[Steve Bentley]

Would changing to a velocity graph help? You can do that here in the curve editor.

I’m not sure I understand the reference to opacity – it only has one attribute but yes you can change the curve on that in the curve editor. Opacity is just a number between 0 and 100 so it doesn’t have an x or y. The position the point has on the curve is just the value mapped against where keyframe is in time.

[Steve Bentley]

We’ve seen this quite a bit. It seems to be depth issue: S&T doesn’t realize that the “X” lines are farther than the object that should be blocking them. The best way we have found is to render certain objects on their own and then comp them in later. And yes often you have to render “over and under” alphas of all the other layers to use as mattes. A pain I know.
Other issues you may see pop up that are related to this is small line segments vanishing for a frame or two. It can make for a very buzzy image. Again it seems to be a depth issue but this time the lines are fighting with the skin of the object that has created the lines in the first place. S&K is a marvel but even after all this time it still has more than its share of glitches

[Steve Bentley]

A couple of approaches:
You can use multiple particle systems (the plain old emitter with force objects can get you pretty close to Xpresso and Thinking Particles but true, you have much more control with TP). Use one system for the floaters and one for the sinkers. You can assign different gravity to each (Oh and make sure to turn your global gravity off in the project settings so it doesn’t come in to play and fight your gravity objects).

You can also use a deflector for the floaters to simulate surface tension. Just put a sub surface plane just below your water level and animate the deflectors intensity. If you choose “Front” for collision type, the particles could drift up through the sub surface plane but then not be able to get back through. With TP you have to have geometry so make sure to make all your deflector objects editable.

The trick with TP and multiple particle “groups” is to use the TP geometry object and then a PPass node and a PGroup node, so that both emitters can work together but be controlled by different forces. Warning – there are two Pgroup nodes (shakes head), you want the Standard one. Make sure all your forces and particles and the TP geometry object all have the correct group number assigned and they are all being fed from the PPass object – it doles out he particles the emitter has sent into the PGroup.

The other way is to render each particle set separately and comp them together. This approach might work better if you need to basically “freeze” time for one of the sets. There is a freeze TP node but sometimes you need the global system (in the project settings) to freeze or slow or reduce the jittering when things should be stopped for a certain effect. If you use the global one it will affect both systems so render them separately with different global settings.
Many of the settings to keep “particles at rest” from buzzing about are in the project settings under Dynamics and Expert.

Its pretty rare we use only one emitter to do particle job.
Does that help?

[Steve Bentley]

Thanks Brian.
I think something’s up. I did try a Mass Map and that doesn’t seem to be working at all (I was using it like a weeble). I even tried moving the mass center below the object.
But I’ll give the top spring a try (like one of those Boston Dynamics robots!)
And yes I have the Individual Elements button set correctly (at least Manual-Correct for what that’s worth)
Cheers

[Steve Bentley]

Also try increasing the bit depth of your project. If you want to upload the project we can take a look.

[Steve Bentley]

I posted a rant about this a few days ago (and got a bit of grief over it).

What I can’t get anyone at Adobe to answer is “What new feature of AE relies on some unique feature of Win 10 in order to run?” In other words, couldn’t all that 2019 is doing be done on Win 7? There doesn’t seem to be a need for the new OS architecture, it’s simply a moving-forward approach. The only answer I’ve been given so far has to do with Audio (riiiiight – for an image compositor? – and that’s what we’re focusing on?). And moving forward is fine, but do you really want to get on a plane whose engines haven’t had much testing and have known issues?
Initially, I was told the Mac folks were in the same perforated boat – you had to go to Mojave. But I’m now told 2019 will still run on High Sierra. I’d be curious to know what the percentage of Mac to PC use is for Adobe given that Mac is less than 10 percent over all.

I don’t have an issue with Adobe setting the pace of progress, but using an OS that still has some serious issues as the foundation of your brave new world seems a little short sighted at this point.
Windows NT hung around ( and is still around) for so long because it was a stable, or as stable as any Microsoft code can be, architecture for mission critical stuff. Win 7 is the new ubiquitous generation of that; testified by the lackluster adoption of Win 8 and the DOA Win 9.
While Win 10 just overtook Win7 as a percentage of installs (by less than a percentage point mind you. And I want that number qualified as I think it may include sales numbers that grades the curve – just try and buy a Win 7 these days), what isn’t being considered is associated installed infrastructure – grafix cards that are compatible with both the OS and the apps that run, Network protocols for render farms, smart switches – even printers, and the drivers for all of the above. And then there’s the overhead – seems that 2019 runs slower on Win 10 than the equivalent Win 7 machine and 2018. Has the disposability that permeates our consumer life now infiltrated our digital one?

