[Steve Bentley]

You have to make sure the mask edge is at least the width of the feather inside the edge of the solid. Thinking about it the other way: The edge of the solid must extend past the feathered area (the feather area value is in pixels and is halfway on either side of the mask line – a 100 unit feather extends 50 pixels either side of the mask line)

[Steve Bentley]

That worked great, thanks Emir! With the cloth tag having it’s own cache I didn’t get to thinking about a secondary cache that had a speed component.

For others who run into this:
Apply your cloth tag (or other dynamics engine) and get your motion how you like it, but at a normal speed. Then apply the point cache tag, hit “Store State” in the point cache tag attributes, then turn on Enable, and then hit Calculate. This will take whatever the cloth tag is doing for the length of the animation and push that point level animation into the memory of the point cache tag.
Now turn off “Enable” in your cloth tag (Basic tab), and set the scale level of the point cache tag to a percentage of the original “speed”. Hit play. Instant slowmo of your original cloth dynamics.
If you leave the cloth tag enabled, it takes precedent and you won’t see any speed change.

If you need to tweak. Empty the point cache tag’s memory (hit empty cache), enable your cloth tag again and adjust its forces etc, then repeat the process above. You don’t have to change the Scale level of the point cache tag while you do this – it’s only going to operate on the speed of the cloth tag when it’s memory is filled by the Calculate button; and the calculation always happens at 100% of the original animations speed no matter what the Scale level is set to. That percentage only shows up on play back.

Oh, and you can also edit the Scale value in the point cache to do some time-ramping without any missing or duplicate frames.
This is a little tricky though – when you animate this number you have to think of it not as speed but as a percentage of the number of “keyframes” of animation in cache.
If you set the Scale value to 50%, and keyframe that about halfway through the animation, the whole animation will run half as fast. But then, 20 frames later if you set another keyframe on the point cache’s Scale value to 25%, thinking the animation will slow down even more, it will in fact go backwards to where the animation was 25% complete. So after that first keyframe is set, it becomes a little more like Enable Time Remapping in AE. “What percentage of the animation do I want to appear on this frame.”

[Steve Bentley]

You can also reduce your color space level if that works for your output and comp needs. 16 bit is sooooo much bigger than 8 bit ram-wise.
Keep in mind that other Adobe products running at the same time seem to share the ram needs and caches. So if you can reduce that habit, things should go better. I can make pshop’s interface go wonky when I start pushing AE to the limit – there is a memory leak, always has been.
As far as Gb sizes of cache, it really depends on comp size, how many elements are in memory, number of layers, the kinds of effects, number of precomps and the layers in them, length of comp and the number of frames in memory, and the bit depth. Adjustment layers ad to this too as they “flatten” whats below them in the layer stack.
My current project is 6000×2000, 3D, hundreds of layers, two minutes in length, 16bit, and I’m routinely purging 200 GB and waiting for that to happen even though i’m previewing in 1/4.
Memory has always been an adobe issue. Given what has to be “live” in memory, I get why pshop and AE are ram hogs, but I would have thought by now, 30 years on, it would have been a little more streamlined.

[Steve Bentley]

Good idea Emir, thanks. I didn’t know if the point cache would work in relation to the wind as that’s what’s moving the cloth around. I’ll give it a twirl.

[Steve Bentley]

Well… that rendered in preview, but the picture viewer couldn’t load the render. So I don’t know if it worked or not.
I think it might be a size limitation (5760×1080) and length (200frames). I tried a bouncing ball and rendered to preview and it failed as well at that size. ( I don’t actually use preview much as I find other methods are faster and you get to see what’s going on during the render, so I didn’t know what to expect at a larger size.)
Actually I think it might be AVI limitation (the only uncompressed format available in preview) as it won’t load into AE either and WMP won’t touch it.

[Steve Bentley]

Something to check: In the preview panel check what the preview rez is set to. “Auto” will mirror what you have set in your main viewer, but if its set to full, then even setting the main viewer to 1/4 will still result in a full rez preview.
I know that doesn’t answer you main ram question but its worth a shot.

Also (for AE2018) get used to purging all the caches frequently. While it will purge your frames it will also purge all the glitches that seem to crop up in this version – these can hog ram too.

I haven’t actually seen that out of ram warning: usually when its full the green bar just stops advancing and the preview starts playing. And we’re normally working on some pretty big and very long stages – 20k pixels across and up and minutes in length! So I would have seen it.

[Steve Bentley]

When you say “shifting”, do you mean the colors are interacting oddly? or the position of the grad color “nodes” is changing position relative to the shape layer?

If the former, make sure your comp is a high enough bit depth so that when the subtle variations combine with other layers’ grads there is in fact a color they can map to in that larger color space, otherwise banding can occur.

If the latter, are you sure you are moving the whole layer and not just the mask? (assuming some of the layers might be solids and not shape layers) With all the layers you have going you might not notice that you had . The “shape” would move but the grad would stay where it was, because the layer itself isn’t moving. If they are all true shape layers I don’t think this would be the problem.
Also check the “align with layer” button in the gradient parameters. With it “off” the layer can move independent of the gradient’s position.

[Steve Bentley]

Thanks Brian, That might get me there. (but, sigh, no alpha, oh well, I’ll break out the full luma shader on a second go round and bipack it).
Its a big frame and as I write this I’m waiting for the preview to do something.. anything.
Odd that the frame rate doesn’t effect a proper render for cloth as it usually does. Even odder that a mesh deformer algoryhthm would work and extrapolate in the preview and not in the full render.

[Steve Bentley]

No, full blown renders. Just using the standard renderer for now.

[Steve Bentley]

There are slightly cheaper ones available but these ones seem to be quite complete. and there are more expensive versions of the same ones that are rigged.
I would ask your client if they are OK with the quality of the model. This “quality” aspect won’t fall under the 3D company’s “100% quality” warranty though. Its all about whether the client feels its a reasonable and correctly detailed enough representation of the human body for their purposes (especially surgery). At this level of model it will be right enough for the 100% warranty but might not be right enough for the client.
In the end its a pretty good deal – there are a huge amount of models in there that separately would cost much much more.
A few things to check – especially for surgery:
Does the heart come apart? Are the lungs solid or do they have an interior? Are the intestines overlapping and one bend intrudes into another? – if all the bends were spline controlled you could unkink the whole thing but as a solid model you can be stuck and these overlaps will show if you do a cutaway. (try a bool by the way and see how the model reacts). Do the tube type things (aorta, arteries, intestines etc) have wall thickness or are they just shells?
Is there an interior to the mouth? Are the eye’s orbs or just a front cap? Are there eye muscles and optic nerve?(I’ve seen this left out sooo many times). Are the eyelids separate or attached to the “skin”? Do the ears have a canal and internal bones? Are all the bones in the foot there? (I’ve seen this incorrect many times too). Are the disks in the spine separate from the vertebrae?