[Steve Bentley]

That’s just a time ramp on the footage and lots of blur. (motion blur can hide infinite sins)
Option 1)
The environment (including the walkway) may be CG (I think I can see the poly facets, but that may be chain link of the railing)
When we do these kinds of shots, we will do a VR movie of each actor in the shot – a spin around so we have a frame of every angle of them. Then we time warp the footage of the people who have been rendered and use that as a texture on flat cards in the CG world so they appear to face the right way even though the camera is moving around them – the frame is picked based on camera angle and the card always faces camera. So yes, stills of a sort, and certainly architectural “cards” but with the moving texture it can seem like they have volume. Its kind of a reverse bullet-time.

Option2)
The other option is that its real and simply sped up. Did they tell everyone to stay still while the camera person walked the path? This would work. A few people move a little.
I think this is more probable but because they have so much of the archi- previz in the video they may have used part of the animated selling package before the place was built.

[Steve Bentley]

What about doing your precomp thing but instead of using loop (which is a one trick pony), use enable time remapping. You can stop and start the animation at any point you wish. If you keep a table of “key” frames you can just type in the value to a new keyframe and that position or part of the animation will appear at that keyframe, no matter where it was in the timeline.
You just have to get used to moving clusters of keyframes so that you don’t change the speed (assuming this is important). To my knowledge there is no tool yet in the curve editor to tell you when the difference between two keyframes is exactly the right angle to give you a 1:1 speed between the nested and outer comp. This would be nice as we use the enable time remapping for everything but we always risk changing the speed of the nested comp or having duplicate frames show up if the ETR keyframes are too close or too far apart.

[Steve Bentley]

We use twixtor to generate the motion data for particular and that will impart the velocity or blur you want, but because lightning forks change from frame to frame, you may not get a successful result from twixtor.

Keep in mind that when you mask a layer or use the alpha as the generator, the number of particles you set to be generated are produced for the whole layer not just the masked part (at least this is my belief and the way things like Mograph work too). So a dot in the middle of a large layer that you want to produce 5000 particles a second would not actually generate 5000 particles from that dot. So with masked or alpha’d layers you really have to crank up those particle numbers to get more coming out of the area you want.

You could try the sub frame sampling in the emitter but because your lighting frames are finite, there’s no “inbetween” frames to get the position data from.
And because the lighting is so fast you will probably have to use a very very high velocity and then a high air “friction” setting so they appear at the edge of the lighting right when you want them and not fly away immediately.
You could also use a copy of your lightning as the emitter but that has been offset in time so that the particles can “catch up” to the brief lighting strike.

[Steve Bentley]

Yas this is a tough one (gone are the days of hand animating the aspect of limbs I guess).
The puppet tool has an overlap tool that you can assign certain parts to overlap others. So the area below the knees would fall “behind” any area above the knees. You can also use two puppet pins at the feet to “pinch” them into perspective to add some foreshortening.

Personally, I’ve fallen in love with the DUIK script (free!) It allows you to add in aspect changes to your art that are automatically triggered by the angle of the joint bend. So you could have 3 or 4 different leg shapes that would be automatically be slotted in as you animate the legs.

[Steve Bentley]

Hey Lucas,
Using the compound blur and splines with stroke (or even better, Trapcode’s 3D stroke) is great for this. If you make a stroke in Pshop that has a brush painting the stroke from black to white, the compound blur in AE can use the gradient that follows the line to reveal things.
Using an animated stroke on a spline in AE can also be used to reveal things.
You can also use the write-on script or paint to reveal things so that your hand controls the speed of the reveal and it won’t feel so mechanical.
You can also just do a simple mask that is soft edged and then increase the mask expansion over time to do a “bloom” reveal in areas that have a cluster of leaves or flowers.

[Steve Bentley]

Here’s another trick Chad.
Find the texture you like (Brian is right – ratio should be 2:1) then take it into Pshop. Change the image size so that its square (yes it will distort). Then use the Polar coordinates effect (rect to polar) and that will show you what the image will look like mapped on a sphere (from the top down). Do a little touch up painting (or stamping) to clean up the pinch point in the middle – don’t change the edges! Then use the polar effect again, but choose polar to rect. This will get you back to your square but with some weird looking smeary things at the top. Thats normal.

Now flip the image upside down and go through the same process again – the polar filter can only do one pole at a time- the top one- so you have to flip the image if you are going to see both poles at some point.

Once that’s done flip your image right side up again and then change the image size back to the original size. You will need do to a little sharpening because the polar effect makes things a little soft due to the inherent lack of resolution when converting from cartesian to polar.

Use a spherical map for this texture in C4D – a UVW map will also work with a sphere object but not as well because the UVW will “eat” a lot of what’s at the poles due to the polys getting smaller and the polar effect distorts things assuming a sphere. If you mapped a globe with a UVW, Antarctica would simply be gobbled up in the pinch and north and south america would be too close to the poles as a result – russia and canada would probably touch where Santa lives. While the antarctica will look odd in the pshop file it will map correctly if you use spherical mapping.

This is also a perfect effect for reflection maps so that you don’t see the pinch point at the top of the environment reflected in your scene objects.

[Steve Bentley]

Dont forget you can also animate things like friction so that on the frame they land where you want them, you can add a keyframe and jack up the friction so that the rolling object doesn’t go any farther.

[Steve Bentley]

What exactly is animated in the texture? Is it a movie or a noise or a gradient that changes? Or does the texture just slide around the object?
Were you hoping to have the animation start at the same time across all objects or at different times?

[Steve Bentley]

Also if the x,y,(and Z) are conjoined that can make things worse. SO in the graph editor you can tell them to be separate dimensions and then you can see each channel instead of a grouped (and poor) representation of the curves

[Steve Bentley]

only in one dimension. SO if you go to the graph editor you can make sure that the (i’m assuming) X f curve is diagonal (constant change) and the Y curve has an ease on it.
In C4D the curves are separate but in AE you have to tell them to be individual.