[Richard Powell]

I think he’s talking about the Display tag. Put a Display Tag on an object. Tick the box next to ‘Use’ ‘Visibility’ and keyframe from 0-100 on consecutive frames. You can also animate the little red and green dots, (under the ‘Basic’ tab in the Attributes Manager) but I don’t like doing that.

[Richard Powell]

Many third-party plugins are just quicker, focused, marketed ways to do things that you could already do with the production bundle, or even the base AE effects. For example, with matte choking, blurring and overlay modes you could probably approximate the effect of that light-wrap plug.

[Richard Powell]

This is really an AE question. But to be brief, you’re talking about AE’s Hue/Lightness/Saturation, Levels, Curves, Grain, Layer Modes and, most interestingly, adding light-wrap. Basically, that’s the same as what you do when you get rid of green ‘spill’ on green-screen footage, except in reverse. You see all this done expertly in the before-after shots of Lord of the Rings’ green-screen footage, but I don’t have that link.

There’s a light-wrap plugin from someone like Image Lounge, but also from Walker Effects:

https://www.walkereffects.com/support/manual/lightwrap/

And here’s a Cow Tute:

https://www.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=%3CFORUMID%3E&page=/articles/dewar_john/light_spill/index.html

[Richard Powell]

That could be Third Eye’s Winnie the Pooh. https://thirdeye.cgcommunity.com/ > go to gallery.

If not, look around through the Maxon Gallery at maxon.de. There’s another Teddy Bear iirc.

[Richard Powell]

If you’re in v9, hold down alt or option while you click the red dots. This new little trick has saved my sanity.

There’s a list of little v9 workflow enhancements here (v9.5 has even more):
https://bonkers.de/tricks/tricks.html

[Richard Powell]

Miniscule steps are all there are. 😉

To wit, note where Nolan said you have to select the ‘sequence’ of an object to apply a time track. The sequence is the horizontal bar where keyframes are set, NOT the attribute itself, e.g. the horizontal bar to the right of the word ‘position,’ but not the word ‘position’ itself.

The distinction between a ‘sequence’ and a ‘track’ is an important one that carries through for a few things. After Effects doesn’t work this way. When you create a position track, a sequence comes along with it, but they’re separately selectable.

Beyond this, there are a few weird things about time tracks also. Search this forum because I’ve gone through them in detail (and others too I’m sure).

[Richard Powell]

If you’re on v9, the plugin ‘Axis Center’ came with the app on the Goodies disk. This plug was written by an inhouse Cinema guy and is essential. Otherwise you can find it at https://www.c4dplugs.com.

It centers object (or hierarchy) axes along any or all directions relative to points, edges, etc. I use it for precisely what you’re doing all the time.

Sounds like you’re coming from Maya because you used the word ‘translate’ when you could’ve said ‘move.’ In that case, if you’re bringing in models from other apps, you’ll also find that aligning an axis to a selected edge is a very useful feature in this plug.

[Richard Powell]

Regular Cow contributor (but not here today) TCA Studios has that as an Xpresso thing called RollON on his site:

https://homepage.mac.com/tcastudios/TCA%20ROLLON.html

[Richard Powell]

You could use the Explosion deformer, or go with the option that will make you suffer and exult in hopefully equal portions, Thinking Particles.

And yes there is a tutorial for that using ‘PFragment’ by Paulselhi (as you can see in the thread, I did the tute myself):

https://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?p=2445230

[Richard Powell]

In the attributes manager of the spline, make the spline natural or uniform and up the number of intermediate points. Or keep it Adaptive and lower the angle.