[Michael Szalapski]

Drones tend to have wide angle lenses that can kind of mess with the camera tracker. You might try removing the lens distortion before tracking.

If you happen to have Red Giant’s VFX Suite, the Lens Distortion Matcher effect can not only do that for you, but, it can also re-distort whatever effects you’re adding to the shot to match the original lens distortion! I use it all the time whenever I’m tracking shots made with wide-angle lenses to get better tracks.

[Michael Szalapski]

Remember, you have the Lite version of Cinema 4D included with your After Effects subscription. You could get pretty close to this with just the Lite features, I think.

[Michael Szalapski]

When you migrate your Particular setup, it doesn’t work? If that’s the case, file a ticket with Maxon – they’re actively trying to fix migration issues.

That said, this should be fairly easy to do with using that same texture as a layer emitter.

[Michael Szalapski]

CS6 saw the debut of the ray-traced renderer. If you had an NVIDIA card in your PC, it worked reasonably well. I don’t recall how it worked if you had an NVIDIA card in your Mac. Regardless, if you switch your comp to the ray-traced renderer, you can extrude vector shapes like shape layers and text (texturing it well might be a bit trickier). So, that’s your free option.

Alternatively, I believe you can get a free trial of Element 3D from VideoCopilot.net (It’s a really worthwhile plugin to purchase if you like doing this sort of thing– it’s kinda the industry standard for doing 3d inside older versions of AE like CS6.)

[Michael Szalapski]

Another way to do it without precomposing would be to place your paper texture at the top, use the people layer as a track matte for the paper texture and make sure you turn the paper texture back on. With the new Track Mattes in the latest version of AE, you have a TON more flexibility on where you put layers and the track mattes that affect them. Then you just make the paper layer whatever blending mode you need.

Alternatively, if you have Red Giants Universe, I’d say Texturize or especially Texturize Motion would be amazing for just this sort of thing.

[Michael Szalapski]

If anybody would it’s this guy: (142) Trapcode Fluids Particle Generator | FX Suite V2 – YouTube

Check out all of his videos – he’s got some tutorials that could point you in the right direction.

That said, if you’re not too tied to Particular, there are also other options like this one: (142) Cheap Tricks | Recreate a Druun Entirely in After Effects – No Plugins! (and FREE Template!) – YouTube

[Michael Szalapski]

Have you tried putting all of your splines in a Connect object and then using that in place of the spline in the sweep object?

[Michael Szalapski]

There isn’t one that I know of. There is Move Anchor Point 4 and Motion 4 from Mt. Mograph that both move the anchor point for you, but more to a specific point (center, right, top, bottom, etc.).

Motion 4, however, does a TON more than that. Very popular tool.

[Michael Szalapski]

AE can export ProRes on Windows too.
C4D on Windows can read ProRes too.

Are you experiencing a problem with this workflow?

[Michael Szalapski]

I don’t know what the issue is, but I do know Trapcode engineers are looking for folks in similar situations so they can chat with you. Message RedGiantNews on Twitter or Instagram and let them know you’re experiencing this issue and would be willing to chat with an engineer about it.