[Steve Bentley]

You could just parent the object to a 3D null that is already pointing the right direction (the null becomes the reoriented anchor point). Then you would have control animating in the direction you want while still having control over the object within the nest. Wherever the parent goes or points the child will follow. And the child can rotate independantly of the parent if you like.

The issue with 3D layers in AE is that they really aren’t true 3D layers. So the anchor widget is fixed in its orientation in reference to the flat plane that is the layer. You can offset the anchor position in the x and y axis, but up is always Y. You’ll notice that the pan behind tool, that lets you move the anchor point around, doesn’t work on the Z axis because that “3D” layer has no depth. So if you could reorient the axis, as you can in C4d, the X or Y might have to point into a dimension that isn’t actually there (enter Rod Serling with the music!)

This is not the case inside Element3D where you are actually using 3D objects, but remember Element is then rendered and placed on a flat plane in the layers list, so it is doable inside Element but Element is its own 3D world. (hence the name)

[Steve Bentley]

All the links would be inside one instance of Element as an effect on one layer. And really its only going to be one true link with the others clones of that original. So the original is at 0,0,0 say, then clone A is moved down one chain link length along the path (less two chain link thicknesses) and rotated 90 degrees or so (you can build in some randomness so each link is not at a perfect 90 from the one before and the one after). There are settings for having the link “follow” the orientation of a path or motion. This means you may have to import the 3D link with its z axis pointing a certain direction (usually along its length).

Glowing glass is very doable in Element but it may or may not reflect and refract the other objects in your scene if they aren’t inside the same instance of element as well. There are ways around this (environment maps for instance) but its not a single button operation.

As for C4D, by AE2017 it was pretty seamless as I recall by that point. You can either render the elements in C4d and import them to AE or import the c4d project into AE and have the entire project as a layer and use the C4D render engine to render it from inside AE. When you make a change to the C4d Project it updates in AE.

[Steve Bentley]

So I assume there is a c4d layer in there somewhere (otherwise why use that render engine) and I assume the petals of the flower aren’t it. They are psd layers as standard AE layers correct?
It could be that both the C4D layer and the petals layers (or at least some of them) occupy the same z space. When the z coordinate is the same for 3 layers they can often pop back and forth in front and then behind others as the rounding of the 3D matrix math decides who is in front and who is in behind.
The C4d render engine renders as AE would but then renders the C4D layers as flat layers and treats them like any other layer in AE, so there isn’t really any 3D geometry from C4D in there, its just a flat plane with imagery rendered to it by the C4D render engine.

[Steve Bentley]

I wouldn’t say it should not be used for video footage, it actually does a great job (and no destructive compression!) However its not the best for playback. You need a really strong computer and graphics card to play back anything of size.
While you can have a keyframe setting other than one, settings other than one can produce pulsing changes like a true compression does. But its a great way to store footage (at least 8bit footage) as long as you use a keyframe distance of 1 (in other words a keyframe every frame) and that way every frame is RLE and completely rebuildable on decode without introducing artifacts. If the footage is noisy you don’t save much in size, but for green screen or mattes the files can be truly microscopic.
However in these days of HD and 4k, 16 and 32 bit comps, log LUTS and raw camera footage, where were trying to tease out every last inch of the gamut, and 8bit format leaves a lot of the data behind.

[Steve Bentley]

ya wmp doesn’t know what an alpha is so it just displays whats in the rgb channel. And with glowy effects that can be psychedelic.

[Steve Bentley]

To me that first image (that looks obviously wrong) may in fact be correct. All those wild aritfacts are only in the RGB channels. If you put that in AE and it has an alpha aroudn the letters the alpha will cut off all that crazy stuff and leave you with what you probably want. If there is no alpha then either AE is not seeing it and you have to “interpret” the footage – right click and choose interpret footage – then choose either premult or straight alpha. If those choices aren’t there then this image has not been rendered with an alpha or the alpha is full frame white (as is the case here).
So this is either because the program that rendered the image can’t make PNG’s with alphas properly or the settings when rendered weren’t correct.

