[Steve Bentley]

I think it might be a procedure order issue. Try putting the displacement in its own material and put that on the object first then use your ambient occlusion shader on top of that. You may have to “mix” the textures or you could use the reverse ambient occlusion “channel” as an “alpha” to map the last shader over the displacement effects.

If its the “i’ve been up too long and I’m sleepy” problem… is displacement turned on in the render options? I’m always turning it off to work fast and then forgetting to turn it back on.

[Steve Bentley]

Choose your spline and either change the kind of spline it is (bezier, cubic etc), or change the Intermediate points setting or change the angle or number setting – or do all three
For adaptive, the lower the Angle setting the more “points” are put in between so the smoother the line is and the more “detail” the line can hold.
Using Uniform places each spline node equidistant from all the others and you can then jack up the Number setting to increase or decrease the overall number of nodes along the spline.

Be careful though, if you are using these splines to extrude or loft or sweep or other things in mograph, each new node on the spline can create a new isoparm along your final geometry which can increase render times – more polys to deal with. You have to find a balance.

[Steve Bentley]

Adding noise to the final image will fool the eye into not seeing the banding.

The issue can stem from a number of places:

1) it might not actually be in the file- with 8 bit monitors there are only so many versions of a color to go round. So if you have a blue gradient that crosses the entire screen and you are using the sRGB or adobeRGB gamut for your screen set up, there just aren’t that many versions of blue in that gamut to allow for each pixel across 1920 of them to get its own unique color. So you end up with, say, 10 pixels in a row getting the same exact tone and hue before the next hue gets put in on the next 10 pixels – voila! stripes!
So you can fiddle with your screen/gfx card colorspace or get a higher bit screen. But thankfully, when printed this may not show up if this is the cause.

2) same issue as above but the color space of the file is insufficient to allow enough colors. This becomes doubly (or trebley) true when you start gradating from one color to another. There are only so many cyans in a specific color space and only so many yellows etc so you can start getting what amounts to moires building up as these two stepping patterns become interference.

3) some effects (like glows) can compress the rate at which a grad spreads out and interacts with a grad below (when using a non “normal” transfer function)

4) The mask or clippingmask of a layer may not have enough bit depth to prevent that layer interacting, causing banding with the layers below. This goes double for images brought in that are used as masks or content – check what bit depth they are.

5) some layering transfer functions can cause the colors to roll around the “end” of the color spectrum/gamut and depending on the function can begin to clip. Culprits include the grouping that starts with Softlight and ends with Pinlight. Darken and lighten also have funny math that causes clipping or “compression” depending on whats below the layer – in these cases try screen, add or multiply – the worst these do is add up to white or black (the end of all clipping)

6) any compression put on the image at the end (jpg for instance) immediately reduces the color available to the file – see above for number of colors available problem.

7) make sure you aren’t looking at the preview proxy – its always horrible

[Steve Bentley]

Is it a mac/pc thing? On PC I got QT access back when I changed to 2019. Last poster didn’t indicate which platform.

[Steve Bentley]

I think the OP wants to rotate the widget so that the layer can be zero’ed out with it pointing in a new direction. I’m not aware of being able to use the pan behind tool or similar to change the rotation offset. If there was the anchor point attribute would have to have a rotation value as well as position.

[Steve Bentley]

Hey Rikk,
You have to think about it the other way round.
Element lives inside of AE is just a flat layer. So its best to send the values of the 3D AE null layers into the values of the objects (or “particle replicator positions” as Element calls them – under each “Group”). The position and rotation of those particles shows up in the effect dialogue for element. This wont be a simple pick whip thing for a number of reasons:

1) the position of objects in Element don’t always relate as one might think to the outside world of your AE comp. So there’s usually an offset that’s required where you will add a constant value to the expression math you get from the null’s position (which you could pick whip, but only to get the initial raw value of where the null is) to feed into the object’s position in the Element effect dialogue.
2) for this kind of animation you can either use the cloning tool inside Element or as Michael pointed out (all refreshed with his new avatar – so that’s why he’s thinking so far ahead of the rest of us aging fx artists: he’s soo young!), you can make what amounts to an IK chain with a set number of objects in Element – each would be in its own group. (the key to Ik chains is what the objects “look at” as they move around.) Again these are calculations you have to add into the expression that drives where the “particles” are positioned.

