[Steve Bentley]

Did you make that deflector sphere editable? The system needs polys to figure out position.

[Steve Bentley]

That screen is probably a little too emerald to be used as a true green screen (real ones are a little more neon/glow-in-the-dark kind of green)
But there’s always a way. What you might be seeing is the compression on the footage. We had some HD footage in the early days of HD on blue screen whos edge was very very ratty. That was pure codec problems.
What codec was used to capture and have to got that original footage or are you working with a compressed version of the original?

We had a client send us some bluescreen footage – the screen was a made of demin – sort blue I guess – but guess what the talent was wearing? That’s the only screen we’ve never been able to pull a decent matte from in 38 years of work.

Next time try getting some green kino flos or similar to light the screen with. The lights you use to light the talent will wash out the screen soon enough so if you can light the screen with the same color as it already is the keys are stellar.
And don’t be afraid of green spill – its actually important because it lets you put some of the new background’s color in as though it’s whats being spilled on the actor.

Can you post a little of the running footage and we can give it a whirl? Doing a comp on a still won’t reveal the dancing edge problem.

[Steve Bentley]

I think Justin is right – when I first looked I thought I could see through the model and hence those crossing lines were lines on the back faces. But on further inspection it looks like you have overlapping faces inhabiting the same planes. C4D will randomly pick which face is most forward resulting in a sparkling look.

[Steve Bentley]

Adding to Mark’s comments: when shooting blondes try and go for Bluescreen – color keys are really just fancy difference mattes and there isn’t a lot of “difference between” yellow hair and green screens.

[Steve Bentley]

So what you are after is larger disk of light in the light shining through your mask?
I don’t know if that’s even possible in a 3D package when doing volumetric lights (I’ve just never tried it with a parallel light source before).
But in Shine it all comes back to a single point – same goes for the radial blur set to zoom if were you thinking of trying that.
But you play with the boost and ray length settings you can reduce the idea that it’s all pointing back to one source by making the beams shorter but brighter. When the eye has less of a line to trace back to a source it’s harder to see where that source started.
Another way is to start with your mask and fill it with a glowing blob. Precomp that on black and then put shine on the precomp. This way its the non-zero point blob that is making the light so the brightness will seem spread over a larger area.

[Steve Bentley]

Depends on the version of AE. If its CS5.5’s and before (and maybe even CS6) memory management was horrible and it could leak into other apps or not release ram for other apps that were taking lots of ram themselves.
But in the newer versions you should be fine. Things won’t run as fast and the compress will take longer than it would normally but go for it.
You can also change the memory management in AE to allow the other apps to have a bit more of the Ram pie.

[Steve Bentley]

Make a separate comp with each line on a separate layer and make that comp as long as your final animation (all lines in the one comp) Then apply an effect on each layer to turn the color of the line to white – there’s a bunch – you can try tint or any of the change colors etc – you can do one layer and then copy and paste the effect to them all. If you’ve kept them as splines you can just change the stroke color in the layer settings or use as stroke effect.
Set each layer to “difference” for its transfer/blend function (again select all and then just change one and they will all change). There should be no background layer in this comp.
This should net you a lot of little black dots where the lines cross (assuming your comp color is not set to black).
Now precomp all of that and call the precomped comp “Lines” , then apply an invert effect to the precomped “Lines” comp and slip a black solid underneath. Now you have a bunch of white dots on black. Lets call this comp “Dots”.
Now in the Lines comp, vary which of the lines are transparent – you could do a random expression on the opacity attribute on each layer to automate this and clamp it to 0 or 100 or you could key frame each one with hold keyframes, or you could key frame one of the lines and then copy those key frames to other lines and offset the keyframes so it’s more random – if you now look in the Dots comp you will get a a bunch of sparkling white dots over black as the animation runs.
Take the Dots comp and screen it over your master comp and the white dots will appear wherever the lines cross and they will sparkle on and off.

[Steve Bentley]

can you upload a little movie of the effect? We might be able to say “oh I know what that is” once we’ve seen it.

[Steve Bentley]

It might be how the various textures assigned to the different sets of polys are being mapped. Did you texture it? or are these textures imported from a the CAD package?

It might also be that many cad packages use Z for “up” in the geometry but that change in orientation doesn’t always translate to the textures when they get converted. So a front facing plane that had a logo it might now be a front facing plane with the logo being projected from above – hence only showing up on a razor’s edge or worse, smearing down across the front face.

It could also be that not all the polys were captured in the select (or they have been reordered on import) and you are either seeing through empty polys, or seeing non textured polys or seeing a pixel from the outside edge of the texture mapping dead center on the model.

[Steve Bentley]

Try also hitting the “separate x,y,z” button in the animation curve editor for your null and camera positioning. This will give you separate curve control over each direction of movement. More often than not you want to (for example) ease in the x direction while the Z direction continues on at an unchanging rate. This separate control lets get the exact move you are looking for.

This is another area where scale falls flat. Without writing an expression and linking the separate xyz scale attributes to other controllers (Iike a slider) the 3 scale attributes curves are locked together. So if you wanted to ease in the X scale and keep the Z scale going full tilt, you are out of luck in the curve editor alone.