Zax Dow
Forum Replies Created
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You know how difficult it is to make a perfect map for a baseball, football or soccer ball, right? The map pinches and squeezes and if you’re lucky you can make something usable but it takes you a day or so to do it. Well Serge has nailed it for you with the InvigoMany product. Every model is made for high-rez applications and the included AE projects enable you to fine tune every element of each map for totally customizable work.
Need to put your company logo on the side of a golf ball? Just open the golf ball project and add your logo to the texture map. Need a football that’s painted with your country’s flag? No problem, overlay the flag onto the texture and you’re ready to go.
What you do with these objects is up to you. Since they’re 3D they’ll animate like any other 3D object. Use them in close-ups or animate them in backgrounds. With this set of projects and texture maps it’s like having an unlimited supply of stock sports footage that’s completely customizable.
If you do anything having to do with sports graphics get this set immediately. I highly recommend it.
Zax Dow
President
Zaxwerks Inc. -
I think you may need to click the UPDATE LIGHT button. Whenever you make changes to the lighting inside the Set-Up window, and then click the OK button to close the Set-Up window, you must click the tiny button in the Effect Controls that has a picture of a light on it and the word “Update” next to it. This button is located near the bottom right corner of the 3D window seen in the Effect Controls. Right next to the little red ball button.
Clicking the Update Light button brings the light settings from insdie the Set-Up window into the Comp window. We make you do this so you don’t accidentally change any lighting keyframes that you might already have created in the AE timeline.
Best,
Zax -
Hi Tim,
Sorry for the delayed response.
The feature sets of all 3 flag plug-ins are the same that’s why we don’t call out feature sets of each one. As much as it would make our lives simpler we had to write the same plug-in 3 different times so it would work in each of the three hosts. Premiere is supposed to support AE plug-ins but it doesn’t support all of the features of the plug-in spec. So the one small difference about the Premiere version is that when you select a Wind Style, you don’t get to see the keyframes in the timeline because a plug-in can’t set keyframes in Premiere. You’ll see the same type of wind, you just won’t see the keyframes that creates the wind.
To choose the different types of cloth, click the big flag picture icon to open up the options window. Here you can choose different cloth types.
As far as flag pole animation goes. There is a twirly arrow that hides all of the flag pole settings. Once you open that twirly arrow you will see the same controls whether you are in the Premiere, AE, or Motion versions.
TIP: When creating flag pole animations, turn off the “Simulation ON” checkbox. This will make the flag look like a stiff board, however it will really speed up the redraw speed because the plug-in isn’t trying to calculate the folding of the cloth at the same time that you are trying to position the flag pole.
Hope that helps.
Best,
Zax -
The first thing to always check for is to make sure you are running the latest version of the software. Go to the Zaxwerks Site and Click the Download Software link. This will take you to a page which has a Product menu near the bottom. You don’t need to enter your name and other data to see the Product menu. Open the menu to see a list of the current products and their version numbers.
Because of how systems change, video card drivers change and host softwares change we are always chasing down new problems. Maintenance and bug fix updates are always free. We don’t charge for maintenance releases. For instance in 4.0.7 we made a change to use fewer OpenGL resources. So changing from 4.0.6 to 4.0.7 may fix the problem for you.
The second most common problem may be with your video card. Get the latest driver from your card manufacturer. You can also reduce the Hardware acceleration slider to see if the problems go away. There may be some advanced thing your card is doing with OpenGL that is causing a problem to show up. Never reduce hardware acceleration to less than half.
The intermittent problems are the hardest to track down and fix. Keep an eye on it and try to find a repeatable case.
Best,
Zax -
Hey, if you’re happy, I’m happy. Spread the good word.
Best,
Zax -
No worries.
4.0.5 isn’t compatible with AE 7. Download the 4.0.6 version and all will be well.
-Zax
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Try opening your QT files in a program other than QT.
Perhaps some of your movies were rendered in QT 7 and some were rendered in QT 6.
Since you went back a version it sounds like you are trying to open a QT 7 file with QT 6.-Zax
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Just buy it now and you’ll get the 4.0 version (including the plug-in) for free.
The 4.0 version is basically ready to go so when you order, ask for the 4.0 download version right now. There is currently no addendum manual explaining the new features. But if you are already familiar with the Invigorator PRO features you won’t have any trouble.
Best,
Zax -
Hi Betty,
I remember one other person had this problem and it went away once he updated the drivers for his video card. Try this first. If this doesn’t work let us know about the hardware you are using.
This kind of thing can also be caused by “desktop optimizers” which are part of your video card control panel. Such as the “screen panning” “xtra large screen” “virtual screen” and other screen management features. Try turning off all of these extra features and see if that clears up the problem.
Another thing that sometimes causes trouble is the driver for your input device. If you have a tablet or a special kind of mouse turn it off or use “normal mode” and test to see if that clears things up. Once we’ve isolated what’s causing the trouble it may be easy to fix or find a workaround.
Best,
Zax -
Serge what a great little tip. I hadn’t thought of this one but I’ll tell you why it works in the second half of this message.
First, an alternative to your trick would be to create a Letter O using the Photoshop text tool, and then adjust the paths to be a more proper circle. For some reason Photoshop will export paths that were created as letters with the holes intact. But if you draw two circles by hand and try to make one of them a hole, Photoshop doesn’t export the inner one as a hole.
The “Import As Layers” trick works because one of the things that the Invigorator does when opening up a file, is it looks to see if there are any paths that are 1- grouped together and 2- one path is totally contained within another path. If it finds grouped paths that are inside of each other then it makes the inner path a hole.
Two paths in a Photoshop file are normally not grouped so they don’t qualify to be made into holes. On the other hand when you use the “open as layers” option both of these paths would be considered on the same layer, so they get grouped on the way in, thus they now satisfy the condition needed to make one a hole in the other.
So knowing this you would be able to make all sorts of other shapes using Photoshop. As long as the extra shapes are contained within a single object they will become holes when you use the Open As Layers option. For instance a circle with two eye shapes and a smile shape should become a Smiley Face with the eyes and mouth as holes.
Best,
Zax