[Steve Bentley]

I’ve been ranting about the lack of true paint in AE since Adobe bought COSA. If only Adobe owned a preeminent paint package they could port from! Seems only fair since Cosa’s layering tech appeared in Pshop in the next rev after the purchase.
Anyone who has used Nuke or Fusion or the holy trinity of Flint,Flame,Inferno scratches their head for hours in AE looking for what to them is an obvious but missing feature.

For the OP, Mocha would be a good alternative to track and remove those posts.

[Steve Bentley]

3D stroke can also do a good job with this – it has a duplicate and offset function that can take one stroke and make it many. This also has the advantage of being 2.5D. You will need to add some glows or shine to this.

You could also look at the free plug in from VideoCopilot – Sabre. While initially intended for light sabre type effects, it has a host of great glowy tricks and unlike 3D stroke, has the intense glow built-in. Just use it on animated paths or masks.
If you are using AE2017 or above you can now have complete control over all nodes along an animated path – so you can animate each node separately at different points in time and use easing and the graph editor. If you have 2016 and before you have to use Mask Avenger from aescripts.com for this.

[Steve Bentley]

If you have R19 (and perhaps as far back as R17) there is a shadowcatcher shader that you apply to a ground object. Depending on your scene you may need to apply a compositing tag with “seen by camera” turned off, but normally shadowcatcher looks after this for you.
You must have a light with shadows turned on and turn on the alpha channel in the render settings. The shadow’s alpha shows up in the alpha channel but not the objects alpha itself, and the color of the object’s shader is the color of the shadow that shows through.
For just the shadow add a composting tag to the hero object and set seen by camera to off, then just the shadow renders.

[Steve Bentley]

Hey Richard, is this on black (limbo) by any chance? I don’t know the reference footage you refer to but for these kinds of things I find you need “signposts” along the way – objects that are just background (or anywhere really, but unimportant objects) that let the viewer see parallax and what direction your are moving so they get a sense of speed, distance and direction.

[Steve Bentley]

You can use the reshape effect. Granted this is more of a true manual morph where you make source and target shapes but it comes with AE.

[Steve Bentley]

Also make sure to turn on the motion blur check box for your spinning 3D layer. You won’t see this effect in the comp unless you turn on the comps overall motion blur button at the top of the timeline window.
The default render settings turns this on for you when you render out but its a good habit to check what those settings are before rendering.

[Steve Bentley]

It could also be that I have Studio with all the bells and whistles (notice the lack of Hair in your render settings). Some of the other versions including C4D lite don’t come with cloth or hair or thinking particles or mograph and maybe even dynamics. Maybe the original file owner had all these things and the file needs them to render properly.

[Steve Bentley]

Ok that’s weird. I don’t even have Vray. Here’s what I’m seeing. What version of C4D are you running? When I open your file it’s saying the V ray plug in missing. Perhaps if this is someone elses file its asking for the Vray plug in that they had and used and with the items I have installed it’s showing up differently.
Its also possible the previous file owner had it set to Vray and without the plug in yours defaulted to physical because thats as close to a specialized renderer it could muster.

[Steve Bentley]

Ok good that clears that up (we’ve made some LED sticks that do what I was describing, you wave them through the air and they create a still that just seems to hang there, so that’s where my brain went).
I haven’t played with booleans in Element 3D (I’m not even sure if it has them) but in C4D you would drag (animate) a “cutting” object through the object you want to slice, and both objects would be childed under a boolean object. Create a movie of every frame and voila, there’s your growing or sliced cross section.
In your case, the cutting object could be a big cube with a slice out of it (a boolean in itself) so that the bulk of the cube makes the bulk of the other object disappear and only reveals the main text object’s geometry in the slice.
The text object should be a shell object with wall thickness, otherwise the boolean is going to reveal a flat face at the cut point instead of an outline. (and a pure shell I don’t think will show its edges as the faces techincally have no thickness). ONce you have a shell you can use the cloth tool to add thickness to the shell.
You might also be able to do this with a shader, but it would have to be a true 3D shader that goes all the way through the object. You could use the gradient shader available in each material (set to object space and 3d) to create a high contrast mask to revel the slice. I’m not sure if that gradient should be in the transparency channel or the alpha (the former I’m guessing) but it would depend on the shader.

[Steve Bentley]

In the render settings (render menu/edit render settings) just turn off the check box marked v-Ray bridge. Might as well turn off Hair renderer too. And check the others if you need them Global Illumination, Object glow (this may do a separate pass at the end before you can “see” the image) and Ambient Occlusion. These are all render effects or ways of rendering that you may or may not need. But they all add time to the render, GI being one that can add significant amounts of time.