[Mylenium]

It’s 3D animation. I answered this a few days ago, but cannot find the original post. Basically it’s the video front-projected onto geometry which is using cloth dynmaics.

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[Mylenium]

[yikesmikes] “Can you make your own font?”

Yes, you can and if you’re strictly sticking to dingbats, it’s probably okay to give it a try. I wouldn’t use a dedicated font tool for that, though. They are far too specific and confront you with too many problems. CorelDraw has a very simple way of saving your graphical elements into a TrueType font file for later use, which is probably the simplest way for people rooted in the graphics industry.

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[Mylenium]

[evrard] ”
Hopefully one of the AE new releases offers this possibility. Such wonderful animations need to be applied to more than texts.”

Umm, no. Actually I believe you’re having a very big misunderstanding here. Text layers work specifically because of the features and nature of fonts, most importantly for:

a) them being vector-based
b) having per-glyph/ per-character attributes which can be used

Even other vectort art could not be animated this way – a simple solid has no spacing, no baseline, no stroke and so on. All those features need to be implemented specifically, meaning they are a separate part of the rendering pipelien as is the case with text layers.

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[Mylenium]

Another simple way to get a uniform color is to use a solid on top of your other stuff and play with blendmodes. Overlay for instance has a natural tendency to turn your stuff blue-ish when used on blue and green solids, Hard Light works good with Reds and yellows.

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[Mylenium]

No, your problem is none. Like Pete said, you need to work with straight Alpha. Internally, AE uses that all the time as does the flame*. In your example, you are simply degenerating the Alpha by imposing an additional level of transparency with your matte onto pixels that already have the correct transparency, but combined with the BG color. It is in that case inevitable that the results are wrong and the edges look jaggy – if the opacity of a pixel falls below a certain value, it will effectively become invisible and only the strong ones remain.

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[Mylenium]

Use a grid Array Cloner and move a Step effector thru it or animate the Falloff of said effector. Add a Random effector to get the variations in the tiles.

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[Mylenium]

[evrard] “How can i make AE treat my graphic elements as text so that i can use the text animations presets to animate them?”

You can’t. They are completely different things. If you use Photoshop text, you can use Filips suggestion, but that’s it.

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[Mylenium]

Change the name of the lights and adjust the name filter in the options panel of Particular accordingly.

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[Mylenium]

You map the cloner like any other object. You just have to use a flat projection. UVW mapping does not work as it has a different meaning in MoGraph. Make sure to enable the “Fix Texture” option in the Cloner.

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[Mylenium]

B3D files are bodypaint multi-layer files. They are useless for other programs. Render as PSD, TIF, RPF or each pass to a separate image sequence. Multipass rendering does not increase render time, it only dumps buffers to image files that the renderer generates anyways.

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