[Paul Roper]

The flippiness is not ideal because instead of a mirror image, I’ve made a solid thing, so it picks up the highlights and shadows directly from the lights. In reality, a reflected letter O would be showing a lot of shadow in the reflection, because we’re seeing the underside of it, but because it’s a ‘real’ O, it’s got highlights on from the lights.

Ah well, nobody will notice!

[Paul Roper]

Yes, I might have to do that (duplicate & flip text).

Interestingly, exactly the same thing is being discussed today on another forum!:

https://forums.adobe.com/message/4994672

[Paul Roper]

Nope, made no difference (making my background plate a 3D layer and pushing it way back in z behind all the other layers). The solid still appears as a black lump, even if I change the colour of the solid to white. I assume it’s because it’s reflecting the “nothingness” that is most of the AE universe. I tried making the background colour of the comp white instead of black – but no change.

I even tried adding a keyer to key out the black from that layer, but it just keyed out the whole thing, reflections and all.

[Paul Roper]

That was my first thought – use an ‘add’ blending mode, but blend modes are not available when using Raytraced 3D.

I could use a mask, but there must be a way of making a solid completely transparent (other than the reflections)? Maybe the problem is that I want a 2D layer (the original footage) to show through it. I might try positioning it as a 3D layer. Not ideal.

[Paul Roper]

I came across that on aescripts.com and was disappointed to learn of its non-compatibility with CS6. I use Keyboard Maestro a lot, so made a macro for this (took all of 2 minutes to create) which I’ve assigned to a function key so I can just toggle multiprocessing on & off with a single keypress. It happens so fast I actually had to put a 0.5 second delay in there to give me enough time to see the check mark appear/disappear from the prefs dialog box.

After Effects is pretty good normally when it comes to keyboard shortcuts – it has almost all my commonly used things “shortcutted”. But other apps such as Final Cut are not so shortcut-friendly so I have quite a few Keyboard Maestro macros to speed those up. Not that that’s relevant in an AE forum!

[Paul Roper]

I assume you’ve figured out that if you DO add a text layer, you could just add the expression:
thisComp.layer(index+1).name
to a text layer’s ‘Source Text’ if that text layer is directly above the “source name layer” to display the layer name.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Thanks for that Walter. I suspected that AE did indeed just use the GPU for number crunching. For any work I do which requires non-standard plugins, I don’t do network renders due to the whole plugin licensing/installing thing, so that shouldn’t be an issue.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Worked perfectly! Thanks, Dan!

[Paul Roper]

So the line’s anchor point is at its right edge and the distance between the line and the circle is fixed, is that correct?

Yes.

Is the distance between the center of the circle and the rotation point of the line the same as the distance between their anchor points?

Yes. The anchor point of the circle is at x=200. The anchor point of the line is at x=1200.

[Paul Roper]

To take it even further, what I’m trying to achieve is something like this:

The green circles are 3D layers parented to the spotlight, so their movement follow the spotlight’s rotation (if I don’t use the ‘point of interest’ but the rotation instead). What I’d like is a pair of lines that also follow the movement (I just added those cyan lines in Photoshop to illustrate what I want) and could ideally move to track the edges of the ‘target’ circle as the spotlight’s cone angle is increased. It’s be great to be able to do this with the Beam effect, so keep the line a consistent width no matter what angle the spotlight is facing.

Any thoughts, anyone? Or as I suspect, as this is for a fairly short animation, I should just keyframe the thing by eye?

– Paul