[Scott Geersen]

well when i say “eveything” i mean everything except the camera. i just add /100 or /1000 as an expression of the scale property of every single 3d layer in the comp.

that way, when you scrub the slider for scale, you get finer adjustments. if you’re trying to scrub the scale slider from 1.02 to 1.05 then you’re in trouble. does that make sense? so you can scrub your whole hand back and forth without having the image leap from 100px of screen space to “so big i can’t see anything else”.

it’s irritating having a scene scale like this, but using the expression was a lot easier to work and live with than trying to wrangle maya into spitting out the correct scene scale.

[Scott Geersen]

Hi Jerzy,
The front face reacts to light, but no matter what colour I set the extrusion to, it remains the one colour on top, bottom, left side, right side, with no shading. Shading from lights is on the front only. If i had a light on the right side, I would expect the right sides of the extrusion to be lighter than the left sides, if that makes sense. Currently I can’t figure out how to make it do this…

[Scott Geersen]

hey jerzy,
thanks for the speedy reply. i making do without it so far as my camera isn’t moving a lot, but i was curious as to why the effect behaves that way – whether it’s something in the expression code (which i haven’t looked at, probably couldn’t understand it if i did) or something inherent in after effects itself. it’ll be interesting to see if there is a better fix than animating to depth to match the moves of the camera!
thanks,
scott.

[Scott Geersen]

Hi Jon,

well, it answers my question and I see that it is possible, but at this stage not worth the effort. I wanted to be able to shear individual invigorator objects at specific times, meaning i’d have to have each object on it’s own layer with the invigorator plugin applied. or layer cycling seems like it would be difficult to control timings. so thanks, but i’ll leave it for this project.

Thanks,
Scott.

[Scott Geersen]

So I figured it out, but it wasn’t completely intuitive. The axes of the invigorator objects appear to be set to the centre of the illustrator file – ie, letter 1’s axis is not the centre of letter 1 when in invgiorator. I had to change my illustrator file so all letters were on top of each other in illustrator (meaning i can’t read the word anymore, but when i pull it into invigorator i can move my controlling nulls apart to put the letters back into their correct positions).

I didn’t think of this at first because it seemed logical that if i told invigorator to import by layers, then each “object” (ie, layer) would have it’s own centre point. Apparently not.

[Scott Geersen]

I’m still waiting for my copy of The Guide so I’m not sure what Stu has said, but even working on AFX here I have to digitize source material from a Digi Beta, and then when the job is ready, play out again, so essentially there’s no difference for that part of the workflow between flame and AE. Flame processes faster in the intermediate stages though, and I actually think I get better results because of that, as doing the flame equivalent of a “ram preview” is much faster, and more previews means more chances to revise an element that might need tweaking. Like AE, everything you do after importing and before exporting to tape remains digital and lossless, assuming no compression codecs are used (like Final Cut Pro can introduce).

[Scott Geersen]

I had to do this a while back for a low budget film, and I also used particular. But for the distortion i cheated… I think I used Panopticum’s Lens filter to create a torus lens (donut) reflecting the scene (you could do that without special plugins though). This piped into particular as the custom particle with transparency and growing in size from particle birth time. You can make the particle (the pre-rendered torus) a 3d layer in it’s own comp, and use expressions to tie the x/y/z rotation to the camera or emitter’s x/y/z rotation in the main comp if necessary, to account for perspective shift, since particular particles always auto-orient to camera.
Add in some turbulent field in particular to make the “trail” less like a perfect straight line. I know the bullet trails in the matrix follow a straight line (i had frame by frame reference) but honestly when you’re up close to the bullet it looks better if the “heat” or “air ripping” from the bullet is disrupting it’s own trail.

The only thing you can’t do is have the distortion from the old particles distorting the new particles: I mean, looking from the rear through the older “rings”, you’d expect to see through them as if they were glass, and the distortion rings in front should be visible through here too… the best compromise with AE is to use particle transparency, a blend mode, and variation in size/position to create the illusion of this. That said, you simply can;’t beat having a 3D friend render a particle animation for you, because that way when you look through the old particles you can see the new ones up ahead and everything is being distorted by everything else, cos that’s the way the 3D materials and rendering work.

To sum up: I tried many different 2d solutions including various glass and distortion filters from tinderbox and sapphire, and in the end, a simple pre-rendered disc set to a particle emitter worked better than anything else.

[Scott Geersen]

hey dave, sorry but i didn’t mean different version of AE, i meant different versions of a project. we go through many many revisions here, and sometimes people want to revisit the past, i was just after a neater way to bring in old effects or comp setups without having to reduce, save, import, change, clean.

[Scott Geersen]

yes but that’s exactly what i wanted to avoid, as i’d then have two copies of everything – pairs of comps with the same name, and two lots of footage items. a bit messy. even if i consolidate footage, things are still a mess (organisationally) and i have to sort out my folders and job structure all over again. the functionality to copy between instances of AE would be most welcome. copy this effect with parameters from this version of the project into this newer version… quicker and easier than having to reduce, import, copy layers to the comp, delete unwanted imports, etc.

[Scott Geersen]

on a similar note of getting realtime HD previews out of AFX, and something that i’ve been trying to make work for a long time, is realtime full-quality previews through my decklink HD extreme. AFX won’t do it, at SD or HD, whereas from FCP i can get realtime HD previews in full quality.
full quality is the key here: i can play back realtime when the video preview preferences are set to “faster” rather than “more accurate”, but faster has the effect of displaying on my broadcast monitor and client monitor as pixelated – if i change the output to “more accurate” i get pixel perfect full quality video out, but it won’t play back in realtime, even though the scene is cached in ram.

has anyone experienced this? even the guys at black magic are no help, they seem to think it should “just work” – and on an old G5 with AE6.5 it did. i’m not sure if it’s the intels that are somehow affecting it, or if it’s just AE7. it’s been very frustrating though having to daily explain to clients that it only looks pixelly because of AE’s output settings.