I am happy staying where we are right now with 2018 on Win 7 (and we usually lag the current version anyway so we can avoid the tiger traps until they are known and possibly covered with a shaky patchwork of reeds), The real issue is that everyone is on this “have to have the latest” craze (thank you iPhone!) and with the auto update in CC difficult for the layman to get turned off (this goes double for Win 10) we have started getting files from clients we can’t open because they are 2019 based, and many don’t even realize they are no longer working on the version they thought they were. And we’ve started getting tech support questions because Win 10 has gone and updated itself and now some aspect of the clients apps no longer work. Perhaps the issue isn’t the incessant updates, perhaps its an issue of giving the professional back control of his world.

With multiple software and hardware players that rely on each others apps and platforms continually upgrading willy nilly, with seemingly no cooperation or organization between them or forward looking plan (or perhaps its exactly the opposite – can you say “Collusion”? – of course you can, everyone can these days) its seems we’re running downhill so fast we’re going to stumble along the way. And right now, Win 10 looks like that tree root that snags the heroine in the horror movie. CEO’s may ship, but nobody said the things that ship have to work (and so many things haven’t through the years)

You’ve got to make the change at some point I agree, but to thumb your nose at (based on the installation statistics) half your base seems, well… rude. Funny how new advances in software seem to come along at the same pace as fiscal calendars. Wag that dog baby!
Now where did I put that copy of AE that works on Win 9?

[Steve Bentley]

I saw the previous post with the columns – be aware that exporting/baking will remove the infinitely zoomable resolution you have in the noise functions within cinema. So if you get too close to the mapped object in Unreal or Unity the texture will get soft as the noise is not being generated on the fly anymore. So keep that in mind when choosing a pixel size and resolution for your material export. Bigger usually means you can get close before you see softness, but bigger also can lead to ringing or chatter (especially with noise functions) as the Unreal engine has to downsample the mapped image when the objects are farther away. If this happens you can alter the antialiasing settings for that object alone (in Unity or Unreal) or try changing the interpolation (MIP or SAT etc). I’m not sure about Unreal but in Unity you have a bit more control over the MIPmapping pyramid structure so you can tweak the resolution of the material maps for different distances from camera to reduce ringing.

[Steve Bentley]

You can also use gray scale maps (think “alpha”) in the alpha and transparency channels to define where the sugar is instead of “masking” the area with geometry boundaries. Two noise textures should do it – one for the small “holes” and granules and one scaled up to create a noise edge where the effect dies away – then just multiply or screen the two noises together in a layer inside your alpha channel.
Use the same bipacked noise layer for the bump channel (this may or may not work depending on your lighting)
Or instead of bump, you could put it in the displacement channel. (warning – displacement can significantly increase render times – but its a still no worries – this will produce a more realistic result than bump.)
If you have octane, its displacement is photoreal and has no smearing on the edges of the displacement (to crazy extrusions!)
You might want to add the noise layers into the luma channel as well to give the whiteness a little kick.
Then finally add an inverse of the noise layers into the either the roughness channel of the reflection channel or just as a mask for the reflections channel – powdered sugar is very non reflective.

[Steve Bentley]

I think what the OP is after is the paradigm used in Pshop – you can just bash the number keypad and change the opacity of layer without any mouse interaction.

[Steve Bentley]

A quick cheat can be to use the mesh warper effect. This won’t work on everything but we use it a lot for faces that need to turn a little, and it would work perfectly for your mattress example.
Split the mesh into two sections (so 3 horizontal units) and one vertical. Then animate the middle divider left and right a little… voila! Parallax!
If the front “corner” of the mattress or the nose on the face is off center, you often have to use more divisions so you have have a division on the front apex of the virtual geometry. And then then just animate all the divisions in concert. The only thing missing is a shift constraint when you animate the division nodes, so be careful when moving the nodes left and right so you don’t get any vertical transformation.
You can also do this with the reshape effect, but because of its triangular interpolation math (instead of quads) sometimes this introduces curved space in the separate halves. (works for faces may not work for a box with grids on every face – like a skyscraper)