[Steve Bentley]

In AE 2017 ish and later you have the new “mask points to nulls” feature. So that will give you either the position of the end points of the spline or give you control over the end points of the spline.
This feature, “Create nulls from paths” is found under the Windows menu near the bottom (depending on what extras you have installed).
Choose the mask or spline in the layers and then go under Windows/Create Nulls from Paths and
pick whether you want to control the mask (spline) points with nulls or you want the spline points to control some nulls.
Then you can get your beam ends position info from those nulls.

[Steve Bentley]

I’ve not done any isometric kind of stuff, but if I had to guess I’d say the camera is too far out and the 3d distance between layers has become too small a percentage of the camera distance for the floating point math. You get the same effect from 3d layers being too close together in Z with a normal camera (for instance 0.1 units is not usually enough to get correct layer ordering).

Its not a true fix but you could put an adjustment layer on top of each 3D layer and that would flatten each layer out so they are all seen as 2D after their 3D calcs have happened.

Try bringing the camera closer (ignore any distortions for now just to find the problem) and see if the reordering issue goes away.

[Steve Bentley]

I just thought of something – its possible you are using vectors and expecting a miracle out of the Bicubic setting. It won’t affect vectors in the way you think – in fact it gets worse.
Instead use the continuously rasterize button with Bi linear (or “best” for us old guys) in the layer quality settings.
Here’s where that switch is

[Steve Bentley]

Just a note on the quality switch in the layers – unless you say otherwise the render will always be as though you turned that to Bilinear or Best or Full. If you set the layer to BiCubic (the curvy one) you should set your render settings to “Current” so that AE picks up that choice from the layers.
Second, Bicubic doesn’t really work well with graphics. (I don’t know what your map looks like). An image has lots of noise and hard edges and soft edges that the Bicubic can use to help sharpen results after the fact. With a graphic it only has the antialiased edge of a line of pixels.
If you are using a vector that’s another story – vectors in theory are infinitely scalable and will keep their sharp edges. Make sure to use the continuously rasterize button for the vector layers and make your vector art as big as you can in something like illustrator. Even vectors have their limits.

[Steve Bentley]

You can of coarse do this in Particular with much more control.
In particular its best to use a sprite or a textured polygon for the shape of the particle (you choose what alpha’d layer you want to be the sprite – it has to be in the time line – by choosing Sprite as particle type in Particle settings and then choosing the source layer in the Texture/Layer setting a few rows down – not from the Sprite options – unless you want one of the Sprite shapes) .
To get a layer in AE to emit particles that are the same color as where those particles came from choose Layer as the emitter type and then choose the layer in the time line you want to emit from.
Make sure to set the Random seed to larger than (much larger even) than the 100,000 default settings or you will start to see looping patterns in the “random” look of the particles.

[Steve Bentley]

You are probably doing it right (the shape you reference in the layer list has to have an alpha otherwise it will be a square) but you have to turn on “Render” at the top of the plug in settings instead of the default “Draft” otherwise it will always look like blue circles.

[Steve Bentley]

I’ll bet you are also rendering out compressed (like H264) to keep the size of the file manageable (in uncompressed format it’s in the 2 petabyte range!) and that compression can add jitters too, especially at each keyframe (in the compression, not in the animation).
Are you sure that’s what they want? Even with a smooth solution you just aren’t going to notice the scaling over that period of time – that’s less of a change than watching the moon move across the sky.
Make sure you are setting the continually rasterize flag for any subcomps so that overall scaling is taken into effect.
These shots (called “Power of 10” shots) are not for the faint of heart. When you scale something up by 200 % the size of the element is actually getting 4 times larger in area. Double again and now you are at 16 times larger. It gets out of hand (and blurry) pretty darn fast.
And based on your scaling size, you are taking a 14,000 pixel wide image and virtually scaling it 5 million pixels. The greatest you can go in AE is 130% in scale before the blurries start to get the better of you.
There are some blow up software solutions that turn the image to vectors, do the blow up and then turn the image back to pixels with little to no degradation but even then they usually top out at 600%. (like Genuine Fractals) You are asking for 300% (give or take) so you are well within this range. But its better to divide the image up into sections, scale them up before you go into AE and then join a bunch of separate blown up chunks in a precomp and then zoom in the master outer comp with continually rasterize turned on for the precomp.. But the images must already be blown up before they get to AE (at least with in 30% of final) for you to generate acceptable quality.

[Steve Bentley]

For Nvidia there’s a few utilities that might help.
There’s a profile inspector which lets you tweak the settings to an incredible degree. Often its a refresh rate difference between the monitors and the GFX card. There’s a also an inspector Utility which can help diagnose issues.
It could literally be anything in the profile settings. I’ve got a GTX 970 that has never really worked right on PC (with AE) no matter what we try in the inspector, but I have another we finally got tuned properly.

[Steve Bentley]

It sounds like you are trying to open a newer version of C4D’s project in an older version of C4D. Do you know the project’s history? Have you let the project determine what app to use by just double clicking the project file? Try opening it from within C4d with the open dialogue.
I’ve got a few legacy versions hanging around and every once in a while, double clicking will pick the wrong one.

[Steve Bentley]

Try lowering the velocity of the emission. Usually with this kind of thing the particles are going so fast they wiz right by the destination before the forces can have any kind of effect.
Alternatively increase the intensity of the attractor.
Finally you can jack up your air resistance.
Once inside the box you will have to add a friction field that encompasses just the contents of the box. Gradually increase those forces as the particles enter and that will slow them down. Remember you can animate the intensity of the forces – so you could start out with a crazy high attractor force to make sure it grabs those first particles and then lower it down as it takes hold and brings those particles closer to their destination.
And because you are firing downwards you might want to turn off the project’s gravity (every project has some unless you say otherwise) as this is adding to the particles voom.