So while this is doable in AE, I think its’ going to be easier in C4D for a bunch of reasons.
1) You can have C4D set up the IK for you and it just kinda works.
2) you can impart dynamics and self collision math with just a few buttons pushes – this is perfect for chains.
3) the data from the nulls and the camera and the lights in AE can be sent into C4D (and visa versa) so that everything lines up and you have targets to play with in your IK chain.
4) you’ll probably have better luck with any depth effects (including penetration) like haze or blur.
5) you might also have better luck with the motion blur in C4d. When you get into expressions often the thing you want to blur isn’t moving as far as ti appears to be so AE blurs it minimally.

Then the only decision is whether to have C4D render the chain and you comp the resultant frames in AE or you have AE do the C4D render for you and bring in the C4D project in as a layer in AE. Keep in mind that while you are getting the image of true 3D geometry in the C4D layer inside of AE, it’s only a layer at that point and as such is flat. So if the chain goes into the distance, and there are other objects near the chain, the c4d layer will only overlap those AE objects that: are below it in the layer stack, or if the chain’s layer (assuming a 3D layer) is above the zdepth assigned to the 2d “cards” of all the other 3d AE layers

I’m not sure if packages like DUIK (free by the way, but there are others) can do IK chains in depth or not but you could use them to animate dummies or nulls in AE and then get the data from those and pass the position and rotation data of each to element3D objects.

[Steve Bentley]

I guess we need to know what layers are c4d and what layers are pshop. It sounded to me like the petals were “flat” pshop layers with their 3D object checkbox on within AE. If that’s the case those items should be handled by the internal AE renderer, no? Or does Ae truly hand off the whole thing to C4D? (that doesn’t seem very efficient)

[Steve Bentley]

Just as a note: after a point upgrade in 2018 our QT animation-best capability has returned, and even up on 2019 it’s still there. (on PC)
But walter’s quite right, with the advances in color depth and and codecs that allow more channels and info, the QT formats are long old in the tooth.
Keep in mind too that the camera used for capture can be putting a spin on things compression wise, so as long as you don’t make things worse (for noise or keying etc) these days you don’t neccesarily need an “uncompressed” format for fidelity.
I will miss the RLE size advantages, especially on keys, but I won’t miss the banding when there weren’t enough colours or gamut headroom to go round.
BTW the ffmpeg prores on pc worked a treat!

[Steve Bentley]

Can’t you export from QT to the avi format? You need the pro version (last one was v7.7 if memory serves.) there’s also the free and incredibly fast and robust ffmpeg.
As for size. Double check the size of that screen, AE does one of the larger cavases and the playback boxes at the stadium aren’t usually as robust as that. Is it possible they have stiched two screens/players together? Also sometimes the multiplexer needs a format where the footage is in a block of two 72 pixel high rows, one over the other but half the total width and it cherry picks the pixels to distribute. So the footage kind of has a carriage return halfway along.

[Steve Bentley]

There are only a few plug ins that can bring in true 3d objects to ae (element, form, particular, zaxwerks etc) so there are limited ways to interact with objs and with the exception of Particular you are working within the environment of the plug in (to allow true 3D). I was thinking you could use the cloning system in element and do it inside element, but you might be able to do it with particular too. Not quite as much control but for a bullwhip-chain it should work. Emit the particles along the animated path with a zero velocity.
Now that i’m thinking about it, you could use the new masknode-to-null feature to extract points along an animated path (the whip) and then asign or emit objects from those points.
A problem I just thought of is that paths in ae are 2D. So you might have to use them on a 3D plane and then use LocalToGlobal coordinate conversion in expressions to tease out the true position of the “3D” path.
In the end I think this will be soooo much easier in c4D.