[Zax Dow]

Hi David,

3D Warps won’t do 5 folds all in the same plug-in. It would go from full to half to quarters to eighths, in one Warp. But not the other two folds.

You might be able to do some creative layer switching, though. For instance once the map was eighths-size you could switch to a smaller (unfolded) plane on a diferent layer that matched the size of the folder plane. Then you could continue folding the new plane three more times.

By the way, this is all speculation. Doing a completely flat fold may cause rendering problems. Before you get caught in a bad situation, I’d recommend that you download the demo version and try it out to find out whether you can do this for sure.

HIT: To fold a fold you’ll have to set the warps to work in Global Space. See the Options window.

Best,
Zax

[Zax Dow]

In the Pose controls, turn OFF the Start At Center controller. When this option is OFF the baseline of the first line becomes the stable point, so if you change from a single line to a double line of text, the first lines will stay in register.

Also, left/right position is based on the justification setting. For instance with left justification on, the text will all match at the left corner of the top line.

If you leave Start At Center ON, the text is shifted to the current center of all text in the block. So every new block of text is going to shift.

-Zax

[Zax Dow]

Hi Dorireen,

Be sure you are running the 4.3.2 version not the 4.3.1 version. The 4.3.2 version was especially released to fix the OpenGL crash that is happening when running AE CS3 on an Intel Mac. The exact problem you report is fixed in the 4.3.2 version.

Here’s the link:

https://zaxwerks.com/downloads/ProAnimator_4.3.2_mac.zip

Best,
Zax

[Zax Dow]

Hey there,

A word of warning for beginners, is to make sure you adjust your positions and pivots inside of the SetUp window, before you make any adjustments to the Sets controls in the Effect Controls Window.

The problem you describe sounds like you adjusted the Scale of the Set that these objects are assigned to. (this is done in the Effect Controls window). Then you opened the SetUp window and started moving the objects inside of that Set. Since the Set is being Scaled, if you rotated any objects within that Set those objects will get skewed oddly.

To fix the problem go back to the Effect Controls and Reset all Set controls to zeros and 100s. This will remove the skewing and put everything back to what the Invigorator considers the “Starting position”. Then you can open the SetUp window and move your objects into their new starting positions. Then close the SetUp window, recenter the pivots if needed, and animate the objects as you wish with the Set controls.

Hope that helps.

Best,
Zax

[Zax Dow]

When folks see ragged edges they are usually rendering a QT movie with an alpha channel and then looking at the movie in QuickTime Player. The problem here is that QT Player doesn’t display the alpha channel so you only see the raw RGB which has no antialiasing around the perimiter, thus the ragged edges.

Most likely your movie is fine. Take it into After Effects or FCP or Motion or someother editing program that knows what to do with the alpha and you’ll see everything nice and smooth.

Best,
Zax

[Zax Dow]

I also wonder why you have this green background. Are you going to key it out? You don’t need to use a greenscreen background in order to create a mask channel. The software will create a perfect alpha channel during the rendering. Just pick a compression codec that supports alpha channels, such as Animation compressor set to Best quality. TGA sequences do it too.

-Zax

[Zax Dow]

Yes, this looks like there are duplicate polys. If this text is from an Illustrator file check it to see that there aren’t duplicate objects grouped to each other that you don’t know about. If it’s from the Invigorator’s text tool check that you didn’t duplicate objects sitting in the same position.

You know you can assign different materials to front/sides/etc without having to duplicate the objects. One of these materials can be the Matte Material (Pro version) which will cut a mask for the faces without having to duplciate objects or layers.

-Zax

[Zax Dow]

As far as I can tell, you can create 3D *planes* in Photoshop which can be exported to AE, but nothing like the Zaxwerks products creates. CS3 adds 3D compositing, which means 2D layers in 3D space. The sort of thing AE has had since version 5.0.

Best,
Zax

[Zax Dow]

The Reset command will only reset the values in the Effect Controls Window. It won’t affect anything inside of the Invigorator’s SetUp window.

It sounds like you have moved and rotated and scaled Set 1. Then when you bring new objects into the Project they automatically get put into Set 1 which have some crazy transformation going on. To fix this you can either:
1- Dump this project and start with a new one.
2- Change the Position/Rotation/Scale values for Set 1 back to 0,0,0 / 0,0,0 and 100% for scale.
3- In the Invigorator’s User Prefs, change which Set objects are put into by default.

If after resetting your Effect Window Transforms you find that the objects are still cock-eyed, then you are probably transforming them inside of the Set-Up window, possibly in an attempt to get them back to normal.

Hope that helps,
Zax

[Zax Dow]

An added note:

As an alternative you can use the 3D Layer Tracking feature.
That way you can see the motion path of an AE 3D layer and then tell an Invigorator object to follow that path.

-Zax