So that the alpha doesn’t cut off the edges of objects that are on black, a straight alpha will render pixels extending out past the edges of the objects in what seem like crazy colors but all make sense once the alpha cookie-cutters the extra junk away. If you did this with a pumultiplied alpha you would get a clean alpha as you expect in the alpha channel but the text would be clean and on black in the RGB channels too. The problem is that the premult alpha will now let some of the black at the edges of thergb’s antialiasing peek through in the alpha’s antialiasing and everything will have a fringe around it (see bad blue screen from the early 1980s).
(if a premult has been set up properly this doesn’t happen)
Here’s what that frame should look like (give or take) Sorry we can’t make PNG’s anymore in AE so this is a pshop file. Open it in pshop and look at the RGB channel and then the alpha channel (the one below the blue channel). When you bring this into AE and tell it that the alpha is straight it will look correct.

13159_671536withalpha.psd.zip

[Steve Bentley]

Instead of increasing contrast etc which can add or enhance video artifacts, you can also use one of the color records to do the track. Red is usually better than green which is usually better than blue. Or you can combine different records in unusual ways (channel math) to enhance or create difference channels and track those. Its all still the orginal data without squashing the colorspace.

[Steve Bentley]

Ah, avacado screen! Usually the result of craft services perparinig a little too much guac and an over-zealous but hungry crew… shooting on a lurching boat.

I’m with Mark on this one. Mocha!. Keep in mind that mocha “learns” the shapes you are dealing with, so depending on camera moves, the characters/objects in front of the screens will not impact you as much as you might think.

You can still key those screen shapes and colors even with the drabness of the green, but there’s a lot of green sparkles in the drummer’s dress so there will be roto required. (or are we seeing raw here and the colors are actually much more punchy when timed?)

If you start getting a fringe on the olive screens (due to the blur) once everything is keyed, you can always reduce the green screen element to gray and have that fill in the fringe. They eye isn’t very good at color and when presented with a little gray between other colors it usually assumes the gray is color too.

[Steve Bentley]

What version of AE and Element are you on? More recent AE’s came with C4d lite (you may not even know you have it).
A chain of links or bunch of single links making a chain should be about the same horsepower needed. Its all geometry and 12 separate links takes the same geometry/memory as one object with 12 links in it. It might even be better as singles because you could turn off self reflections and just have the chain links reflect each other (assuming a shiny chain) wheas one big model would have to self reflect to see the other links. It might also be better because in Element each of those links is just an instance of the first one so even less memory is used.

I also got to thinking that BOA might be able to do this if you have it (if not have a look at aescripts.com)

Whats the chain made of (texture wise)? I got to wondering if there were other ways of doing this. 3D stroke might do it (assuming no rust and simple coloring) as might VC’s free saber plugin (assuming a chain made of light). Particular can now do 3D objects so sprites generated along a moving spline might do the trick and then you assign the link objects to the sprites.

But again you should be able to use the cloner in Element to populate a single link (cloned) along a path and all you have to animate is the path. You could also tweak the clones over time to add a bit of secondary animation. It won’t be as good as a set of real links in a dynamic simulation with collision and gravity turned on in C4D but it might do the trick.

[Steve Bentley]

Hey Rikk, I may be missing what you are trying to do but I don’t think you can do that with element and an existing chain model. The model of the chain is just fixed geometry inside element so you can’t treat it like a string where you can pull on the ends at least realistically.

That being said, you could use the mograph like system in Element to place individual clones of 3D links along a spline/path and then animate the spline or tie the ends of the spline to object in your scene.

Or export your nulls where you want the chain to attach to and use Cineware to animate the chain in C4D using any of the rope tricks or mograph or dynamics tricks on the chain structure and then bring that C4D project back into you AE project – AE will render the chain for you in a C4D render engine all within AE.

You might also be able to use Newton to do this if you have it – its a physics based engin for AE but I’m not sure if it works on 3D geometry yet.