[Nicolas Guionnet]

By the way, how do you deal with successive destructive compression that may occur when you export and import footages ?

(From Blender to Ae to PP) … do you always export in a lossless format ?

[Nicolas Guionnet]

Hi Dave, thanks for your answer,

The truth is that I don’t have much experience of audio in PP and NONE (!) in AE.

I am not sure about the way I am going to deal with the audio yet. I first thought that sound would be recorded first, and then all the animations and keyframes would be synchronized with it. Audio is master, key frames are slaves. But this last step cannot be done in PP …

I must admit … I am a bit confused. I should make tests first ! 🙂

[Nicolas Guionnet]

After 2 days of work in Blender, I believe that importing OBJ’s to AE to use them in Stardust is not as simple as … working with Blender.
In fact, the last time I used it professionally, it was 10 years ago, and seeing what it became generates a lot of enthusiasm in this room …

It has everything, and everything is in total control with scripting. For instance, if I want to draw the trajectory of a particle, it’s … easy here, and impossible in Stardust. And, if you have a question … type it in Google … and Bam ! … a page full of answers … It’s not a community, it’s a country.

Well, let’s compare the next image I created in blender with the ones above in this thread :

That said, AE is still the way to go for a lot of things …

I am probably not going to buy Stardust or Trapcode now. Coding vs [ setting a finite number of options ]. Not such a simple choice but for the moment I choose code.

… but I may change my mind next week … 😀

[Nicolas Guionnet]

Great !

> “On the plus side, Stardust customer support is very responsive. Talked to them plenty this past week. ”

Did you use the forum or did you send an email to them directly ? ( I tried the forum a couple of days ago and my post is not published yet … ans some are 8 months old or more and did not get any answer).

[Nicolas Guionnet]

Well, I am going to re-learn Blender. 5 years or more is enough to forget most of what I knew. I will try the export with UV.

The low quality issue a got (2nd image) was solved when I removed the motion blur option of Stardust.
.

[Nicolas Guionnet]

… I forgot :

Did you deal with this issue while importing an OBJ from Blender ? … I think you told me you don’t use Blender that much.

So it’s not a Blender to Stardust problem … rather reassuring for I dread that king of ultra-specific oddities that kill your day …

[Nicolas Guionnet]

Hi Kalleheikki !

Thank you (once again). Yes, it is the UV mapping. I changed UV Mapping Model to Sphere … Isn’t it weird ? Sphere ?! ????

For my model is not a sphere but … an OBJ model. I think that, without your help, it would have taken another week for me to find this …

Before :

After :

It is not perfect yet but … there is probably some quality parameter somewhere that I am going to find …

Great !

[Nicolas Guionnet]

Well, Thanks a lot Tomas, That’s clear …
I’ll be back on this page I think, to (re)-re-read your answer and apply it.

T H A N K S !

[Nicolas Guionnet]

Hi Tomas,

In fact, there will be a set of 30 seconds to 5 minutes Ae animations (mostly 2D) that will be synchronized with a sound track.
The soundtrack is the backbone of the video. So the work is mainly concatenating the animation and adjusting the key frames to get the right synchronization with the auto.

These AE footages won’t contain much video (I mean out of a camera in real world).

The project could be divided into parts, if it is preferable for technical reasons.

Thanks for your answer !

[Nicolas Guionnet]

Well, removing Math.floor() had no effect.

But choosing 4fps and even more with2 fps increased dramatically render time.

Increasing, particle life produces indeed a surface. But it seems hard to control.

And to get more control, I am on my way to use Blender script to produce OBJs and import theme into Trapcode or Stardust …