[Steve Bentley]

If you alt drag inside the detection box that will shift the focus to something new to track in the frame. While the box will move and the path’s one point will move, you will notice the attach point does not move, and that’s the point that is sending data to the receiving layer.
Once you hit play again to keep tracking or retract a section the path will shift to this new object but not the attach point. (thats the little white cross)

So if you had two planes flying along at roughly the same speed and you were tracking one of them. you could stop the track, alt move the detect box to the other plane and continue the track. The path would jump to the second plane for that part of the track but when you send the data to the receiving layer it will continue on along the original track vector assuming the planes are moving the same way. What happens is an offset is included in tracking data when the tracker box is moved with the alt key, so the sudden shift of the tracker box isn’t noticed.

[Steve Bentley]

Do you have mp4s or H264 as source footage? Many of these highly compressed formats use virtual frames and RSMB can’t deal with something that’s not really there when it needs to extrapolate.
If you encounter huge lags or hangs or just hiccups then convert your source footage to uncompressed or some format that AE is ok with (like ProRes) before bringing it into AE.
Usually scrubbing the time line will let you know if you are going to have errors.

[Steve Bentley]

Turn off ambient occlusion – that’s not doing anything to the edges.
You can also sometimes turn down the anti aliasing or the quality level in the physical render depending on what you need the alpha for.
Both of these speed things up immensely.
You can also turn off transparency, shadows reflections and refractions if you still need some materials for the render but be careful if some of your materials create “holes” in things – you might still need transparency.
Motion blur quality can often be turned down as well depending on the use of the alpha.
\
If there is a way to not use physical (i’ve been able to do this a few times for just an alpha) then use another renderer that can use more cores. You might have a kick’n box, but physical can only see two of those cores and sometimes only one.

[Steve Bentley]

Keep in mind both phase and evolution can make huge changes in the look of the noise being used, especially if your scale of world is on the extreme end of things. Usually with these sorts of settings we start out with settings like .002.

[Steve Bentley]

If you use the plexus plug in the first thing you do is to invert the Y, so I’m not sure if its possible. I’ve just gotten used to the pipeline and because you can always swap axis in AE with a simple script its never been an issue.

[Steve Bentley]

If the drive you are swapping isn’t the root drive where your OS is and your program files then you should be fine. If you double click on one missing asset in the AE file it will ask you to find it and then it will find the others based on the original file structure.
But if you are swapping your root then thats going to be the heartache you think it is.
Can you just add a drive and make it your scratch disk for AE? It might help, but unless the SSD is wearing out it should be sooo much faster than the HDD.

[Steve Bentley]

Yep, already looked after – I have a feeling that “collision noise” is part of the restitution setting.

I think sometimes you get lucky with object placement and simulations and things go well and sometimes… well this is the latter.
I love their comment in the manual about even thunderstorms affecting things in sims. Its so true.
I think if I could release the cache for the impact object things would be better because then I could cache the sim. But caching just one of the new tags seems to kill the cache on the impact object’s tag so it doesn’t take much to chaznge things that I’ve gotten looking good. and I just can’t get the same motion from the impact object if I remove it’s cache.

The other day we were wondering if there was a bit of mass based gravity in each object – just like the real world – if you were in freefall. We added a new large object with a static dynamics tag to a scene and everything started falling towards it. Take it away and we’re back to normal. I would have thought only a gravity force or the projects gravity would be able to affect direction (there is only a gravity force, no project gravity and collisions in this sim, and yet we were getting a non “down” vector for our falling motion with the big object hanging around. Einstein was right- even in C4d!

[Steve Bentley]

Me too. We think it’s C4D’s paging file (assuming Windows). It seems to take a few restarts and some time sitting with cinema open but no file loaded for it to clear the file out of both ram and the drive. And with lots of polys that file can be huge. With 128 gb of ram we have seen the paging file reach 4 times that size. If your hard drive is fragmented or doesn’t have enough space for it, that increase the time it takes to clear.

[Steve Bentley]

The simple answer is that they are just different. Y+ is up in C4d but Y+ is down in AE.
This more complete answer is that y=0 is top left in AE and as you move down the comp window the values increase. In C4D values increase as things go up the frame. When you start flipping about the X or Z to correct this, often you get gimbal lock. You can sometimes correct for this by choosing a differnt rotation order in the coordinates dialogue in cinema. You can release gimbal lock sometimes if you rotate about the X first and then Y instead of how C4d does it: y then x (or more correctly H then P).

If you were working with Form Z you would also have to content with Z being up.

[Steve Bentley]

I didn’t realize that “the party’s over” was in the manual, so yes I had in fact read that eons ago.
The big problem is that the manual is just worded so badly – whenever I go back to it I end up yelling at the screen. I suppose once you know the techniques the verbiage makes sense sometimes but I feel for people coming up the chain who are new to the controls or concepts. I wonder if the German one is better?

I haven’t had to work with the Restitution Lifetime setting yet but I’m starting to think I need to. Now if only the text in the manual made any sense. There are so many examples of things that are just wrong in the help pages, I never know whether to believe something that seems a little off or if it is indeed just plain wrong.

Everything written about this particular control seems to make sense..until.
It seems to imply that there are little standoff bumps that are calculated so that objects that are touching aren’t touching as far as the dynamics are concerned, so you can have (in the example) a newtons cradle at rest. So far so good. And once that value (which has no units!!!!) is elapsed – so I’m guessing either frames or seconds – then those virtual bumps go away, and now even dynamics sees them touching and will act to push them apart if bounce is set above zero (again i’m assuming because it’s not explicit).
But then it says “if the time set is too short the cradle will not work at all”. I would think if the time was set too short it would work all too well and the balls would spring apart and then start clacking. I’m hoping they meant that the cradle will not work correctly and the initial bounce will be even before any ball is set in motion, but again… manuals can never be too explicit!

Any way, that’s my rant. If I had the time I’d offer to rewrite it (“be the change you want to see in the world”, but they turned the mic off before gandhi had time to say – “if you have the time”)