[Steve Bentley]

Instead of keying you can also use the set channel effect to send a channel that won’t have any red in it (then invert it) to be used by your particle engine. You might think, “I’ll use the red channel” but the white squares will also show up in that channel as white is one third red. But the red squares won’t show up in the blue or green channels, so use one of those and invert it – that will give you a black and white element where the red squares are white and you can use that to drive you particle emission.

[Steve Bentley]

You can also use FFMpeg to strip out the old audio and add new audio without reencoding the video portion.

[Steve Bentley]

You can also achieve this out of the box with Saber – videoCopilots free plug in. No particular needed. But there is nothing wrong with Particular for this use either. You can even do it just with fractal noise.

As for the glowy goodness, (and adding to what Andrew said), we’ll often start with multiple copies of the effect Screen’d on top of the original, just to see how it looks. Often you have to crush those Screen’s layers or the brightness builds up too much. You can also add a Gaussian blur to the extra copies along side the Level’s crush (Levels first please) and duplicate those layers a few times to get the deep color and glow to build up.

[Steve Bentley]

Double check the color space in C4D’s render settings when using EXR’s. In R19 it defaults, for some baffling reason, to sRGB instead of none or linear or 709. This is like buying a ferrari with a rev limiter on it set to 1000 RPM. Once set your project will be fine for all of its iterations, but I’ve noticed when starting a fresh project, there is the pesky sRGB again.

[Steve Bentley]

ya that darn work thing. I know the feeling.
I know Dave’s company slapped a “you shall not pass” sticker on his version of AE2018. We’ve been pretty happy with 15.03 (albeit I’ve gotten way too friendly with the “purge all” command) but dipping our toe in anything newer resulted in all sorts of issues, not the least of which was the loss of QT codecs. We run all our mattes in QT animation best to save drive space (with 8K it adds up) and I missed that most of all. I know why its been phased out but I haven’t found a good RLE replacement yet.

[Steve Bentley]

Or if you want to have particles emitted from an object and don’t go anywhere just make their velocity zero (and any randomness 0 as well) and after the first frame keyframe the birth rate to 0. They will be frozen in the spot they were born.

[Steve Bentley]

So updating AE will fix the bug with DUIK? but what do i do about all the issues with AE >15.1 – Been down that road already and surprisingly still have my hair.
The massive negative layers numbers I was getting when this issue cropped do go away once I save and restart AE. I ended up just rebuilding that character and all is well.
It does seem to be an AE issue. If I save and restart that DUIK error will go away for a while. But I still don’t know why I couldn’t get past the issue on that one set of art.

[Steve Bentley]

I just did a quicky to show you the Link List set up. Its not complete by any means but might help
12600_linklistsetup.c4d.zip

[Steve Bentley]

You can also use the Material node (Iterators) to output the list from the material manager. This doesn’t change but you can change where that output begins from. So if you had Red, Green Red Green, and you set the First Material node to a 0, as you iterate through a list of the material tags you would get the same pattern. But make the First material node equal to 1 you will get a pattern starting with Green.
This is “Learning to fly by first inventing air”, but with your method not working I thought it might help.

I stripped it down even further- two material nodes and two pairs of material tag nodes with a boole and a NOT to switch between which material gets sent to which pair of tags. Again, one change and then it’s frozen. This should work. But with two of the same tag in the expresso window, they might be fighting. That’s why I suggested a link list of both tags and materials – you can iterate through each and there won’t be any conflicts.

[Steve Bentley]

I got it to work, but not the way you have it now. (nothing wrong with that way but i’ve got QWERTY dents in my forehead so I tried something else.
You can make a link list of the materials from the material manager (just drag them into the link list). Then send in an index value to the link list – that will output the material of choice and send it into the connected material tags.