[Steve Bentley]

Thanks Walter – we are starting to see issues in the Card area for other things (shredding in previews etc). I’ve got the latest drivers from Nvdia and that did clear up some of the issues but not all. But AE was already set to not use the GPU and we are still getting intermittent results with the Gradients (in the Layer styles too) The first time you use it in a comp, it works, after that it never shows up.

I had heard horror stories about the new AE and wondered if this was part of it, but would be willing to concede it was my GTX 980 if I hadn’t already turned it off in the prefs.

[Steve Bentley]

You can also pre comp the circles moving but use outlines only. Use a transfer function that will “intersect” the outlines (assuming white outlines on black – multiply would work here). So you end up with a white dot moving around on the screen where the circles edges overlap. Then either use just that as an element or track that dot(s).

[Steve Bentley]

Horizons are great for pulling a rotation track off – even without any detail on the horizon.
Pre comp your shot with two thin vertical masks on either side of the shot where you have a clean horizon. So there will be two strips of image that run vertically and the rest will be your background color. Then, in the outer comp track the change in color at the horizon as it slides up and down in these two mask slots. You will only get y values in your rotation track but it means that your x track isn’t sliding all over the place. Depending on the shot sometimes you have to use the same trick before you do the Y track (but with thin horizontal masks) and “stabilize” it left and right so your roll axis point doesn’t drift around.

[Steve Bentley]

Thats definitely stock footage of rolling fog/smoke (probably man made) And its not a custom element they shot for it because you can see the loop point and its not been handled very well (if it was custom it would have been closer to the right length). But based on the content and the noise that might even be back in the optical days.

I doubt you could get there with Particular without killing your machine with a billion particles.

Shooting is the best way to get that in short order – no render times and you keep wafting your smoke until you get what you want.
But for those without a camera and without Tubulence FD you can get there with fractal noise. The trick is the masking. If you make feathered masks that move and roll like you want the fog to (do this first before you get into working with the noise and then you can see the rough shapes moving about), then erode the edges of the masks with one set of moving noise and then pass another set of moving noise through these eroded masks. Make a few layers and composite them over each other – try not to use “screen” as that just ends up blooming everything to washed-out eventually. Also try different speeds of noise that drift and evolve with the direction of travel of the masks. Dont forget to tint your fog – it may seem like its white but its actually a tint of the background color.

Finally if you have it, Turbulence FD, Houdini and even Blender can get you there but there is a lot of non intuitive experimentation to “direct” that prima donna fog, and there can be long render times if you don’t want the noise to show (high sample rates).

[Steve Bentley]

In AE you could use an image of the lines and dots and wrap it around the CC sphere effect. Or better, map a texture to a sphere in Element 3D (3rd Party plugin) and use displacement to get a little more thickness. As long as you don’t get too close you won’t realize that it’s a texture on a spherical shell – make sure to turn on both back and front sides of the sphere to render so you can see “inside” and the lines and dots in your texture should have an alpha channel so everything else is clear.

In C4d this is dead easy and so many ways to do it.
You could use an swept arc with balls on the end and have a Mograph cloner map them to a sphere (surface mode), then use a shader effector and pump in a noise texture to have them appear in random spots (more pleasing in this case than a random effector used for position)
Or you could have an emitter shoot particles out along the surface of sphere and use a tracer effector from Mograph to “spline” the trails of the particles.
I’m not sure if Mograph comes with all versions of C4D though.
You can also write an expresso node to join two points on a sphere with an arc spline that then gets swept and then you place balls at the two end point locations – rinse/repeat for all the other lines or use a cloner. This is nice because your arc doesn’t have to adhere to the surface of the sphere and you can set an apogee height in the middle of the arc. (hyperbolic trajectory)
You can also emit particles on a tangent from the surface of the sphere and use gravity at the center of the sphere to put them into an orbit that decays and when they contact the sphere again they die. Then use tracer to spline the pathways and sweep them into real geometry. Use a setdata node to put small dot spheres at the point of emission and point of recontact.
You can also just use the splines that are generated by tracer and then use sketch and tune or cell render or Whitelights plug in to render the splines out without geometry (warning Sketch and Tune and Whitelights can be long renders if you don’t want a lot of noise).

[Steve Bentley]

We used to do this with grease on glass on a rostrum camera (back in the film days – remember those?) – look up Canada’s National Film Board (NFB). This technique was all the rage for a while. There are tons of excellent examples.
But these days you can use Corel’s Painter with their oilskin layers. So you get the natural materials look (brush strokes and painterly feel) plus the advantage of frame by frame animation and an undo feature which you don’t get in real life. You could do it in photoshop with the animation tools but I think it would turn out better in Painter.
Due to the accuracy they have probably rotoscoped either a 3D animation or something filmed to get the objects moving so perfectly and the perspective.
While there are plug ins that can get you part of the way there, for this kind of thing often you have to just do it by hand to get the look you want. You can often work down at 12-15fps instead of a usual rate and then frame blend between to bring it up to full 24 or 30fps. This adds to to the dreamy smeary look.
If you want to really frustrate yourself you could use a particle system that has imagery mapped to it. The particles would bleed in the direction of the camera travel (you might be able to tie it to the motion blur channels) but I wouldn’t recommend this in AE. While the particle systems available for AE are really nice (Particular etc) they don’t hold a candle to what you can achieve in a 3D package with Xparticles or TP or Turbulence FD or Houdini. Just so much more control and you can feed in other data channels to drive aspects of each particle. But the amount of R&D would be killer.

[Steve Bentley]

It might be the nature of the fade that causes the blob. If you take a thin line and fade the end out it will look like the line comes to a point (we used to fake comet trails this way) The opposite can happen when you have a pointed shape and try and fade it out: the point becomes a blob in comparison to the much larger bulbous end having more definition.
I’m not exactly sure what you are trying to do here.
It could also be a function of the aux system which will often immitate tapering trails with my comet tail trick above – so the more trails you get the more not-so-pointed sprites you get that are the same width along their length and they are just being faded to simulate a taper – but with so many they build up and you see that its just a fade across a constant width.

[Steve Bentley]

The whole point of projection mapping in the real world (as in that video) is to give the illusion that the projected image is attached to the fabric and moves with the person. The beauty of doing this sort of thing inside a 3D package is that you can literally stick a texture onto an animated character’s shirt and it will warp and follow the movement of the character as though it had been printed there (you may need a “stick texture” tag so that any mesh deformers also warp the texture). A video texture is no different from a bitmap texture, except that you can set in and out points for the video frames (its the animation tab inside the material’s bit map settings)
Often a “flat” mapping routine will be enough for a decal on a shirt but you may want to consider a “cylindrical” mapping setting to let the texture wrap around the body.

[Steve Bentley]

If you need easing (PLA can’t do easing) you can link each node on the splines to a different null using xpresso and then animate the nulls instead of the nodes, and then you can use fcurves for easing.

[Steve Bentley]

Without seeing the file or an image of the scene, its hard to advise.
Could you use primitive cylinders instead? You can keep these “low” poly but have them render perfectly smooth.
Is there a reason you can’t use instances?
7gb is pretty big but if there are thousands of rods, those poly’s add up. Check the end caps – first do you really need them? Are there more polys than need to be on the cap – usually you can get away with a single ngon or radiating triangles with no divisions.
Could the rods farther from camera be of a lower rez?
You can increase your phong angle and reduce the geometry and the rods will still render smooth (to a point).