[Steve Bentley]

And while it should be obvious, the spheres in the precomp will need a glow or gaussian blur on them to get that soft edge.

[Steve Bentley]

Two other tips – try animating the instability state in the effect rather than scatter (yes, I got to playing; you will still need a scatter amount but it can be fixed).
You can also use the rotation and twist but you might have to rotate your precomped sphere by the same amount so the balls in the effect don’t go “round the clock”. Well, they will, but with the sphere rotating by the same amount, and probably the precom itself too, they should look like they are staying put meanwhile you have all this random motion going on with the balls themselves.

[Steve Bentley]

You might be able to get there with CC Ball Action. Precomp your shaded spheres and the apply the effect on the precomp in the outer layer. In the effect, animate the scatter attribute and set the ball size to something like 10. I’m not sure if the scatter effect should be a random number on each frame or a smoothly changing amount.

[Steve Bentley]

I find the hot keys get lost (Win7) frequently. If you goto to Window/Customization/Customize commands and create a new hot key or remind a standard one what it should be, the rest will wake up and behave.

[Steve Bentley]

I solved the luma channel issue – if you change the hair tag generate type to “flat” you can then add a normal material ontop of the hair tag and use a luma only texture.

[Steve Bentley]

Yep, tried that too. The hair object generates the render tag and with the copy or merge that never gets triggered. The real mystery is why the hair count box is grayed out.
I’m almost done the copying and pasting of all the settings. Thats taking less time than trimming the project down. Of course the small version I was working with works just great so there’s no point sending that.

While we’re on the topic, I was hoping to add what amounts to a luminescence channel to the hair instead of the usual diffusion options that are available in the hair shader. Is there any way I can trick it? Pipe a lumanence output from another material into the diffuse port on the hair shader perhaps?

[Steve Bentley]

I should mention. That’s R19 on Win7.
Currently I’m rebuilding it in the larger project and copying and pasting each and all of the values from the previous set up. If only we had computers for these repetitive tasks!

[Steve Bentley]

Yep tried that. No luck.

[Steve Bentley]

Do you mean that the assets will reorganize within the square frame to have the same look and feel as they were in the 16:9 frame? Or as Tero suggests you just need a crop?
For just a crop you can drag your16:9 into another comp that is 1080×1080 and that will automatically trim that first comp live – so you can move things in the HD comp and see how it looks in square too without remaking either.

The other way for the same look and feel idea, is to position your assets in relation to the center and frame edge, not simply by scale and position (usually rotation looks after itself). Its best to use expressions for this so they can calculate things like even spacing and distance from edges. Then you can use a second part of those same expressions to alter the assets for your other aspect. When the second half of each expression is made active these will move assets to the same kind of relationship they had in the HD comp but formatted for a square, and then render out of a parent square comp that is cropping the original HD. You do have to put a switch on the expressions so that you can turn sections of them all on or off at once. Use the check box effect and link the expression math to that one effect. Remember that expressions feed the last number calculated to the attribute, so if let the code continue the first chunk for the HD version will be ignored. Basically it can be as simple as a giant if/else with the second calculation inside the “else” braces.
This can be easy or hard depending on the content design. But if its a pipeline for multiple screens of different formats that will be used over and over, its great because you just create for HD and let AE do the reorganization for the other formats.
When we do this, we also include sliders out in the square comp that link to the original expressions on the inner HD comp, so that from the square comp we can tweak positions or scales without affecting the original infrastructure.

[Steve Bentley]

Well first, this isn’t the same file as the golden eggs – there are lots of different and missing elements. So there is no way its going be identical. Oh ya and its coming from a version 4 revs ago – before the entire reflection engine was rewritten.

I also don’t know the render set up for that file – how many bounces? render engine? reflection fall off? gloss coat?

You can get there with either R14 or R18, its all in how you apply the reflections and the objects being reflected.

I’ll bet the difference is in the Fresnel application.