[Yossarian]

Thanks for the help. I found that changing the interpolation to linear smoothed things out, even though that seemed a little counterintuitive to me. I’ll keep the other tips in mind too.

[Yossarian]

Last I heard he was selling weapons to the US military from some undisclosed location in the Nicaraguan jungle.

[Yossarian]

And if this fails for you, and you still have 6.5 installed, those plugins have worked fine for me so far. Just copy the files from your 6.5 plugins folder to your 7 plugins folder.

[Yossarian]

Thanks a lot for your help, guys. I’ll check into both of those companies.

[Yossarian]

Thanks for the response. I’m working on PCs here, though; do you know of any decent cards for them or a place where I could look?

[Yossarian]

Thanks for the advice, everyone. Every outside opinion I get from people involved in production helps my case when I go to ask for a new tool. I’m a big fan of having the kind of control a fully functional 3D app gives you as opposed to having a beefed-up plugin, so I’m glad to hear so many good things about C4D.

This isn’t to discourage anyone else from offering their two cents; I just wanted to make sure that those who have already commented got recognized. Thanks again, guys.

[Yossarian]

Seems like this might be better placed in a photoshop forum, but here goes.

You can do this in photoshop or after effects just the way you described – with the pen tool. In AE, you’ll want to duplicate the layer you’re going to slice up as many times as layers you want, then use the pen tool to simply mask out a different portion of each layer.

In PS, take the pen tool and draw an outline around where you want the cut to go (make sure the pen tool options are set to draw a path instead of a shape or fill pixels). Once you have a closed path, go to your paths palette (in the same window as the layers palette) and click on the third button from the left (“load path as selection”). Go back to your layers palette, make sure the layer you want to cut is selected, and press ctrl+shift+j (or go to Layer/new/layer via cut).

Hope I understood what you were asking for.

[Yossarian]

Yeah, it really does. Perhaps if enough people contact Adobe about this, they’ll release a patch of some sort.

[Yossarian]

I think you might be best off using the Text animation menu within the text layer. Twirl down the text layer’s transform properties, click on the arrow next to “Text” (on the right side), and choose scale to animate. You’ll pretty much have to play with it from there – you’re going to want to change the scale property (not keyframe it, just change it once) and keyframe the “end” property (under “range selector”) to match the timing you want (you can also select the path text option in here instead of adding the path text effect before doing this).

For what you’re doing, you might also play with the “shape” option (under “advanced”) – ramp down might work for you.

Hope this helps some; sorry if I just told you things you already know.

[Yossarian]

I may not be the best person for the job here, but since there’s a lack of other responses right now, I’ll say that I think you’ll have a difficult time with something like without a dedicated camera tracking program. AE can track position and 2D rotation, but if she’s spinning around, you’ll have a hard time tracking the rotation of her torso/arms unless the camera’s above her.

I’ve always wanted a copy of Boujou, which appears to be a nice little camera tracker, but the price makes me chuckle and go back to eating my cold porridge.

All that to say good luck, and please post back if you find a good way to do this inside AE; I’d definitely like to know about it.

…there’s always the chance that I might have the wrong idea of what you’re going for here, though