[Steve Bentley]

Yes you can certainly do the HitFilm trick. AE can have nulls in 3D (or at least pseudo 3d) and using expressions you can make another 3d layer that has been dragged about by a 2D track always point to the head-centered null. There will be a point where the illusion falls apart due the 2D track but you can also compensate for this by adding secondary animation keyframes to the expression to “goose” the track data and get the parallax you are after.

[Steve Bentley]

Use Greg’s suggestion of Displacement effect but use a noise on another layer as the source for the diplace. If you use a large scale version of the cell noise or a few others you will get exactly this look and it can animate – no masks required.

[Steve Bentley]

No it’s not the 4K that’s doing it.
The best pipeline for AE and encoding is to first render out of AE as either an uncompressed format or something that is virtually lossless like ProRes or BlackMagic. Then take that rendered movie and use another tool to encode.
This is especially true with H264 which really needs to wade through every frame first to see what every frame looks like in order to get the best compression/size ratio. AE by it’s nature doesn’t know what’s coming up or what the last frame looked like, it takes each frame as it comes. So it can’t really do the 2 pass thing efficiently.
Premiere is also designed to cache elements and mix elements on the fly so you don’t have to wait for dissolves which require two streams at the very least.
Because AE assumes that:
1) there will be more streams of content than any reasonable processor or card or codec could handle in real time and will have effects that require subpixel sampling and 3D matrix math and 3rd party effects, so it takes one frame at a time, and
2) there are better tools to be doing editing and compressing in. Making a product do all things for all people leads to an overly complex interface and a result that isn’t as good as one that specializes.

While you can do many of things that Premiere can do and Encoder can do inside of AE, it’s not the ideal program for it. The same reason the Premiere doesn’t have the flexibility to do the things AE can do is the same reason that AE is a more complex program (or perhaps differently complex) so that it can do highly specialized things, but can’t do something as simple as dissolve two layers in real time. And compressing isn’t one of those features either.

Apart from saving the drive space (and drive space is cheap now) I can’t see a good reason for a render and compress pipeline out of AE. Do you really want to waste extra time with compressing a shot that isn’t right yet?

You are right though, given what AE is being tasked with I don’t find it takes full advantage of the procs or threads or even ram. There was a time that no matter how much ram you had AE could only use a few gigs of it. I have a feeling this is an infrastructure issue. Remember Adobe bought this program (it used to be called COSA) and they are probably still dealing with legacy code that is cheaper to piggy back on than rip it out and start again. Is it perfect? Not by a very long shot. But given the price and what it can do…

If you must encode from AE, set a watch folder for your compression software of choice and have it start it’s thing once AE has finished the render. If you really need to increase your speed use FFmpg. After using it you will have the same reaction to its speed as you are having with AE vs premiere – why isn’t everything this fast? Plus you can transcode from one format to another without creating an intermediary format and without losing quality.

[Steve Bentley]

So a couple of things that will help,
First, the attraction amount is way too high – you probably set it that high because it wasn’t working. Understandable.

In the paper’s dynamics tag there is a forces tab and in there is an area to include or exclude the forces you want to affect this specific tag. You have it set to “include” but nothing is included. You can either change it to exclude and not include anything (so exclude nothing = include everything) or you can drag and drop the attraction force from the object manager into this area and keep it on include. That’s usually the best because then if you add more forces later for something else you aren’t scratching your head as to why your paper is now doing something else.

You probably weren’t aware that there is always another force lurking in C4d – gravity. You can have a separate gravity force but to turn off the project gravity, go to the project settings (not prefs) under edit and go to the dynamics tab and set gravity to 0.

That’s why when the paper gets over by the letters it gives up and falls. That’s the projects gravity at work.

I would split this into 2 or three files. Or have multiple paper objects within the project – one for each section so you aren’t fighting previous deformers when using the dynamics. So the last scene would have it’s own paper object with no deformers on it (or deformers that will help with the letters wrap). You could also make the paper here cloth so it gets plastered on to the letters better than a flat sheet could be.

[Steve Bentley]

I see what you are trying to do.
Wouldn’t it just be easier to paint with flat color in layers in BP. Each layer would be self alphing and you could turn each on and off for your masks in AE.
I mean, keying colors will work, but because of antialiasing you will always have a little fringe you will have to deal with.
But that will will work and then you just swap materials in C4D with the new AE renders.

I think there’s a way to do this all in C4D. If you paint in layers in BP you should be able to pick fabric swatches in C4d and assign them to areas of the model and they will be masked by the master masking texture made in BP.

You could also just make selection tags of the various areas that get different fabrics and then literally throw a bunch of fabric textures on the model and just type the appropriate name in the selection area of each texture tag and they will only show up there.

[Steve Bentley]

Oh wait a minute – I was thinking about the edge lines that make up the shape, and not the faces. I’ve never done that with S&T, but have done it will scribble texture maps. You have to decide how live you want the fill to be. 12 fps is good. The fill should keep going after the face is filled in. You can mess with body paint to map the polys but (depending on your model style) I’ve found it easier to copy the faces you want to color, expand them as flat polys and map alpha scribble materials to those “attached” faces.

Whats the final look? Flat or dimensional? If the latter you have to think about overshoot lines travelling in a plane that intersect with faces perpendicualar, that have the same kind of materials on them. It can look kinda intersecty.

[Steve Bentley]

I’m not in front of c4d right now but will be a bit later. THere is a an overshoot parameter that will extend the line outside the objects polys.

You should be prepared for issues in the render. S&T will drop lines every once in a while when doing animated lines, and lines will pop on and off. It can be jarring in the playback. What we do to compensate is to render the whole thing a few times on a few different machines. But start the renders on different frames – then stack all three (with the correct frame offset to match the different frame start points) and pick the best one for the top hero layer and then paint through to recover missing segments. S&T is a remarkable piece of code but it can drive you batty.

[Steve Bentley]

Do you have sketch and toon? (is that what you meant by sketch?) Because yes it will do that. Or you can get out the crayons and make texture maps, or you can use a write on effect in either pshop or Ae and make texture maps with that.
Crank down the frame rate though because a change in scribble every frame at 24 or 30 fps is just too noisy.

[Steve Bentley]

Normally the LUT is just so a 32 bit file can be seen on an 8bit monitor. So if you work in 32bit and render back to the same format in 32bit, nothing should change. Check your color managment in AE to make sure you aren’t altering the colorspace.

But if you have to convert the format you were given to a format you can work with and that’s what your LUT is for, you will need the reverse LUT to get it back to the original format, or perhaps the post house can take your export format and they can do the coversion – this is usually the best because the reverse LUTs are never perfect and often they don’t need it to be perfect since they are going grade it anyway. So better to do as little processing on it as possible so that the Post CC doesn’t magnify any changes and so the grader has the headroom he/she needs to get the looks they are after.

[Steve Bentley]

If you have QT pro you can export out of that too – that’s the fastest. (Ok, FFMPeg is the fastest but you have to use a command shell)