[Steve Bentley]

To be fair, using 3D models in AE does still need a plug in (like Element 3D, and Zaxwerks).

The 3D world in AE is actually a cheat so we call it 2.5 D and I will do that here for clarity.

However the pipeline between AE and C4d (and even maya) has become fairly painless. You can bring renders in from your 3D world and use them as though they are part of AE’s 2.5D world. The C4D renders are in 2D in the end but you can send project assets and objects positioned in 3D back and forth between C4d and AE so that you can position stuff for rendering elements in C4d or line up your 3D renders to objects in AE’s 2.5D world. In the end it all looks 3D.

We’re working on project right now that I initially thought I was going to use Element3D and use real 3D geometry inside of AE. But because of the stylized look needed, we couldn’t tease that out of Element, so we ended up using 3D “flats” for some elements in AE and then rendering the 3D objects in C4d and bringing those renders into AE to intermingle in 2.5D space within the flats. And all of that is native to AE (except C4D of course). So it was the style required that determined technique rather than a tail-effect wagging the dog. And given that we were given only 2D art from the client, they keep saying (gratifyingly) “how did you do that?, its 3D!”

Let us know if there a specific thing you are trying to do and we can steer you in the right direction.

[Steve Bentley]

As a former imbiber of the Macintosh Kool-aid, I can attest that on a PC there is lot of junk going on under the hood that is better looked after for you in MacLand. It could even be that AE is not releasing and the last instance is still using ram. (on a PC you can have multiple copies of any app running at the same time)

Use cntrl/alt/delete to check the task manager and see what’s running right now (like another instance of AE). For “computer speak” items in the list you can search the web and it will tell you what those are and what they do. You can kill any process you want jst to try things out. That may give you more trouble than you would like as that process may have been important but they will all come back after a restart.

Also go to the start menu and type msconfig. This is kind of like the task manager but schedules processes to fire up on boot. So many machines (HP I’m speaking to you!) come with software installed that is supposed to help you manage the machine but instead end up gumming the works. You can turn these off to keep them from coming on at boot time. (hint: sort by manufacturer because most of microsoft’s stuff, and its going to be the bulk of the list, need to be there – except Defender which should be off if you have your own antivirus app: this alone can cause huge slowdowns as the two applications duel thinking the other is virus).

Also check software that loves to update itself (acrobat is nasty for this, as is citrix). It can take huge resources to constantly go out to the web to see if there is an update available and then start installing it when you least expect.
You can turn off many of these updaters in the MSCONFIG.

All adobe products are ram hogs (they need to be) but that memory is rarely managed well by the application and that can slow things down and even slow down apps you fire up after you have shut down AE. Get used to hitting purge all while working and when you exit AE, to clean things up and speed you along.
Using SSD’s can speed things up as well for the disk caches and source files.

Finally it could be the application fighting with how it has to output to your monitor{s}. Color space, size and frame rates can all affect how smoothly the running image is sent to screen. We have an Nvidia GTX 980 that shreds the image on the screen during playback and causes uneven frame rates. We have one that doesn’t. So there are lots of places this could be happening.

[Steve Bentley]

And designing motion graphics around some new plugin only adds to the “noise” of a billion others doing the same, so your work tends to look like everyone else’s. (remember the iPod 3D stroke sweeps commercial? and the 500 copycats that followed? Really, it was only 498 copycats – the two I did were completely original…. I honestly tried to say that with a straight face)
Design first, then figure out what plug ins, if any, you need to achieve that design. Don’t predict the future – invent it!

[Steve Bentley]

The colored layer doesn’t really sit in space relative to the mask. Think about a real reflection – it’s back behind you somewhere, on a different plane. Its has more to do with simply moving the color element within the masked area so that it feels like its a reflection. With the bill spinning, think of the colored layers as a cyc around the environment. As the bill spins you will see “reflected” the far left of the cyc then whats behind you then the far right. So you can simulate the effect by dragging the color layer left to right through the mask area(in 2D). For extra realism put a cosin function on the move so that it changes speed as the bill spins.

[Steve Bentley]

Shouldn’t geometry detail concentration be the determining factor for reducing polys and not where the polys are on the object?

[Steve Bentley]

The problem is PNG only “Run length encodes” along the length of the pixels in one frame, whereas QT is doing for the length of the clip.
For us the difference is 6GB vs 136kB files. Ah, progress!

[Steve Bentley]

I think you’re right Cassius – if it was a cell shader (even quantized), ten to one there would be changes in the “lighting” but with parts of each model having a specific color in the luma channel they would stay consistent through the turns. But it is hard to tell with all the glitch effects.
We’re doing stuff today actually that needs the cell shader but can’t have light changes as the object turns, so we just linked the lights to the objects so the lights move with them.

[Steve Bentley]

If you make a copy of your reveal mask, offset its animation in time (so the reveal happens a little later) then stroke the edge of the mask (a fairly wide stroke) and use the stroke as the mask. Then pass a square fractal noise pattern in yellow through that stroked edge matte and screen it over the footage.

[Steve Bentley]

Re Brian’s suggestion – you will have to include a stick texture tag and “record” the position of the texture before you bend the geometry, otherwise the geometry will move within the field of the texture space.

[Steve Bentley]

Thanks Brian,
We ended up just running another render with no S&T, no textures and an alpha, and passing the S&T render through the non S&T alpha. But I’ll give the object buffers a try.
Cheers