[Steve Bentley]

Probably a spline deformer. Whats the start shape?

[Steve Bentley]

Would a deformer be a better choice? In the end they are all deformers. Do you have a pic of what you are trying to do?

[Steve Bentley]

Here’s one we did with Mixamo data sets and our characters. All silhouettes but with the lights and atmo and a viewers own experience at concerts you don’t even think about the fact that the characters have no detail. Only the characters are 3D (at least outside of AE) all the other stuff including the earth balls we had bouncing around were done in Video Copilot’s element 3D and Optical flares in AE.
And with so much movement going on with the crowd grooving to the tunes your brain says it can see more than it actually can. Most of vision is memory, not whats right in front of us.

11553_concertanimation.jpg.zip

[Steve Bentley]

depending on ram on the box, the machine could be wrangling and overly large page file on the drive – or clearing one out for the upcoming data – that can take an inordinate amount of time. I’ve never understsood why windows is slow at this or why the combo of pretty much any adobe product and the page file can bring a box to its knees.
Make sure you have at least twice your ram amount in free and clear hard drive space available plus the 10 percent reserve all hard drives need.

[Steve Bentley]

Actually if it’s full of what ever flavour mark hamill likes to float around in, you don’t actually see the liquid as liquid. What sells it are the bubbles, the bouncy boyancy, the envrionment around it being lit by causitcs and just that overal fish tank lighting, and the index of refraction of glass and liquid distorting the half naked body inside.
The lens effect will get you partway there for the distortion. Particular does great bubbles that expand and wiggle as they float up through the water (sadly you have to mimic the reflections the bubbles have unless you also have element3D which can map reflections (although now that I say that you might be able to get as proper reflection out of the sphere particle in particular))
And don’t forget micro floaties. These you don’t really notice but they scream liquid suspension. and don’t forget the reflections on the glass tube – these can be mimiced in AE even without Element.

[Steve Bentley]

Are we seeing the whole screen in that video? It seems that the stroke goes away from one end and then comes back on the from the other.

I just pasted a square from AI into AE and I can have it go away from both ends with the stroke effect but not the other way around.
The point of the stroke effect was to draw something on and then follow it up with the stroke eating it’s tale. You can get into negative space when the values of the start are overtaken by the values of the end and then the stroke eats itself until the numbers overtake each other and then the stroke builds from that point where the end over took the start.
So you can have it remove from both ends at once but I’ve never been able to (nor could I imagine it working given the effect parameters) to have the stroke build from both ends at the same time Do I have that right? Is this the goal?.

If this is your intent what about two strokes over top of each other and one starts at one end and the other at the opposite end and then screen or multiply them together into “1”?
You could also have it build from both ends as long as your “ends” are the middle of the stroke and the stroke is closed.

I just tried trapcode and I can’t get to where I think you want to be with that more robust plug in either. In fact I can’t even get it to do the overtake thing that the built in one can do.

Even going into 3D, you can’t have a sweep “grow” from both ends at the same time and meet in the middle (at least with the sweep extrusion out of the box as it was indented to be used)
I’ve got a few more spline based strokers here I’ll try it with.

[Steve Bentley]

Better idea. Do you whole project without any blur. Then duplicate the comp and bring in that second copy to the first. Inside the second copy turn off all layers except the layers making the transparent layer.
Now back in your first comp use that second comp as the masking layer for a blurring adjustment layer.

[Steve Bentley]

I assume you mean Particular.
The back of my brain says you can do this but I’ve just tried without luck. But here’s a cheat.
Have the aux system kick in at frame 30 and give it it’s own physics paramater while keeping the parent particle’s physics turned off. Have the parents emit the kids from where they are and in a 1:1 population ratio and then kill the parent on the same frame the child is emitted.
unles you have sub frame sampling turned on you won’t know that a child has taken over on frame 31.

[Steve Bentley]

Can you reoutput your 3D nulls from your 3D package? If so, don’t use nulls. Stick a camera inside your object that would normally become your null and have it fly around with the object. When the camera comes in it will have rotation information

[Steve Bentley]

You dont’ have a keyboard like the Corsair models do you? You can set any key to be any key and we’ve had the mapping go haywire (ironically in the oppsite direction – we turn off the caps lock key, and one day it just came on by itself)