robcat2075

-Have you tried "baking" the hair before the render? "Bake Particles" I think. -Remote possibility.... the way multipass is incremented has changed in v18f. Do you get the same wrong result in v17? -Another option is A:M's non-multipass motion blur which should be similar to your AE post motion blur

An AE file is really a just a bunch of lists and parameters. Reading that shouldn't be a problem unless they decide to make it a problem. 32-bit or 64-bit OS shouldn't be an issue. The data is in separate files and those could be 30 year old formats like JPG that still read as expected.

By "processing footage" I mean the real time scrubbing and compositing of my After Effects compositions that has to happen for me to be able to judge my work without having to go to a final render to Quicktime for every preview. Imagine if you could only advance animation in A:M one frame every 5 seconds or one every 20 seconds or if you could only watch it in 1/64th the normal size. It's a poor situation for working with multiple video elements.

Another thing that dissuaded me from upgrading was that the modern After Effects that I trial-versioned wasn't one bit faster at processing footage than the one I've been using from 1999.

Proprietary formats are a mixed bag of powers and limitations. I'll note that the cost of staying up to staying on board a proprietary thing much less today than it used to be. 25 years ago if you wanted to do Photoshop stuff you either had to buy a Quantel Paintbox ($15,000?) or rent time with an operator on one, and you'd have to pay more every time you wanted to revisit that project. None-the-less i still haven't jumped on board the Adobe Cloud train.

Being broke is a problem in itself.

They just decided to not support the old format. An explanatory error message comes up. I forget the text but it says the version was too old. I recall on the boards someone said there is an intermediate version, maybe CS1 or 2, that could load the old and resave it and then the newly saved file would be readable by the current version. However, I don't have the intermediate version.

I had that problem. It was from the peanut butter and jelly sandwich I ate the day before.

I'm on 18f also. I'm not sure what we are doing differently. I just tried connecting two splines that are already drawn and I was still able to connect them without them becoming one spline.

I believe that is a feature so that if a new user accidentally deletes all lights they will at least get an image. Add at least one dim light and you should have darkness .

I can't open my AE 5 files in modern AE. I tried a trial subscription and none of my old AE projects could be opened and i never found any way to translate them.

Compatibility is a problem. One reason I haven't gotten on board with any new After Effects is that they can't open my old AE files.

I didn't know you could do that. I've always been doing what Fuchur said. But I tried it in v18 and it worked for me, I think. Is this what you are trying to do?... clip3548NonConnectingCP.mov

I'm not sure I understand the problem.

Looks sharp! Are those decal bricks or material bricks?

It doesn't really require you to save your work to the cloud and no where else, does it?

I have now seen the first season of "The Walking Dead" I look forward to seeing "The Wobbling Dead" and will indeed be impressed that you have been able to make something amusing out of this.

I suppose that's the touted advantage of Adobe's Cloud subscriptions? You can use it on whatever machine you're on? I'm not sure it that is the deal or not...

Hope you have a fine birthday with minimal worries!

As Martin used to say, "It's possible, like going to Mars is possible." If it is a series of baked frames with each one containing all the information needed to render that frame, I think that is more possible than transferring rigged characters that respond to animation keyframes.

A worst case scenario I see is that so many companies exit the desktop PC market that they become expensive items again, sold as "workstations".

You now have three weeks to get your sci-fi contest image into shape. I better get to work!

My thread for Birn's book

I like that one too. In the edition i have there is actually some A:M coverage but he was using an early version of A:M that didn't have CP weighting so it was abit obsolete inthat regard. However, even without any A:M coverage his advice on what parts of the face need to move and his approach to doing lip-sync work are worthwhile.

If you're wanting to animate characters, "The Animators Survival Kit" is solid information about posing, timing, keyframes and workflow. It has zero information about using a computer but if you can pose and keyframe bones it's really all the same. For CG lighting I recommend Jeremy Birn's "Digital Lighting and Rendering". I have a thread on the forum that translates its terms to A:M terms. ILM's "The Art of Special Effects" is about old-school 1980's pre-computer VFX but most of those ideas transfer to modern tools. Used copies are cheap. The have a follow up about their digital era but I haven't seen it.