[Steve Bentley]

Can you show us the animate tab of the actual material? The render settings area is really just a global settings area – all the real magic happens in the material.

Re the cell shader. i was thinking you could use the black and white as just a matte – pass a color through the inverse luma of the rendered files in after effects and you will only get the outline in whatever color you want.

[Steve Bentley]

I hear you. Did the same thing. Problem was while GoPros do bright outdoors well they aren’t so good at graphics capture – a lot noisier than I was counting on. If you are going to do it, use as much light as you possibly can – then double it.

[Steve Bentley]

When you slide the layer ahead in time is there still some of it after frame zero? A better solution is to make your timeline longer and slide your clip down in time and leave the particles to start generating on nothing before the clip but render the whole thing and just edit the first part out.
I haven’t used CC for a long time as I use Particular now – is there no “pre roll” setting? where you can set how many frames to start the effect before frame 0?

[Steve Bentley]

I think the problem is that scale is logarithmic or at the very least exponential. But I can see a use for pixels was well, but then it should be called width and height. Aren’t width and height parameters you can access in the expressions? (I’m not in front of the machine at the moment so I could be thinking of C4d’s scripting language).

[Steve Bentley]

Do you want to include the gate weave? How do you get gate weave in a RED camera? That guy needs a better tripod.

Anyway. You could use particular to have particles shoot outward and turbulence to give them some windy trails – then have the aux system in particular fill the in the trails. The lead particles will only ever be dots or sprites or small single “brushes” but the aux system lets each lead particle spawn a trail of secondary particles in its wake to make the “stroke”. Its going to take quite a few to fill that in solid but you could follow up with an expanding mask of fractal noise that just fills things in so you don’t have to use a gazillion particles.

You can do this whole thing with just a couple of fractal noise masks that expand and evolve – its kind of: a soft circle mask, masking a fractal noise which in turn masks another fractal noise (its the same as deathstar explosion with the radiating ring in the doctored version of episode IV – it looks like fingers of flame licking out from the leading edge but it’s just moving fractal noise). Its tricky to get all the bits expanding and evolving at the right rate but you can get pretty close to that stock clip with just noise and masking.

[Steve Bentley]

It might be the X direction is local for the plane effector but not for the project. Try keyframing all the directions at the same time and see if it animates then. (but only move it in what you assume is the X)

[Steve Bentley]

Ya S&T can be a little tricky, especially on animated things. Could you use the Cell Shader instead? (render menu extra effects) Is much more stable and can be colorized in AE.

But with S&T try baking your deformations and dynamics (last tab in the dynamics tag). Once C4d can look down the timeline to whats coming it has a better time predicting what’s going to be needed for the next set of strokes.

I couldn’t see those images you uploaded. Can you let us know the settings you are using in S&T?

[Steve Bentley]

Absolutely – you might need particular to do that curving membrane at the end, but if you didn’t want the final “curl over”, all of that is flat and just placed in 3D space and doable without plug ins.

[Steve Bentley]

It used to be that AE would only use so much ram no matter how much you had. Given the history of AE I’ll bet that’s still the case. So I would suggest a faster drive and make your cache drive a drive that doesn’t have other software on it. Make sure too that the new fast drive is also on a fast bus – not all of them are.

I also find that more ram means more cache clearing problems. Try doing an intese render in AE , quit and then try compressing that rendered file in some other program. It can be terribly slow because the computer is still trying to deal with loaded ram and a massive paging file. Often it makes sense to just restart to clear the baffles. I find the more ram you have for AE the worse this “feature” gets.

And don’t be fooled by Graphics cards stats – AE only offloads to the card for very specific tasks, ones you may never use. For the most part its all CPU.

[Steve Bentley]

Perhaps AE isn’t pegging the procs because it’s not doing pesky routines like “memory management” or “cache clearing” – yes I’m taking to you Adobe!

Here is my guess as to what’s going on.

In PP you are able to hit play and it just plays. Right? We’ll not so fast. You are only able to do this if you are in a codec that has the wizardry to shepherd all those pixels through in a way that will allow that to happen at 30fps. Try it. Import an HD file made of umcompressed tiffs and see how fast it can play without rendering. So I would call PP codec clean – it can work with and pass through the codec you are using.

Because AE is expecting to composite, color correct, distort and use alphas, it only makes sense to do this with uncompressed pixels. To do this with a file that has a codec on it (I know, technically everything is a codec- even raw) would mean that the file wouldn’t unpack correctly, there would be missing information, and the color space you would be working in would not allow even the simplest color correction before clipping occurred.
So AE takes whatever it’s given (even H24) and turns it into pixels in the color space set for the AE working enviro. And thats a lot of work to slug through pixel by pixel. But that still doesn’t explain the proc not being used. I mean, why not harness more resources to get that stuff through quicker?
And just because so many people don’t know – a high end 264 file is 30k mb per second or just under 4 mB per second. Uncompressed HD (in 8 bit, 30fps) is 186 mb per second. PP can deal with the compressed one at 4mB but AE has to deal with all the pixels at 186 mB. That’s almost a 5000 percent difference.

I have a feeling the lack of processor interest in what you are rendering is due to the threaded nature of the app. Obviously it should be more multi threaded, but can it be? With elements having to be recombined at the end of the crunching and be aware of other bits of the image before deciding on final antialiasing and layer depth, perhaps that’s a harder task than just splitting up the job. Keep in mind to that it has to do one layer and then add in the next – rinse, repeat. Perhaps the individual jobs are so simple. before advancing to the next, are so simple there is no way to saturate the processor.

For years we lamented the fact there was no good paint solution for AE. We dreamed of adobe someday buying a world class paint package and incorporating the two. (And Adobe bought Pshop from the brother’s Knoll a decade before). A compositing package without a good paint is just silly. But there it is. If they couldn’t combine their own products perhaps there is some coding law of nature they can’t get past. Or perhaps its just that they could see like we did that they would end up with only one product to sell. Rumor has it that they bought Cosa (now AE) to get the layering tech for Pshop. So cross pollination can happen.

When working on Flame or Inferno you don’t have to cache the single clip you are working with, you can just play it – and that’s with a massive EXR or other cine file, granted, there is some codec magic going on there to let you even see it on your lowly 8 bit screen. But even on a higher bit display it can still play real time. So it is doable in a compositing type environment.

I don’t use Nuke or Fusion or HitFilm so I’d be curious to know how fast they are and how well they saturate the bus. AE is a product for the masses and just so happens to be good enough for professional use, so perhaps it hasn’t had the development it should have because they can’t sell it for the astronomical prices Discreet used to get for Flame. I think it’s survived because of it’s robust plug in set, lack of a secret handshake to write plug ins for, and it’s “in the moment” flexibility. In Flame if you want to pass something through another clip’s matte you have to go make (process) that matte first. In Ae you just layer it properly an ta da!