[Walter Soyka]

Does resetting the After Effects preferences help?

Hold Ctrl+Alt+Shift (Windows) or Cmd+Opt+Shift (macOS) while starting Ae.

[Walter Soyka]

This is going to be super-hard as a first 3D project. Instead, I’d suggest finding some natural footage and compositing it into your scene. You’ll almost certainly need to rotoscope the frog; not as easy as keying, but much easier than modeling and animating a frog from scratch.

[Walter Soyka]

You mean the undulating dots/lines in the first couple seconds of the video?

I think they are bars that catch light on their ends and across their top edges. I’d approach this in C4D with a cloner to create the array of objects, and an effector or two to ripple them.

[Walter Soyka]

Sorry for my delay, Andreas. All I was trying to say was that with Essential Graphics, the obvious workflow is to expose properties you want to OVERWRITE in a containing comp. However, you can also expose properties that you want to READ in a containing comp.

For example, if you were animating things like position, scale and opacity for a footage layer that you would have normally targeted for replacement with Essential Graphics, you could instead pass those values up through Essential Graphics for reference in containing comps. Then you could choose whether you wanted to handle the footage at L1, L2 or L3 in your setup — but still retain the animation as originally intended.

I also think that you CAN swap EG comps if they have the same kinds of properties in the same order. If you were to over-engineer all your EG comps of the same level so they all had the same properties (whether you used them or not in each specific comp), you should be able to swap them without breaking things.

[Walter Soyka]

I imagine that you are using a Box emitter in X, Y and Z to spread your characters across the 3D frame. This will result in all kinds of crazy overlaps because your characters are being randomly placed in a volume; no one is standing on the floor.

I think the easiest solve is to have Particular handle the z-sorting for you by setting up your scene so everyone is standing on a floor, then tilting the floor up.

I’m assuming you’re using a Sprite particle type, and that your particles are set to face the camera.

Set your Box emitter size to XYZ Individual. Set the Emitter Size X (across the screen) and the Emitter Size Z (in and out of the screen) to something large — maybe the width of your comp or larger. Set the Emitter Size Y to 0. You’ll see all your characters standing on a floor and properly z-sorted — but they will all be on a line, not spread across the entire height of your comp. Set the Emitter’s X Rotation to however steep you need (maybe 40 degrees) to tilt the “floor” up and cover the comp.

[Walter Soyka]

Nope, there is no way to lock the contents of the Essential Graphics panel.

No way to have the Essential Graphics panel track the active item comp, either — you have to manually select it from the dropdown.

You know what to do:
https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911311-after-effects

[Walter Soyka]

I can’t think of a way to handle the indirect footage replacement within the Essential Graphics framework. I guess I’d handle it entirely in scripting.

Remember, though, that you can use Essential Graphics to expose the keyframes and values (in the first level of abstraction) and values only (via expression in the second level of abstraction) from Essential Graphics properties into containing comps, so you could still indirectly manipulate properties of your footage that way.

[Walter Soyka]

Your workaround is exactly what I do, too. I think it’s the only way to accomplish what you’re looking to do.

Seems like there’s a bit of a performance penalty for nested Essential Graphics, too, but I still think it’s worth it for all the flexibility that the Essential Graphics workflow brings.

[Walter Soyka]

You can apply Colorama after your 4-color gradient to funk it up. You could also use the Posterize effect to limit the total number of colors.

[Walter Soyka]

Check the CINEMA 4D Renderer’s options. This is accessible either by clicking on the CINEMA 4D renderer selector in the lower right corner of the viewer panel, and then choosing “Renderer options…”, or by opening your comp settings, navigating to the 3D Renderer panel, and clicking the Options button.

Inside the C4D renderer options screen, there’s a quality slider. It looks like yours might be turned all the way down. I think the default setting is 25, but you can increase it for better fidelity renders at the cost of longer render times.