[Steve Bentley]

First, there aren’t enough polys to bend that cleanly. You can either subdivide the mesh once you have made the extrude editable or, before you have made it editable you can give the extrude an even mesh (its down at the bottom of the Extrude Caps attributes. – choose quads) and the make it editable.

Second you would probably be better with the spline deformer (in the shape of your A).

If you must use the hated bend, try using limited or within box. That way it won’t deform the whole character, just the bits inside the deform cage.
You could also try FFD or Mesh deformera – its more a cage paradigm that you can twist around any which way.

If this is a still you can also use a sweep object to make the A frame and then model the cross beam to join the two sides. The sweep will follow a curvy path for you.

Finally, you could really go to town and put bones inside the mesh and then move the bones about to get the deformations you are looking for.

[Steve Bentley]

The adjustment layer is applying the glow to every thing so even though you are masking the bag, the glow is looking at all pixels to determine the colors and the mask is just being applied to the adjustment layer not the effect itself.
I don’t have ChromGlow but perhaps there is a “use mask or use mask and effects” settings that may combined the mask into the effect. Another option may be “premultiply” in the effect’s settings that might do the trick.
A better approach to the shot would be to do a rough mask around the fairy layer, with a feather so you don’t have to be too accurate, and then place the that layer over an original of the shot and tell the effect to show the effect only. Then you can have the glow bloom over the back but not glow the back itself.

Even better might be to mask the fairy and then precompose her on a black solid. Then put the glow on the precomp layer in your outer comp. The precomp would sit over the original shot.

You may need a different blend mode with the Chrom glow in this method (screen or perhaps overlay)

[Steve Bentley]

Is it the chiseled look you are having trouble with?
Here’s a tutorial on how to acheive that.
https://vimeo.com/35313125
Its a shame after all these years that this isn’t part of text extruding just as bevels and rads are. Most other packages have a profile setting in the fillet that acheives this.

[Steve Bentley]

Like this

12656_nonroundeyeballs2.c4d.zip

[Steve Bentley]

Well, that was an incomplete answer wasn’t it!
Sorry about that. Once you have that part of the expresso set up, then you can link another invisible object’s rotation to the rotation of the tag (get rid of the constant’s in the expresso and replace with the output of said object).
Then have that invisible object “look at” your tracking object.

[Steve Bentley]

It depends on your mapping mode. If you use expresso to change the rotation of the texture tag with a spherical map its pretty easy. Other mapping modes will work but this might be the simplest for an egg shaped eyeball.

12655_nonroundeyeballs.c4d.zip

[Steve Bentley]

Don’t forget you can follow a track with and move, rotate, whatever another turned off version of your keying layer – in effect it becomes and independent “mask”.

[Steve Bentley]

Tell us more about the shot.
What does the car do? How does it pass through frame? Is the camera locked off, locked off on sticks and can pan, or handheld? Whats behind the car? Does anything pass in front of the car? What is the object you need to stick to the car?

[Steve Bentley]

If its not for a shot then just nest two planes in your null set up. Run the time marker up to where you have made your first two turns, and just before you make your third. Then make a new plane a child of the original plane, you can make plane 2 be exactly where the first is by zeroing out the coordinates of the 2nd plane. Then bring in nulls as children of the first plane and put them where plane 2’s rotation points are, setting them as one null parented to the other (4th turn will be a child of the 3rd turn null). Then make the 2nd plane a child of the nulls. animate nulls 3 and 4 dragging the second plane around. Use a display tag on the planes and animate their visibility in the tag so that on the frame before the 3rd turn, the first plane turns off and plane 2 turns on.

[Steve Bentley]

If I understand the problem correctly, you are telling the track to be only in 2D so you’re not really generating a solve for a 3D camera. But you need to view the E3D element in true 3D. It might track fine if it was a sphere in E3D because you wouldn’t see it not rotating in perspective, but if was more complex, even a simple cube, the eye would notice that it’s not shifting in perspective correctly compared to the moving car.

Is there a reason you can’t a true 3D camera solve right inside AE? (its an effect now so search for camera tracker in the effects and presets panel.)