[Sam Young]

i’ll give that a try. thanks, adam!

[Sam Young]

this has happened to me both in 7.0 and cs3 beta.

i’d rather not post the code — top secret project — but basically, it’s a way of defining a 3d motion path with one layer (which i call refObject), and then having any number of other layers evenly distribute along that same path, and then animate their distribution. so if i happen to change the motion path for the refObject, all other layers will adjust accordingly.

to create the pattern of distributed layers, all i have to do is duplicate one of the visible layers as many times as i want. but the weird thing is, the expressions i’ve applied to position and other properties on these layers will mysteriously and without any error message Turn Themselves Off.

i’ve noticed that this is more prone to happen if these comps have more than 100 layers. does AE freak out if a comp has that many layers?

[Sam Young]

thanks, that’s what i thought.

damn nonsquare pixels, they confuse me.

[Sam Young]

there’s CC Cylinder, under the perspective effects sub-group.

[Sam Young]

shift+, (shift comma) = jump to comp tab to left
and
shift+. (shift period) = jump to comp tab to right

[Sam Young]

oh yeah, i’m running c4d release 9 on mac osx 10.4.8

[Sam Young]

great tutorial, thank you!

if i may add something…

instead of having to render out frames of the ink-splat, that you made in your particle world comp, as photoshop still images, you could simply nest that composition in another comp where the ink splats would show up, and apply an expression to the nested comp’s time remap property that randomly chooses a frame from that nested comp’s duration? something like:

(applied to to remap:)

seedRandom(1,true);
random(1,outPoint)

this chooses a random frame from the nested comp between 1 second (or about the point when the ink splats start to take shape) and the out point of the nested comp.

this way, whenever you make a duplicate of this nested comp, each duplicate would show a different ink splat, and there would be no need to render & import still images.

just a suggestion….

[Sam Young]

dumb question:
have you tried using CC Page Turn?

[Sam Young]

scale to fit =
ctrl+alt+F (windows)
cmd+opt+F (mac)

[Sam Young]

thanks, dan!