[Richie Tovell]

No it isn’t solved damn.

Is there anyone who knows anything about Zaxwerks here? I’m trying to get a 3D warps layer to track an AFX layer, but 3D warps wont track it properly because the anchor points on the AFX layer have been moved.

What’s worse is that by selecting the “track 3D layer” option 3D warps locks the layers transform controls, including the anchor points so I can’t keyframe or link the anchor points as a workaround..

Is there a solution, can anyone from Zaxwerks explain what to do here? how can I regain control over the anchor point’s?

Another problem I’m facing is with after effects, it seems my only other option here would be to link all the transform controls in warps to the layer I need it to track, but this layer is a child, and I don’t appear to be able to link anything to it’s transform parameters, for some reason it being a child layer means that it’s transform controls (x,y,z, – rotate, position, anchor points and scale) won’t pass on their transform information to any other controls, so nothing can be linked to them except through parenting, which 3D warps doesn’t do.

is there a workaround for this, any ideas anybody, I’m really stressed out here, months of work and learning have gone in to this composition and it’s falling apart. 🙁

Coda – musical selections; in film, the ending or last section of a film (often wordless).

[Richie Tovell]

OK, so there are equivalents for anchor point’s, I found them.

Coda – musical selections; in film, the ending or last section of a film (often wordless).

[Richie Tovell]

Oh, I forgot, there’s more than 12 layers there, the layers are doubled up, so there’s actually closer to 30, the reason for this is that the aliasing left lines along the folds so each layer has a copy of it’self placed below it with it’s quality set to draft, this fills in the lines but keeps the top layer at best quality, I just thought I’d mention it because I originally said there were 30 layers which in fact there are.

I’d love to be able to find a plugin that could do this, but their doesn’t seem to be one lol.

Thanks though and sorry for being so confusing.

Coda – musical selections; in film, the ending or last section of a film (often wordless).

[Richie Tovell]

Sorry for confusing you Dave, I love working with expressions but I’m not so good at it.

I’ve sussed out what I need to do but you could definitely do a better job, maybe there is no better way though, the pics bellow should make thing clearer.

So, the image is split in to 12 or so layers, these are all parented together, their anchor point’s placed side by side.

They collapse when the lead layer’s y rotation is adjusted, all the y rotations are linked to this lead layers y rotation by varying degrees so they will rotate by different amounts to form the final collapsed shape that you see, the x and z scales for each layer are also all linked to the lead layers y rotation, this is so that the whole shape can be collapsed from one transform control, that control (the y rotation on the lead layer) is linked to the output of trapcode sound keys that way the image will follow audio as it collapses.

I’m now experimenting with leaving the scale off of some of the layers and adding more scale to others to create more of a distortion on the layers surface, it’s looking good so far and a few instances of 3d layer warps will be added to the front facing layers to distort them even more as, in itself it’s a pretty boring shape, it needs a lot of improving.

In addition to this all the y rotations roatate by different amounts and so to do the scales increase at different amounts, this is why I needed an expression that I could apply and easilly adjust for each layer individually.

The problem was that as the image started to collapse the scale increase forced the image off of the sides of the screen, so I was thinking along the lines of delaying the scaling till after the collapse had started that way the scale would push the rotated layers more in the z plain rather than sideways out of the comp.

Sorry it’s not that great an idea, but complicated to explain and still needs a lot of work, the nice thing about it is it’s independent of the timeline until it’s linked to the tracode audio layers, which means I can swap out the audio and distort the image using different sounds as the comp develops.

Hope that’s made things clearer?

Coda – musical selections; in film, the ending or last section of a film (often wordless).

[Richie Tovell]

This was what I figured out. Sorry I wasn’t very clear before.

temp = transform.yRotation;

if (temp <50){

[100, 100, 100];

}else{temp = transform.yRotation;
[temp+50, 100, temp+50]; }

Coda - musical selections; in film, the ending or last section of a film (often wordless).

[Richie Tovell]

No I think I’m doing this the wrong way completly, time is too confusing as there’s the time it takes to rotate and also the time in the actual comp.

Could I do this instead,

here’s the linked expression temp = transform.yRotation;
[temp, temp, temp]

Can I set this expression to only act only after the layer has rotated by a certain degree, so after 50 degrees y rotation the temp values start to increase?

Coda – musical selections; in film, the ending or last section of a film (often wordless).

[Richie Tovell]

Ah, cool, thanks for the replies.

Dan, my layers are stacked oddly, 15 layers are above the leader layer (though they can be moved perhaps). I was hoping to find an expression that can be applied separately to the individual layers that need to be delayed. Also, the delay needs to be applied to just the scale of each layer.

Would that need a different expression? Here’s the expression I’m using, very simple.

temp = transform.yRotation;[temp+100,100, temp+100]

The layers don’t follow a precise pattern, they are all different sizes and rotate by different amounts, thus their scales need to increase at different times and by different amounts (this it to keep the overall image within the bounds of the comp, if the layers scale up at the wrong time they’ll leave the comp.

In short I need to apply varying amounts of delay throughout 30 or so layers, the scale of these layers needs to increase by varying amounts after they have already begun to rotate.

Could I do something like this?

Change

temp = transform.yRotation;[temp+100,100, temp+100]

to?

temp = transform.yRotation;[delay =.05;temp+100,100, delay =.05; temp+100]

would that work, am I close?

Coda – musical selections; in film, the ending or last section of a film (often wordless).

[Richie Tovell]

Thought I’d update this post.

Disabled the onboard sound in the Bios (first improvement) this helped quite a lot, then just on a whim went through the device manager looking for stray audio drivers and found a couple of these chappies, (ATI Function drivers for High Definition audio) disabled them and low and behold, crystal clear audio, even when opening AFX with a buffer setting of 7 ms there was absolutely no distortion at al!!!! any lower than this and I get drop outs, but no distortion. I don’t know exactly why these drivers are here, I’m assuming they’re to do with my ATI Radeon HD 4870’s, but why are they there? they’re graphics cards not sound cards! so why do they need audio drivers? It’s a mystery 🙂

Coda – musical selections; in film, the ending or last section of a film (often wordless).

[Richie Tovell]

No problem, personally I preffer hard copies of manuals, but the AE help files I do read online seem pretty well laid out and cirtainly clear enough, though pehaps using more diagrams on the help pages might help people more, I don’t know. The comments sections seem to cut to the chase more also and are a great help.

I changed the preffernces text doc but still no luck, even when I dropped the max number of cores down to just 2 I still got the same underruns.

This shouldn’t be happening, my CPU even with multi processing enable and all 4 cores running only just hit’s %10.

Coda – musical selections; in film, the ending or last section of a film (often wordless).

[Richie Tovell]

Sure, no it’s not a problem with your help files, I do read them, I actually have a learning dissablity, it’s linked to a head injury I recieved that causes me sevear head pain and makes reading extreemly difficult.

I actually love reading manuals but often I need help to find the most direct solution so I ask questions on the forums here, it’s difficult to convey what this conditin is like but sometimes I litraly can’t make it to the bottom of a page of text, the text goes out of focus and the pain kicks in.

Thanks for the pointers, I’ll give them a look over, seems that restricting the aount of cores isn’t that complicated a task.

Coda – musical selections; in film, the ending or last section of a film (often wordless).