[Steve Bentley]

Remember. nurbs don’t actually render – its just so you can model with curves – those aren’t actual polys being shown there, but when the render engine kicks in it subdivides the curvy shapes in to triangles or quads so that in the end you are rendering with polys even though you started with curvy nurbs.

[Steve Bentley]

The key to gold is not the gold shader but whats around to reflect in the that shader. Think about it like a photo Studio. An all black room with soft boxes here and there and especially, surrounding the camera lens. You can make simple disks or squares with graduations of white on them (in the luma channel) and the add a compositing tag to those reflectors and tell them to not show up in the camera or cast shadows or affect AO, but have them show up in the reflections and GI channels.

[Steve Bentley]

Sketchup makes models that are “water tight”. In other words solids. C4D can do that too but it’s more of a surface modeller. Its probably that C4D is interpreting the inner sides of walls and wall ends as polys too (as it should) when you just need the outer skin.
If you have a rectangle of poly’s in the middle of a wall in sketch up, and you grab that face and pull, you get an extrusion coming out of the wall. If you do the same in C4D you end up distorting the entire wall, so C4D doesn’t push and pull geometry around without you first telling it to extrude (and even then not was well as Sketch up or Solid works). So there is extra info there in the SKUP file that C4d normally doesn’t have to deal with.
Try an OBJ export as there are often settings in the export where you can trim inside faces, combine coincident faces etc that may reduce the overall poly load.

[Steve Bentley]

It really depends on how that OBJ’s polys have been ordered and whether or not a UV map has been baked into the OBJ. In C4d, is there a little checkerboard tag next to the objects name in the object manager? If not then the UVW map is gone.
For something like your bell I would imagine that’s been created with revolve function (or lathe) so the UV’ should be well ordered. You can change the projection of the map in the texture tag’s attributes – based on your images I would imagine a flat projection with the orientation of the tag set to p:-90 (the flat projection assumes you want to “shine” the texture on a flat surface straight in front of you with the plane receiving the texture spanning the X,Y planes. To shoot from the top down you have to orient the texture (rotate in the X) so that it points straight down.)
With the shallow angles of the sides of this bell shape that should work, but a cylindrical map would probably be better – however the texture you provided is definitely not cylindrical.

[Steve Bentley]

The client needed a bunch of different aspect and sizes, some of which need the continuously rasterize to make sure everything scales nice and sharp, but they couldn’t figure out how to change the stage size without screwing up the look of the snow. We couldn’t either and still don’t know why the number of blobs changes especially since they are just pngs of patches of blobs.
When we change the aspect we have to shift elements around to accommodate the new composition layout.
I suppose shouldn’t have used the word render. The issue is how the elements appear in the viewer, stage, camera view or whatever you want to call it.
Its almost as if the min max depth clipping changes when you change the width of the comp and you get to see layers that until that point were too far from or too close to the default camera to show up.

[Steve Bentley]

Was there supposed to be an attachment? (you can just drag it in to the text window). Are you using DUIK?

[Steve Bentley]

For the circuit boards we often use the Compound Blur – one of the most poorly understood effects in AE. You can draw a path in Pshop (and now finally in AE) that graduates from tip to tail. You can use that as a reference element to create comet tails – the brighter the levels in the grad of the line the more Compound blur will blur that element. So when using the beam effect or 3D stroke or stroking a shape path or stoking text over time, you could always animate the “head” differently from tail but you can’t make the tail fade out. (ok you can ,with a mask but that’s tough when you go around a corner) but the compound blur will follow the path and in many cases (especially with thin things) a blur is the same as fade out.
So you just make all these comets that follow the paths of the circuits and then mask them with the circuit board alpha to clean the up.

[Steve Bentley]

How is that shield made? Is it a 3D element rendered in another package? A shield in element 3d or Zaxwerks? Or is it just an image that’s had its 3D button turned on in AE?
I looks like the shield as a photoshop file or a png that doesn’t have an alpha (if its a jpg then there’s your problem; jpgs can’t have alphas) and you are seeing the boundary of the image. Check the interpretation settings in the project window for that element – it could be AE couildn’t figure out what do alpha wise and you can force AE to assume a straight or premult alpha

[Steve Bentley]

Can I assume that the Fancy cube is a 3D render that is now 2D footage? When you bring that footage into AE, it has no knowledge of depth so any layers you put on top of that layer will land in front and any layers you put behind will be obscured by the cube’s alpha – even if those “in front” and “behind” layers are 3D solid layers. So putting the Red Solid on top, even though its a 3D layer, means it can’t “go behind” the cube’s flat render because there isn’t really any behind to go to. You can think of it as : when you add a 2D layer (or an adjustment layer) into a 3D AE scene, wherever that 2D layer is in the stack AE flattens all the layers below and renders them along with that 2D layer on a 2D plane that sits at level 0. Any 3D layers above that layer start the 3D stack again with that newly rendered “flat” behind them.

So a couple of options.

You can split the Solid layer (cntl/shiftD), or whatever you are replacing the solid with- one for behind(below) and one for the front (on top) of the 2D render of the cube, and use the cube’s alpha as a track matte for the one that sits behind (below). The top solid can just render on top and obscure the cube when it needs to and the behind one will be obscured by the cubes matte when it passes underneath. But that doesn’t always work since the solid can be partially obscured itself AND partially obscure the cube at the same time. You can also get ringing when the solid is edge on – even though its a 3D layer it has no z depth itself – its flat flat flat.

You could render out a depth map or a position map of of the scene in C4D and use one of the 3D effects in AE to mask the solid based on the depth information.This isn’t always the best and has some issues. You also need to render and comp in a high bit depth (not the same depth as the depth map) so that all the subtle differences in geometric depth can be captured.

You could use the track matte idea from the first solution and hand mask another layer of the solid in for spots where it both ends up behind and in front on the same frame.

I’m assuming you want to replace the solid with some other footage or you would have just rendered the whole thing in C4D and be done. Like an image that rotates about the cube?

You could use the cineware tools (or the C4D plug in if you are an older version of AE) and have the cube rendered from within After Effects. Then its truly 3D in the scene and the z position of the red solid is honored as it rotates in front and behind.

[Steve Bentley]

You can turn off the master gravity in the project settings and then add your own gravity object (under particles in the simulate menu) and point that object Y in the opposite direction you want gravity to pull. Add a sim tag to the objects your want gravity to affect and add the gravity tag to the simtag’s forceList area (make sure to set the force mode to “include”)