[Steve Bentley]

I had not downloaded the file when I answered last time. Now I have. So its a miniscus look you are after – the sort of clingy way water crawls up anything it touches under surface tension right (that’s the only thing that “animates” in the file as far as I can see (what version of C4D was this done in?)

We’ve done exactly this in the past and used the technique I outlined in the first post. But you have to think of it as looking from the top down and where the leg interacts with the water.
A couple of ways to go about it.
You could tie a gradient to follow the position of the leg around in expresso – but the circular gradient would be mapped onto a plane or your water cube. As a straight render it would look like the person had two rings just above the ankles radiating out from their legs. But instead of a color map use the gradient in the displacement channel to make that water bulge up near the legs.
The other way is to animate that gradient by hand using as reference a temp render shot from the top down with just the legs and water (use a parallel camera sized to the cube of water for easy mapping).

If you want to keep using the collision you could turn up the divisions of the cube and make it an editable object. Then you can animate the friction and stiffness in the collider and you can also animate the steps per frame in the project settings. This will keep the water from jumping around once its settled.
I think too I’d use an invisible dummy leg linked to the real leg so the dummy moves with the real one. That dummy leg should be simpler than the real one and it should not have a foot – almost just a cylinder. Its the dummy you use for the collisions. If you drag the foot through the water in your current project you can see the foot is affecting the collisions too and it messes it up a bit.

[Steve Bentley]

You could also select the edges you want to hide and make them part of a selection set so you could turn the hide selected function on and off for specific sets of edges all at once. It does mean you have to select them in the first place but it sounds like you have to in Max anyway.

[Steve Bentley]

You didn’t mention what version of AE you were running (or I missed it).
I have a few versions here that cause issues with others. So for instance an install of 2017 will affect a still installed version of CS6 so much that if you run CS6 and quit, it doesn’t actually quit and is still running in the task manager. You can then fire up another version and another and another. If you don’t manually kill the process you can have a tons of the same app running and hogging resources. If this can happen with one version it can happen with others.

[Steve Bentley]

If a texture only maps to certain faces then there will be a selection set as a tag. It will be named something and the texture will have the same name in its target. Set C4D to faces (or polys – instead of model or points or lines) then select the selection tag you want and in the attributes you can select “restore selection”. That will light up (select) all the polys associated with that selection set.

[Steve Bentley]

The tire doesn’t actually deform. See attached file.
Make a copy of your road shape (with all the little mountains). Make it blue instead of white. Now move it a little higher than the white line road.
Move your tire across the frame.
Make a copy of your tire or make a circle mask that matches the tire moving.
Put the copy of your tire on top of the blue road line in the layers in the time line.
On the blue line layer select alpha matte (in the blue line layer settings under TrkMat). The copy of the tire will turn itself off (the eyeball) and the blue line will be masked by the moving tire so it will only show up where the the tire is.
You may need a tire blocking layer as I’ve done here depending on how you do your stroked lines.

I’ve used stroke to make the lines here but you could use shape layers (with fewer layers too!). You can also have the wheel rotating if you want more detail on it and that won’t affect this set up

12416_tiredeformer.aep.zip

[Steve Bentley]

You can use more than three points for sure. It might be that with 4 legs your joints are looping around on themselves. Try treating each leg separately then link them to the parent body (you may be doing this). I’m doing a horse right now and it’s all working fine.

[Steve Bentley]

So do you in fact want a helix? Here’s another attempt. If you want triangular steps just adjust the points and or the steps in the 3D stroke plug in. This is the only way to make a helix in 3D stroke. There might be a helix plug in available and Element 3D from videocopilot will also allow true 3D helix to be made.

12415_aecs553dstrokehelix.aep.zip

[Steve Bentley]

Hey Cassius,
I accidentally hit your web site link instead of return to posts and I got a “site can’t be reached” in Firefox and Chrome. Just thought you should know.

[Steve Bentley]

Wouldn’t it be easier to keyframe the emission value of particular? Won’t the particles per sec need to be tied to the speed of the emission point, so you get dotted lines with a specific period.

Otherwise Dan’s code should do the trick with a few mods for your situation.
Assuming 30fps:

pps = 500; // particles per second
onFrames = 90; // 3 seconds at 30fps
offFrames=270; // you could tie these two to a slider so you woudn’t have to open the expression again when you change the time span/
f = timeToFrames(time-inPoint)%(onFrames+offFrames); //AE works in seconds so you have to convert to get frames
if (f >onFrames && f

[Steve Bentley]

We’ll often run a transparency channel with a fresnel shader in it along the edges of the hair. This way you can have each strand be slightly transparent either at the edges or in the core and it takes the “edge off” and reduces sharpness. You just have to fiddle with the fresnel gradient to get it right, often using the twirl down to get actual positions of the nodes in the gradient. Sometimes the black and white nodes are only 3 or 4 positions apart which is hard to to by eye.
I recommend turning off refraction though to keep render times down or using a refraction index of 1. You can also try this in the alpha channel and reverse the fresnel gradient, but we’ve had better luck in the trani channel.

You could also run a multi pass render so the hair has its own object buffer channel and then post process the hair only with a slight blur, or run a motion blur pass for just the hair so that you can amp up its motion blur and keep the blur of the character “correct”. This way the blur isn’t just an overall fuzzyness, it has some connection to how the hair is moving. This idea can produce (in the extreme) what I can only describe as “hair that Monet would have painted”.