[Yoondo]

Are you trying to make this look like it’s in a 3d environment?
If not, just have your wheel spinning and animate the position and scale for your zooming.
My understanding of your post is fairly simple task?

Only other suggestion is that if you are zooming in real close to the spinning wheel,
your sources should be in Illustrator format so that even at super closeups it will
be crisp.

Hope that helps.

[Yoondo]

The best and proper way to lock or group your 3d wall layers is to select all your 3d
wall layers and precompose. Then on the precomp layer, click on the star button in the
switches column and also make it a 3d layer. That should pop the wall layers
into a real 3d mode without worrying about them going out of whack. If you want to edit
the contents of the precomp layer, Alt+click on the precomp., it will take to the layers
that you had. You can add, edit and adjust to suit your needs.
Good luck

[Yoondo]

Do you have other applications open while rendering? Zaxwerks products tend to eat up
memory, but as long as you don’t have it running you should be fine. I’ve had similar
problem with prior versions but never with 6.5. You may want to use something like the
system mechanics pro to defragment your memory to see if that helps or reboot(you probably
did this million times, ha?).Iam on a PC with similar config. and I can render in 2K size
3-5 min. in tga which can total to 40 gigs and no problem.
Hope that helps.

[Yoondo]

Definitely, if Carl wants z depth control, my suggestion would not work. Would card wipe
work with that? of course, you would have to apply card wipe first then your text effect.
You know, I’m always up for trying new things and I’d like to experiment this myself.

[Yoondo]

If your objective is as simple as having 4 walls like a room, then turn your 4 wall layers
into 3d layers and construct the walls turning them into a box(room), AE 3d mode is totally workable making scenes into total 3d environment with camera and lighting. I love this
feature and have done special scenes for animated feature films.

[Yoondo]

I would think if you turn your text layer into a 3d layer it will still work in 3d mode.
Or if that doesn’t work you can precomp the layer after you are happy with the text effect
then make it a 3d layer.

[Yoondo]

It’s cool, but it lacks texture on the flames. Perhaps you should use some noise on it.

[Yoondo]

You need to apply easy out on the first keyframe and easy in on the last key.
Or, you could twirl down the postion property and you will see kind of a boxy
graph. You want to make this boxy shape to a speed bump(from the side) look.
You can do that by messing around with the blue handles at the beg. and end of
the graph. You want to make a nice and smooth plain to a hill and back down to a
smooth plane.

[Yoondo]

Oh yeah, big difference, thanks very much, Alan

[Yoondo]

With respect to Steve’s suggestion, I think a simpler way, is to duplicate the
layer and apply a rectangular mask on the top layer with the desired amount of border from
the comp edge to the mask line. Then open mask property (hit MM) and select “subtract”.
Feather the mask and blur the mask layer to suit your needs.