[Steve Bentley]

How was the curb generated? If its a sweep or a loft that should work. If its a deform you have to apply the texture with the object straight and then use a sticktexture tag to “record” the position of the map hooked to those UV’s and then do the deform.
I don’t think it has much to do with the Vray texture, but more the order of the UV’s in the original model.

[Steve Bentley]

I wonder if you can use the trick in character animation where the character would pick up and object and then give it to another character. Initially the object is controlled by itself, and then by the motion of the characters hand and then by the motion of the other character’s hand.
In your case the plane would be the object and nulls along the path would “takeover” to rotate the plane and then send it on its way to the next null.
The trick is the Parent Constraint tag – heres a link to a tut.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NjLWf5wwrE

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[Steve Bentley]

The problem with photos for things like floors is that the photo doesn’t often tile correctly and the photo is often a small section of the floor and you need a football field of floor, so if you just blow it up you get planks that are 3 feet across. Even products that boast a “seamless tile” sometimes aren’t. And taking a photo is tough too because the lighting will be different from one side to the other and therefore it won’t tile seamlessly either.

There is software that will tile things for you, or you can fake it by using photoshop and the offset filter (this puts opposite ends side by side) and then paint or color correct any issues before re offsetting the image back to normal.
There are also material libraries that generate floors etc from code.
The other problem with tiling for floors (the repeating pattern type, not the ceramic type), is that you see the same tile over and over again and a pattern starts to build up. So even if you get a true seamless tile texture, you really need more than one to spread about or the pattern will be obvious. “Hey, there’s that knot in the wood again….and again… and again.”

Finally, on your Pshop question. This could all be done Pshop easily (the whole comp, not just the floor element) and probably better than C4D. You can take multiple snaps of floors (preferably different parts of the same floor) and blend them with the perspective tool so they are all on the right angle. Once feathered together the differences in lighting will all blend to a cohesive whole. Making a checkerboard material where every square has it’s own image inside of C4D is actually quite hard. You could make the texture in Pshop and do the checkerboarding there and then its one big map in C4D. But once you have that, why not just angle the floor back with the persective tool or the transform tools or even make it 3D all right inside photoshop?

[Steve Bentley]

Actually if you just keep the legacy reflection and change the mix mode to normal or add, that does the trick too

[Steve Bentley]

Hey Eric, I had to do the same thing again with the eggs. I had to delete or turn off the existing reflection which I assume has been converted from a legacy version, and replace it with a Beckmann and then everything works fine.

To be fair it doesn’t look like your image (there’s no golden tone but that may be another matter). But I can see the cyc reflected, the eggs in each other and the cyc in the reflection of the reflected eggs.

It looks like the legacy Fresnel is using a mix mode of Multiply – that’s an odd choice for a reflection and may be why its not very bright. Here’s the file.

12647_blackeggsupdate.c4d.zip

[Steve Bentley]

Hi Marko,
I’ve been unable to download that project. Cow says its missing and it’s not even under your files directory.
Can you re drag it to the reply text entry box?

[Steve Bentley]

I’ve been seeing this of late as well. While I’m willing to admit a carbon based error, I’ve been using AE since before it was AE so…
I’m not sure if DUIK is doing this or not but check that you actually have your work area set. I’ve been finding the work area collapsed far too many times for it to simply be me. So the warning isn’t wrong many times – there aren’t more than two frames to preview because the in and out of the work area have been slammed together. Did DUIK do that? Not sure, but maybe this will help.

[Steve Bentley]

Or you can go the other way – animate your 2D character in AE with the puppet tool or DUIK or (there’s another one but it escapes me at the moment). Render those out as animations with alphas and then bring them into C4D in materials on flat “cards”. You can shift the prerendered animations in time inside the materials animation tab (its a little counter intuitive but give us a shout if you get lost), and now you can see them animate in the preview window.
Then you can stay in your 3D world where you have the most flexibility.

While AE can talk to C4D and render the C4D stuff inside AE along side all the 2.5 elements in your layer stack, and while Element 3D could do this too, I always feel a little handcuffed in this mode. You don’t have the classic 4 views in AE that you do in C4D, so positioning things is clunky, double that for Element3D as you are inside yet another interface (yes you can view things from different angles in AE but there are limitations: you can’t see beyond the frame edge without scrolling over, and if stuff gets too far from the ortho camera it doesn’t show up and axis disappear).

I have also found (and this may be complexity of objects) that the render engine in C4D is much faster than letting AE shepherd the C4D renders through Cineware. Plus, rendering in C4D, you get to use 3rd party renderers like Octane or Maxwell or Cycles. Keep in mind that when rendering C4D stuff in AE you technically have two apps open and both are ram hogs, so if the scene is heavy there can be more drive caching going on that would be needed if you rendered one at a time

You can set up dummy objects (like the buildings in your example) that are simple AE native things or imports of the geometry from C4D as place holders so you know where stuff is while you are animating your characters.

[Steve Bentley]

There’s coffee and python and we’ve done some .js for super custom things.

[Steve Bentley]

I’ve got a rev of R14 still on the system so I can look at it in that.