[Steve Bentley]

Can you upload that file and maybe we can spot the difference?

[Steve Bentley]

In the reflection tab of the material in my R19, I can see its a Beckmann but I think that might be C4D interpreting from and earlier rev. I see no reflections. But if I turn that reflection off and add a new Beckmann, everything works fine.

[Steve Bentley]

Oh, and Eric, you can just drag your file in to the reply text box and that will upload it to the Cow. Its a little easier for us to download that way.

[Steve Bentley]

Hey Brian, I think the edit button is different between browsers. I only see mine when in collapsed thread mode and after I’ve hit reply to one of my posts. (I can’t actually run in collapsed thread mode), I normally see the expanded thread with all entries visible and readable, but when I hit replay I can finally see just the titles stacked in the thread and the edit button.
Win 7 Pro Firefox

[Steve Bentley]

Yes, just hit reply to your post, then go up and you will see an edit button at the bottom of the list of all the posts in the thread.

Re missing reflections.
That shiny glossiness you are seeing is the reflection of the soft box. There is nothing to reflect in the ball scene you sent. Just the floor and balls.
You can force a reflection even without geometry by using the environment channel in the materials. You can put an image of the scene you want reflected in there and it will do the job right quick, but won’t reflect other objects in the scene.
The other option is to surround your scene with a giant sphere that is not visible to camera and map a scene on that. Its similar to the environment tab but does a better job because its a true reflection of the environment and the objects in the scene.
And you can mix the two techniques when you want to bend the rules of physics.

[Steve Bentley]

Is it the lines simulating the audio spectrum that you want or the glowyness?
Guessing its the glowyness: that’s probably just multiple copies of the original, some with blurs and probably one with a directional blur along the direction of the lines. Then screen those extra blur layers over the original sharp layer. Often too you can reduce the opacity of the original so its not perfectly sharp at the core. Vary the intensity of the blurs and opacity of the overlays until you get what you want.
For the blur layers sometimes you have to put a levels filter on before the blur. Crush the levels a little so the medium tones get pushed either to dark or light to reduce the fog density from getting to high everywhere.

[Steve Bentley]

I’m in R19 and I don’t get what you get when you duplicate the ball. I don’t get the arc you have at the bottom of the sphere (in yours its where the red arrows are in mine).
If you watch the GI work itself out you can see all the reflections rather harshly and that’s the best way to make sure they are all there – they can get pretty subtle once the GI is finished cooking.
The difference could be that the camera angle changed – I just slid mine over to accomodate the other ball, but I think you have gone higher so that might make another bounce off the ball in the floor (and then back to the ball) show up.

You can also change how many bounces you get in the render settings.

I’m not seeing an issue in R19. but I’m pretty sure back in R11 the reflection tab on the material didn’t have the stackable specular and reflections option that we have now, and that makes reflections much more real and much more controllable. There was also an issue circa R13 where if you didn’t let the objects reflection bounce enough times, the final (small) reflection of the other ball would be black in the first ball. That was fixed in R14 I think.

[Steve Bentley]

You could also make a null whose position you can separate and have that drive the values of the path transform in the shape layer. Make an expression on the transform, leave the default highlighted and then pick whip the position element from the null.

For the shape itself, you can have individual control over the path nodes by “create nulls from path” in the Windows menu. This gives you the option to create a bunch of nulls automagicaly for every null in the path. When you move those nulls (and you can separate the xyz for the nulls) the nodes on the path follow their respective null.

[Steve Bentley]

There is also a setting in the first page of the prefs to “place footage at composition start”. If you turn that off AE will put your footage at your time marker. (you can use cntrl forwardslash, cmd forward slash on Mac to do this in a keystroke)

[Steve Bentley]

You can use the wiggle expression on the transparency attribute. Use a long period (time between “changes”) and you may have to set min and max of 0 and 100. You may also have to round off the result as opacity only takes positive integers.