[Michael Szalapski]

Is your question about displacement or about Shadow Studio 2? I don’t know how the two are related.

What do you mean when you say it renders differently? Can you show some examples?

[Michael Szalapski]

No need for Quadro graphics. No need for a Xeon processor. Neither one helps you at all. You’re just paying money for features that are irrelevant for you.

For any sort of video editing, motion design, or even 3d animation, you just need a GeForce card like a 3080 or 2080 or even a 2070. I mean, if you’re doing 3d animation with a GPU renderer like Redshift or Cycles 4D, then you might want multiple 3090s, but that’s another discussion. In any case, you don’t need a Quadro.

Xeon chips are only useful if you want to have two of them. Having two of them won’t benefit you in Premiere Pro.

Now, AE’s changing dramatically. They have the debut of Multi-Frame Rendering in public beta and are expected to deliver it in the “release” version of AE in the next couple of months. This is very different from the old Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously feature. It works a lot better and is much more stable and is doing entirely different things under the hood!

This huge change in AE is going to change processor recommendations, but there’s not enough testing out there (and the feature isn’t even complete yet) to have anything concrete to suggest. Before MFR came into beta, the suggestion for AE was to get as high of a clock speed as you can afford and the amount of cores didn’t matter at all. Now, the amount of cores do matter, but I’d still err on the side of higher clock speed unless you can get a ton more cores without a big drop in clock speed.

You want at least 64 GB of RAM. More wouldn’t hurt.

You want more than one drive. Ideally, you’d have some form of SSD or M.2 for your OS, another one for your AE caches and a third drive for footage. Even better if you could have a fourth drive to render to. The third and fourth drives don’t have to be SSDs, but it’d be better if the third was.

[Michael Szalapski]

There is a Triangulate Mesh command.

[Michael Szalapski]

Also, make sure you don’t have Draft 3d turned on.

[Michael Szalapski]

Press reset in the character panel and that should fix it.

Also, consider updating! You’re missing some bug fixes.

[Michael Szalapski]

If you have your null auto oriented to follow its motion, does the camera follow it too?

[Michael Szalapski]

There is no quality compromise. There is just a TON of time lost.

Once you understand how to edit in Premiere Pro (for example, the Q and W key shortcuts), you will be able to edit 10-20x faster.

[Michael Szalapski]

There are several ways you could approach this. Some would be better for your situation depending on what, exactly it is you need to happen.

How long of a shot is it and what, exactly, does the viewer need to see? I ask because, while C4D does have spline dynamics and you could sim this happening for real, it would be faster to fake it if you could get away with it.

One way to fake it would be to have two ropes. One straight and the other a helix wrapped around your drum. You could reveal the helix appearing to get longer (by either making the helix actually longer or by offsetting a cylinder on a spline wrap deformer) on the drum while the texture on the straight piece animates to look like it’s moving up onto the drum. This would work even better if the winching mechanism could have a crossbar or something that visually obscures the transition point (depending on how photo-real this rope needs to be and how visible texture detail is).

[Michael Szalapski]

AE has a function called Auto Trace that will make the masks for you – you can base it on the alpha simply and then you could use the Radio Waves effect based on the resulting mask.

Or you could try this sort of technique (adjusting the blur down would make the waves more rigidly follow the shape, but also smaller): https://www.dropbox.com/s/bo3wtv1tkfbvikv/waves%20from%20shape.aep?dl=0

[Michael Szalapski]

Form also has fluid physics that let it swirl around really beautifully, but it doesn’t allow OBJs to contain them.

Would Particular be more suited for this? Depending on the shape of your obj, you could use the new flocking tools to keep it contained. (You’d tell the flocking particles to avoid another set of particles you spawn on the outside of your mesh.)