Tristan Nieto
Forum Replies Created
-
Can’t help if you’re on a PC, but if you’re using a Mac, then the best advice I can give is trash both the AE preferences and the Quicktime preferences. Then reboot. A repair permissions wouldn’t hurt either.
Tristan Nieto
Visual Effects & Motion Graphics
tristannieto.blogspot.com -
I second that. If you’re ever going to be doing more than one fluid animation then Real Flow is invaluable.
That being said, I’ve actually been able to get some really good fluid simulations out of Blender, which is free, but it’s not that user friendly for those unfamiliar with 3D.
Tristan Nieto
Visual Effects & Motion Graphics
tristannieto.blogspot.com -
Try this:
Make a new solid, trace the layout of your pipes as a mask onto the new solid. Apply particle playground and then in the wall property, set the boundary to the mask you’ve created. Pick a point where you want the fluid to start and make sure the barrel radius is within the mask, otherwise particles will bounce out.
Once you’ve got that, play around with the physics of the particle generator to get it moving more like a fluid. I recommend adding lots of particles (around 200 per second) and make them largish, at least 5 px. Then precomp it or use an adjustment layer to add the Roughen Edges Effect. This will allow you to get rid of all the square corners and make it look like a single, fluidic blob. Things like CC Glass are also good if you want to give it more of a shape.
However, you can’t really do much with the particles once they’re generated. So don’t ask too much of them. They wont do things like make waves, create pressure or follow paths, but if all you’re doing is filling a space with particles it should work for you.
Good Luck.
Tristan Nieto
Visual Effects & Motion Graphics
tristannieto.blogspot.com -
Unless you’re RAM previewing your composition, After effects won’t output any sound.
In general, doing anything in AE to sync with sound isn’t that easy. My usual plan of attack is to get very familiar with the audio file and the sound waveform. Remember the lines and what they look like on the waveform, then animate to that.
Tristan Nieto
Visual Effects & Motion Graphics
tristannieto.blogspot.com -
Sorry to exhume an old thread, but I’m now having this issue too.
Was it ever resolved?
Tristan Nieto
Visual Effects & Motion Graphics
tristannieto.blogspot.com -
I’ve had to do similar projects and found the hardest thing to get around is the “Unable to create 9,600 x 5,400 image buffer” error. The way I’ve got around it in the past is to split anything really big down into smaller parts the size of each monitor, (eg 1920 x 1080), in Photoshop and then reassemble them within a 3D comp at the same resolution (1080). Then, create an array of cameras, one for each screen, and lock them together in a grid. If you align everything correctly, this will give you one master comp where each camera correlates to a specific screen in the Video Wall.
This way, you’ve effectively got a single 9,600 x 5,400 comp, but with no elements (including the final comp itself) being bigger than 2K. If you’re good with maths & expressions, it can all be set up fairly neatly. You can also get back a lot of render time by disabling the parts of the image that a particular camera doesn’t see, which in this example would account for 24 of 25 images (or 96%).
Hope that’s not to confusing.
Tristan Nieto
Visual Effects & Motion Graphics
tristannieto.blogspot.com -
Short answer is no. Grain artefacts usually happen in AE when blur settings are too high. It happens a lot with the Radial Blur effect too.
You can try taking the project settings up to 16-bit colour (or 32) and that might help, or try dialing down the Blur Amount.
If you’ve got the time, there’s always the Remove Grain effect, or you can simulate DoF using gaussian blurs with expressions linked to distance from camera and what not, but it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
Tristan Nieto
Visual Effects & Motion Graphics
tristannieto.blogspot.com -
In my experience it seems to depend on 2 things:
1) The background colour of the composition in AE, &
2) The program you’re importing the file into.Some programs will fill an alpha channel with a random colour (like black, white or middle grey), some support the checkerboard look, while others simply ignore the alpha channel and use the RGB value. Sometimes a program will mistakenly interpret the alpha as Straight instead of Premultiplied, (or vice versa), which you can usually (but not always) change. After effects will usually (if not always) fill the transparent parts of a composition with the background colour.
AFAIK, there is no “correct” colour – it all depends on what you are planning to do with it.
-
The 3D layer idea could definitely yield a better result. The softness of a shadow would increase as the layers get further apart, which would probably give you a better result, being more realistic.
On the other hand, because 3D lights and 3D layers need 3D cameras, separating the layers along the z axis will give you some major perspective issues. This could be partially fixed with some clever expressions linking the z-pos to the scale, but it’s a whole lot of stuffing about, which, given that you were looking for an easier way, might not be worth the trouble. Alternatively, you could render out the “Front” view instead of the “Active Camera”, but this time the lack of perspective may result in some problems.
Do let us know how you solve it.
-
Thanks Kyle,
Good thinking, but sadly it doesn’t get around the problem. Just as with the motion path, if the text lines are separated by radians (or degrees) from a centrepoint, they still will collide at the bottom and top.
The problem is basically that one “unit” (whatever you want to measure by) around the edge of a circle will always equate to something different in x/y co-ordinates, depending on where you are. Points at the bottom and top of the circle will tend towards high values for x and low values for y, whilst at the sides this will reverse; lower x values and higher y values. In other words, as you move around the edge of a circle, your x velocity is quite low at the sides, (because you’re mostly moving up and down) and high at the top (because you’re mostly moving side to side).
If all that’s too mathsy for people, just copy a circle mask to an object’s position, then hit the button that separates the x and y keyframes, and have a look at the speed and value curves. Even though the object moves the same distance around the circle every frame, the x and y graphs give you something else entirely. What I’m looking for is a way to have a circle shaped path with the Y speed graph being totally flat.
And if all this sounds terribly confusing, join the club 😉