[Protohobo]

Oh, I see what I was doing wrong.

Its just like what you said except for one step I was missing. In CS6 in order to draw into an existing vector mask you need to be in PATH mode not SHAPE mode.

thanks

[Protohobo]

do you have a photo example of the look you are trying to achieve?

[Protohobo]

oh. I had looked in there but foolishly not while I had a PNG sequence preset selected. its really obvious once the render is set up. thanks for the guidance.

[Protohobo]

ok, I have 2 viewers and 2 timelines, but is there a way to lock one timeline to one viewer and the other timeline to the other view? currently it seems like one timeline updates both viewers while the other timeline only updates one view.

thanks

[Protohobo]

heh.. the client of course. i believe it has to do with how flash will handle this asset later on but as an artist you don’t always know.

But even with out this current reason I would love to have a way to seamlessly go from illustrator to PS and stay vector and not have to recolor.

[Protohobo]

a lot of the artwork ends up being really complex. Whole scenes of houses and trees and with detail down to the multiple levels of highlights on each shingle, etc..

I would want to make the art all in one place including coloring it and ideally (just because of preference to how the vector tools work) I would like to do it in illustrator.

[Protohobo]

i love smart objects and use them constantly. this project needs to be made entirely out of photoshop vector shapes or “compound shapes” and not smart objects.

plus, I think this will be good to know as the one downside of smart objects is that to edit them you need to either enter another PSD or illustrator.

I do wish I could select a ton of shapes from illustrator and paste them all at once into PS and have the option to have them show up as many shape layers instead of rasterized, smart object, or a single shape layer where all my colors from AI were reduced to one 1 color.

as it is, this process of exporting a PSD from AI that contains only compound shapes and no normal paths seems to be the only way to get all my shapes into PS as editable vector shapes with the right colors

[Protohobo]

update: I figured out I could manually go to every path in my AI file and convert them into Compound Shapes and then export a PSD and open it in PS and every layer will be a vector and editable layer in PS.

Now I guess I need to write an action that will go thru every path and convert it to a compound shape in preparation for going to PS.

[Protohobo]

hello

I am having a very similar problem, I had a comp in a huge project file that has 3d flag in it, it was running fine. then one day, in the same huge project file I began experimenting with flag on a huge layer. I got the same crash message:

after effects error: crash occurred while invoking effect plug-in “3d flag”

I have now, if I open that same project, I get the same crash. If I remove the plug-in from my plug-in folder, I can get the scene to start with the message:
“This project contains 2 references to missing effects… (“3d Flag”)”

If I do a fresh install of the flag plug-in i get the same crash again.

Here is where my problem gets harder. The project is actually about 100 comps deep. I have been working on it for a long long time and is the most complex production I have ever made. I can only actually remember where 1 instance of the flag plug-in being used.

So my question is, is there a way to search for usages of a plug-in thru a whole project?

Is there any other way to purge the corrupted instances of a plug-in? I really liked my settings and would hate to have to redo them.