[Steve Bentley]

If you need to deform with a texture you can, but you will need a crazy level of subD’s to make it smooth and a high enough resolution map to do it.

You can also achieve this with invisible letters and Ambient Occlusion and no deforming – just have them cast a shadow on the plane as they scale up or rise up (towards camera).

If you have Octane, its deformation routine can generate a billion more subdivisions economically than C4D’s native engine can.

If you use the dynamics engine you will probably see subtle little flickers even at a very high subD level.

[Steve Bentley]

Hmmm, somethings up. Initially the output of the Switch was a bool, which didn’t jive with the Equal. But after toggling the Switch to Bool and back to Real its now outputting numbers as you were expecting (and probably seeing).
This may be an issue with my brand new build of R19.
Let me keep looking.

[Steve Bentley]

Just having a first look – could it be that you are expecting the output of the switcher to be “1” or some other number? It’s not. In your default setup up, the output of the switcher is “true”. So in the equal node, “1”does not equal “True” (even though in many bool tests it does) and you get a false.
Will keep looking but though that might help.

[Steve Bentley]

The align to spline snaps the anchor point of the object (in this case the new parent null) to the spline. So just move the anchor point with the Enable Axis tool until the whole thing lines up. You can also do this anchor point adjustment with the rotation of the null so that the wheel is facing the right way.

[Steve Bentley]

I’ve been getting many failures of late. Close the project that’s giving you trouble. Create a new project, create a new comp and solid, add a new version of Element. If it succeeds, close that project, close AE and then open the project you wanted to in the first place.
If it doesn’t succeed, close AE and start the process again with a new comp, solid and element. When you close this one you should be able to open the problem project.
I think there is a pref that gets corrupt. Starting from scratch writes a new one.

[Steve Bentley]

C4d has to take over all rotation channels (HPB) so that it can control the rotation of the wheel around the path. It may seem overkill because you are probably only wanting the wheel to follow the path tangentially in the wheels H (Y) but think about if the path looked like a Rube Goldberg machine and the path had a 3rd dimension to its travellings. At some point the rotations to keep the wheel aligned to the path would add up to a gimbal lock – so C4D needs all the rotation channels to control that.
The solution is to nest your already rotating wheel in a null and have the null follow the path. The advantage of this is that you can have the null not be at the wheels center so it can literally stick to the road while the wheel rotates about its own axis somewhere above the road.

[Steve Bentley]

Ya, I tried that. New projects let me view separate tracks as one would expect, so it seems to be related to a particular rev of a particular project – a heavy one I must admit. I can still edit separate channels in earlier versions of the project.

It’s a camera, so I’ve taken to making a copy of the project, deleting all but the camera and a few “markers” so I know where objects are, tweaking my splines in that now nearly empty project and then importing the copy project back into to the original as a comp and then extracting the camera from the imported comp and pasting into the original.
(Oh man! I forgot to stretch first! Cramp!)

Memory leak perhaps? I can mess up C4D menus by render-caching some of this project.

[Steve Bentley]

A couple of questions:
Is the text native to AE? Or is it an illustrator file? (if the latter, try the Continuously Rasterize button – the little sun icon just to the right of the layer name.)
Is the text precomposed? Are you rendering out at full resolution?
Is the layer’s quality and sampling setting (the diagonal line next to the CR sun button) set to smooth?
Are you rendering out to a compressed format? Compressed formats (overly simplified) don’t have as many colors as an uncompressed file so there aren’t as many available to do the anti aliasing roll off. The compression can also introduce artifacts around saturated colors to simulate sharpness and trapping. (I can see some dark banding around the red).
Have you tried a higher color space comp? (16 or 32 bit)

There is no issue with red in AE. Any visible jaggy issue that arises tends to be a contrast one (the difference between full red or black or white and the background is so great that the antialiasing doesn’t have enough distance to create a smooth transition. This would be the case in any compositor even Pshop. Its not so much a problem as just the stepping of the anti aliasing routine – its just number of pixels available vs the difference in colors.
On the other hand full red on video monitors can sometimes “ring”. This is why there are Legal standards for broadcast.

You may have the same issue with the Track Distance text, but because it’s closer to the background color it’s not showing as much.

[Steve Bentley]

Mix texture isn’t needed when the second material has an alpha. If the alpha text material is the second (to the right) texture on the object, the alpha should cookie cutter the text over the base texture. However depending on how the alpha was made, you may need to try different settings in the alpha channel of the texture.
It used to be that C4d couldn’t process smart objects or text from Pshop but I haven’t checked that in R19, but still, I would be surprised: half of what should be cross product compatible doesn’t even work between adobe products.

[Steve Bentley]

Treat it like they do in manufacturing. Use a material that is the color of the keyboard for the whole thing, then on a second material that sits over the first, use a flat mapping to put a stencil of just the letters over the tops of the keys. The image of the letters would be all black (or whatever color you want the text to be) with an alpha of the letters to “cut them out” when placed over the base texture.
If you take a snap shot of the key board from above (perpendicular to the face of the key tops). then close cut that image to the edges of your model, and use that image size and reference to place the letters in the alpha., Then when placing that in 3D you can simply right click on the texture and say “fit to object” : no messy line up! (tip: you have to get the orientation of the flat mapping right so that the arrows in the texture map orient properly when using the texture tool: the red arrow points to the right and the green arrow points up)