers, so that it doesn’t conflict with any of the action in the car.

-Matt

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

Hi Shaun,

I can’t quite picture exactly what you have in mind, but if what I’ve suggested is close, I bet you can make it work.

I would suggest precomping your footage and applying the polar coordinates to the pre comp. Then experiment with animating the position of the footage within the pre comp. As you move the footage position horizontally within the pre comp, you will see that it moves/wipes radially in the polar coordinates. If you move it vertically, you will see it moves/wipes in an iris fashion.

I think by tinkering with some combination of animating the position and scale of your footage within the pre-comp, and animating the interpolation value of the polar coordinates, you may be able to to achieve what you want.

One other note, changing from rectangular to polar shrinks your footage (you end up with a circle with a diameter that is the height of the layer that it is applied to) so you might want to make your pre-comp larger than your main comp so that you don’t have to scale up and lose quality.

Good luck,

-Matt

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

If by “reverse of what I want” you mean that you want the seam on the bottom, apply the transform effect to flip the image vertically before you apply polar coordinates. Then flip the entire clip by scaling y by -%100.

Also, since the Rect to Polar bends from the middle, you could try precomping the clip that you want to distort, make it double the height, and place the clip in the half that bends (without the seam)

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

It might not be quite the look that you are going for, but have you tried the “polar coordinates” effect? Animate the interpolation of Rect to Polar.

-Matt

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

That noise expression that Michael mentioned looks cool. I’ll have to explore that more.

I was going to suggest, you could just set two keyframes for your top and bottom y position, set them to ease in and out, then apply the expression loopOut(“pingpong”) to the layer. You can then adjust the period of the wave by changing the timing of the keyframes, and the amplitude by the spacial distance between the two.

That said, the nice thing about Michaels noise expression, is that if you have a number of floating objects, it will look like they are effected by a common turbulent force rather than animated independently.

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

Hi Corrie,

I was just cleaning up my downloads folder and found your fish animation. I thought I’d check this thread to see if you had tried it. Glad you like it. Much quicker than tracking a mask. I figured you might have a few frames where you have to put your own white mask behind it, but I thought it would work for most of your frames.

I think the paint bucket is one of the better overlooked plugins in AE. I find it helpful in lots of situations. It works well to cut things out that were shot against black or white, where a chroma key doesn’t work well. If you don’t have a pure background, you can also stack multiple copies of the effect with lower sensitivity to knock out different areas without intruding on the image you are trying to cut out.

I liked your fish, and I’d love to see your final animation. Post a link when its done!

Cheers,

-Matt

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com