[Steve Bentley]

You might have to double click the mask in the viewport to get it out of scale mode so you can access each point. Does it have the classic scaling dots at the 4 corners and compass points?
Is it locked by chance (hitting L by accident will do that )
Have you set an initial key frame on the path attribute? If you don’t, every change will be the new and forever shape of the mask.

[Steve Bentley]

Particles aren’t for the faint of heart, and double that sentiment for volumetrics like clouds. Ther are lots of settings so the same system can do clouds and light sabers and glowing bumble bees and water and rain and and sparks and…
But that’s not helpful so…
Have you any shadow casting lights in the scene? Your voxels or sprites need to cast shadows on their neighbors to get those dark areas you are looking for.
You could do this much simpler with a few stills of fluffy clouds and make a multiplane animation of a bunch of them. With some soft masking it would look just like your reference movie (for this kind of move only) and would take much less time to render.

[Steve Bentley]

Ah, the lost art of typography!
Most of the changes you mention can be done in AE and should be done by any discerning typehead. Really, only “perfect pixel alignment” for web fonts will be the only things you can’t do in AE (or in illustrator and then bring into AE). Once the creators start messing with counter heights and x height differences, I’m sorry, it’s just not the same font anymore- same family maybe but not the same font. We work with a lot of fonts that have been slightly warped for a corporation but based on a classic. Its shocking how little differences can make a huge impact on how the type looks in a block. While some fonts have been designed for the web, there are a few hundred years of refining that have gone into some classics that (when set right ) should not be ignored.

But all that aside, I think it mattered more when a high rez screen was 1280pix or less, Now with HD and 4K there are so many pixels per sq inch, IMHO, you should apply the rules you would apply if you were making a print piece that was 24″ diagonal (or whatever your viewing size will be) – the human eye hasn’t changes that much since Gutenberg.
One of my guys says “ya but there are so many screen sizes that people might be looking at this on”. True, but how many design houses will adjust the letter spacing for the postcard they just made out of the poster you just carefully typeset. The browser should be handling the corrections needed for ultra small screens vs larger ones and if that is built into the font, great, but with the need to make a splash and be different, I doubt many “different” fonts have that feature.

I think people have forgotten they still need to set type, or probably more accurately, were never taught that things like letter spacing and x heights and kerning or ligatures even matter. And with no one wanting to pay for fonts these days I think it’s a losing battle to expect electronic display versions from a virus-laden freebee.

[Steve Bentley]

Depends on what goes in that screen ( I assume it’s the screen right?). You could track just one point and hand off to another point as that point gets covered by her. Remember to track something that is at the depth the screen is at not the talent or it will never track. You can always pass off the tracking chore to something that is still on screen after your main point goes offscreen – you can move the detecting box in AE any time you like (with some modification keys) and the track will continue as though you were tracking the original point but now locked to the new detail.

I know the first idea probably is to do a 4 point corner track but you might not need it. If on a dolly you don’t need rotation (if handheld use two points to get the rotation) but I doubt you need a perspective track here. Get the motion to match and then use the green to key out the image. If nothing graphicy touches the edge of the screen you probably won’t see incorrect perpspective that creeps in over time, but you might have to initially corner pin the comp that will shine through the matte, you just won’t do that for every frame with 4 tracking points – its very very hard to track 4 points and keep them all going together when the shot is out of focus. You could also hand keyframe your corner pin if it’s really needed, Just keep in mind the start and stop ease of the camera move.

[Steve Bentley]

Isn’t that what the discreet colors in the texture map are doing now? Or is the object being textured truly blue green and orange?
It sounds like you are planning an intermediate step when you don’t need one. I may be missing something.

[Steve Bentley]

Here’s the full url https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Drg6soX8960
You don’t need realflow for that level of the always classic: liquid melted toaster. I mean it would work, but it’s a big hammer for what is a pretty simple sim. (hey, where are all the crumbs? Shouldn’t they be floating on top?”

You could do that easily with particles and metaballs or even in AE with a particle generator and some of the 3D liquid plugins AE comes with (does Mr. Mercury come with AE?)
I find you only need to go to realflow if you want really really specific flow patterns or you dont want to see any evidence of lumps in the liquid, or if you need sheeting, which is impossible to do with metaballs.

[Steve Bentley]

I haven’t read that but I will. Thanks Brian.
Yes I have been keyframing those settings as well as the velocity thresholds (I figured they would have to kill it for sure but it can be tough to know what the actual velocity is of x object is) and if I take those values too high I get things hanging impossibly middair.

I thought going more accurate with the mesh of the object would help so any false intersections wouldn’t cause the sudden eruptions of movement. I’ve found that any crazy flyaway object are usually when two objects suddenly find themselves intersecting on one frame – long past just touching, due to approximations in the shape choice or by the auto shape choice changing what it thinks will work best. I figured more accurate mesh math would solve that, and it did, but introduced a huge amount of “tim robbins jacobs ladder” kind of shaking, which the step settings (now up around 75) wouldn’t solve.

I think part of the problem might be the impact object. It was part of another spot the client wants to match but it got a cache on it at some point (I don’t rememeber baking it) and now if I remove that cache in the dynamics tag, try as I might, I can’t get that dynamic driven movement again. I’m actually surprised it works at all: a cached object’s motion intersecting with objects that have dynamic tags. The big issues are always the objects that get trapped between the impact object and other static areas. If the impact object didn’t have a predetermined caches action on it, it might stop sooner and theyby not force other shapes into spaces they can’t really fit, where they reverberate off a rock and hard place trying to get out, and they do that forever, or suddenly find a way out and emerge at escape velocities.

[Steve Bentley]

The AE tracker could do this with the tricks I mentioned. Mocha would probably do a better job and does a better job tracking backwards and extrapolating off screen.
Again you can cheat here – if you make a sub comp with the footage and a still of the first frame of the footage (where you have a good image of the lift and the point you want to track), overlay that still over the footage and hand animate it past the start of the shot. this way you can see if the motion looks real enough. So you are moving a still beyond the boundaries of the frame and the the zero time marker. Once that looks real enough you can track that new sub comp past the start of the original footage. Then turn off the still.

[Steve Bentley]

If you are actually going to animate a camera then that track will naturally be in perspective (for more perspective use a wider camera lens). With the trapcode solution you will eventually run out of taper. I’ve also never been a fan of the taper in TC3D stroke. It’s kinda bulbous so it may not look like your brain things perspective looks. But you can still use 3D stroke with a constant thickness and constant coloring (for the flat look). Tha camera path can in fact become the track with 3D stroke.

For rollercoasters keep in mind that when you are riding one you naturally anticipate corners and start to look around a curve before you get to it. If you let the camera just follow a spline then the feel will be very mechanical because the camera can only see along the tangent to the curve. People don’t work like that, we want to know what’s coming. So make sure to turn the camera just ahead of the corner and before the end of the corner.

[Steve Bentley]

Hi Rafi,
That image link is broken. Can you re upload?
Couple of things about paper vs cloth. If you want it to look like real paper keep in mind Paper can only curl in one direction at a time, while cloth can fold in any direction and then fold in another at the same time. So you can stiffen the cloth simulation but it will still behave like a woven material.
One of the ways we have animated flying paper is to make a spline path with loop-de-loops and all sorts of turns and curves. Then attach the paper object spline and have it follow along the spline and be deforemed by the spline. If you animate the time component so that it doesn’t travel at the same speed along the spline it will look very convincing. (you coud also render a constant speed in C4d at a much higher frame rate and then do time warps in AE to get the timing right)

Wind can work but it’s hard to get right ( you will need some turbulence in there too). If you go that route an attractor might work better than gravity.