[Mylenium]

[bahare] “hello out there,

I’m architect and modelling a organic form. I would like to print out something like an pattern to be able to build a physical model of my form. is it possible to put a mesh over the form and create a unfolded map of the object?

thanks,
b.”

In theory yes, in practice your chances aren’t that good. Your best bet is to create several planar UV maps for all axes and merge them into one, but it requires Bodypaint and is still prone to distortions. You could then use this UV map as a template or bake your rendered data to it. another variant might be setting up several orthographic cameras and render out your scene from different views. Those images could then be put together in photoshop or other programs.

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Make sure you save your file as Illustrator 8 or earlier. Then open it like you would open a scene.

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Ahem, Make Movie? Render Queue? RAM preview will only render as many frames as it can cram into your computer’s – erm – RAM (or “memory” as some people call it). That’s why it’s called RAM preview. The other rendering methods are not limited by this.

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[Michael Munkittrick] “1. How would I go about creating a soft-white emanating light source from the filament outward?
2. How do I get that light source to cast its light on objects within a scene?”

Not particularly pertaining to C4D but more to 3D in general: Those effects usually require global illumination. You’d model your neon and then give it some luminosity and the GI render does the rest. The thing is, that GI is usually a very slow process – depending on the complexity of the scene, even a single frame at SD res can take hours. So usually you calculate this info only once and then either cache it or bake it to a texture map. You could also get away by placing multiple tube area lights along your profile.

[Michael Munkittrick] “3. And what is the proper way to rig the model so that the control for multiple light sources can be done from a singular step as opposed to going down through my hierarchy?”

In case of “real” GI that wouldn’t be a problem since it would be a property of one single material. If you use multiple light sources, you could probaly link the using XPresso or a custom attribute. Dunno that for sure since I’m only playing with the demo of 9.6 and don’t have the money for the real thing…. :-\ Oh man, I should have stuchk with C4D instead of LW… *sigh*

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[rendernyc] “actually i started using 3d particle systems about 10 years ago and almost all of work with particles has been in 3d apps. I have used particular on jobs where we needed some quick easy particles and Its great for a plugin that integrates so well

however,

it is basic as far as particle systems go, for instance, particulars ramp system to change values over time is very limited at best when you really need to finetune things.”

Ah, I see. Still, your assesment of Particular being “basic” and PI being “fullblown” strikes me as way off. A lot of what you would probably consider a weakness in Particular can’t really be blamed on the plugin itself but is more because of the limitations of AE’s 3D implementation. If ever, I would attribute “basic” to plugins such as CC Particle Systems, FE Pixel Polly or other such oversimplified tools (though that shouldn’t imply that this simplicity in some situations isn’t wanted).

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[mr_gfx] “how can i get around this?”

You don’t. If your screen recording software has a dedicated player, you may be able to view and export it to another format from there, but apart from that no other app will allow you to edit a protected file.

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[rendernyc] “depends what ya need to do.

particular is much more basic plugin (that can produce some very nice results) while particle illusion is a full blown particle app that will allow for more flexibility”

That’s a completely wrong statement. Neither is Particular “basic” nor is PI “fullblown”. Obviously you have never used particle systems in 3D programs to understand that. 😐 Particular does all its calculations in 3D, meaning it can never be as fast and interactive viewpoint (x^2 is mathematically different from x^3). Yes, it’s also limited in terms of collisions and a few other things, but don’t let that stop you.

PI certainly is nice, but since it’s an external app, you will always have to set aside time for the various import and export procedures. As it is restricted to 2D it’s probably more intuitive, but actually requires more manual work to integrate it with 3D elements if they are meant to overlap with the particles or if you need DOF etc.. Also do not forget that PI does all its magic using your graphics card – if you don’t have a halfway decent one it’s nearly useless. This also affects the resolution: If you have a small screen res thus resulting in a small render buffer for PI you will never be able to break out of this limit and e.g. render HD stuff if your monitor is set to 800 by 600 pixels.

As for the presets – well, I would argue that. You can find enough presets (including mine) for Particular to get going without digging into the depths of the plugin first. I also feel that many of those “thousands of presets” for PI are more or less the same, reducing the effective end number of distinctive setups drastically.

So in the end nobody really wins. If you can afford both, then get both. If you have an immediate requirement and need the intuitiveness along with a prefab preset, then go for PI.

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Presumably you won’t be able to use it directly at all. The error message sounds like it’s an protected WMV file and AE won’t open those, no matter whether they play fine in MediaPlayer and other apps.

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Nope. All menus have to comply to the specs defined by the DVD (video) standard. You can’t simply make them larger and hope for the best. Just like Jeff said, check your workflow. most likely your image simply contains to much high-contrast stuff with non-broadcast-safe colors, which makes the transcoder go boom. Other than that, you should figure in perceptional phenomena – e.g. a slightly, in a controlled manner blurred text will actually look much better on most TV sets since its luma values are spread more evenly across fields/ scanlines.

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Use Flask/Xmpeg to create an AVI from your footage.

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