[Sam Stalos]

Thanks for the advise, Norman. I also tried the Avanti gui and felt I was closer to making it work, but Avanti admits to some incompatibility issues with Windows 7.

Finally I went back, and as you suggested, just dove into the command-line approach. I felt I was back in DOS-land. I finally got it to work.

For anyone who has the same problems, I found a website written by David Torcivia detailing the command-line approach he used. It was very nicely detailed, and redundant with explanation, just the thing you need the first time through.

I could not invoke ffmpeg to open using just the command “ffmpeg,” even though I had drilled into the “bin” folder. I had to specify “ffmpeg.exe”. That threw me for a while. And because I hadn’t read the document ffmpeg provides (thinking I would use a gui), I thought the “-an” command was code for output file location. But of course it’s not. It means no audio. And with all those sub-folders, making a typo was so easy I almost gave up on the command-line approach. Now I see the advantage of a gui. I may go back to Avanti and try to figure out the nuances, but for now I’m cooking.

Thanks again.

[Sam Stalos]

Thank you for responding Dave.

The task seems easy to envision but I haven’t found an elegant solution.

Here’s what I have completed thus far. The file (BumpMapTest1.avi) was downloaded to CreativeCow using the Video Upload icon. However, I don’t see it attached yet, so I’m going have guess how that attachment is to be made.

To make this test, I first rendered a .mov clip animating all of the various “farm animal” images –which aren’t really farm animals, as you can see. Of course I’m having to do a lot of guessing in this phase, but it’s doable.

1. You’ll notice the edge around some .png images, so your advice to mask those images is well taken. However, if you’ll notice the arrow image, it is also a .png but needs no masking. The arrow was constructed in Corel’s vector program (CorelDraw) and converted to .png. I wonder if that’s not a better solution than to mask all of those other moving .pngs. The arrow is a little difficult to see. It moves right to left in the lower 2/3’s and stops on the lower right. It gets placed behind the image of the guy sitting down.

As a curious note, this render was done using AE 3.0, which accepts this .png and does not border the image file. However, AE CC does not accept this image .png, and I’ll have to investigate why.

2. I’m a bit confused about “have one bump map for each animal layer, and be careful as you assign a unique bump map to each animal layer.” I assumed the bump-map can only be assigned to the textured layer, not to the individual animal layers, which means only one bump-map per composition. I’m pretty sure I tested the multi-bump-map option first and found it wouldn’t work, but I’ll give it a second try immediately.

3. I obviously have work to do with various controls to make the single images seem more bumped rather than simply superimposed with a degree of transparency. The arrow is probably the best example here, and I’ll have to play with the degree of white/black intensity in the original images, but all of this can be worked out.

Thus far, my methodology is very clumsy. I was hoping to find a way to achieve more control without the separate .mov clip guessing.

By the way, to get this test file down to a reasonable size, I first rendered the mov+leather files in AE to .avi so I could use the VirtualDub > HandBrake (Xvid) method of compression. I see the note on Creative Cow’s page to submit the original footage and they would do the compression. But I can’t imagine sending you them 2 Gig worth of material. Using HandBrake it went from 2 Gig to 19.6 Meg. Not bad.

Thank you, Dave, and feel free to add any other ideas or advise.