[Nicholas Toth]

I just used those maps to animate navigation on earth. They wrap perfect. The only issue you’ll find with CCsphere is that if you put any longitude or latitude lines on it they are fat in the middle and skinny at the polar top and bottom.

Any suggestions on how to pre-comp anything on that that sphere so it doesn’t proportion out (the lines getting fatter at the equator and skinnier at the polar opposites)? Will a polar coordinates type of modification work? I work with 3d, but mostly simulation (physics/dynamics/particles) not texturing — so spherical mapping is not my cup of tea.

Nicholas Toth
Freelance Animator
nicholastoth.com

[Nicholas Toth]

well you can track lights and use a particular emitter that looks like a flowing light…rotoscope the cars out and set them to layer emitters with the same settings…put the same flow on their lights…depends on how “flowy” you want it….come to think of it if you track it to a motion path and set it to a mask the vegas effect might no work so bad if you shorten the length of the actual vegas stroke.

I’m a photographer too so I would suggest overall re-shooting it, slow down your shutterspeed for some nice blurrs — if you have a digital camera and the proper software you can do timelapse image sequences right to a laptop.

those were just some thoughts off the top of my head…and lots of points of elipsis

post it when your finished…I’d like to see it

Nicholas Toth
Freelance Animator
nicholastoth.com

[Nicholas Toth]

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm bar-B-que

[Nicholas Toth]

try using c4d clothhide….
grass = soft springy cloth
ball = very rigid cloth
floor = very rigid cloth

Just make sure your gravity on the floor is 0.

Dynamics is a really cool part of c4d — but I avoid it at all costs because the calculation time is way too long. Cloth is much faster and you can use it for a ton of things. It works very well with metal objects and stuff bending too….

[Nicholas Toth]

thanks — that worked

[Nicholas Toth]

that manual is pretty intimidating…

[Nicholas Toth]

do you mean project an image onto the sphere?
turn the sphere into a screen?
render your animation and then add an alpha animated texture on top of the earth?

I don’t understand your question.

[Nicholas Toth]

Then make a path where you want it to go, set your target if need be, and animate along the distance of the path using the align to path/spline tag. Ease them in and out.

“HOW CAN I SMOOTHLY ANIMATE A CAMERA ALONG A PATH?”

I think that was your question.

[Nicholas Toth]

you seem to have answered your own question in the subject line…

[Nicholas Toth]

export an image sequence out of flash and import into ae.