At first glance, this seems like a relatively doable assignment, and I already have an idea in mind. Since I’m not new to Z space, I figured a Fly Down might look good, and I could also re-purpose the assignment assets.
Ok, so I’m already arranging my clouds in Z space and feeling confident. Now onto the animation… Everything seems to be going as planned. Scrubbing seems to be a pain – even at quarter resolution. Hmm. Now AE likes to crash every few minutes. Going to purge all caches, and see if that helps. Nope. Still crashing. Creating a copy, and going to start removing elements, and see if I can find the culprit.
Welp, unfortunately something is amiss. This project is continually crashing AE on me. Going to have to sign off until I can rectify the sitch….
OK, glitch rectified.
And by rectified, I mean I started the whole project over :/
I didn’t figure out where the error was, but at least this go-round nothing acted up. Like I mentioned, instead of the fly through the clouds, I’m doing a fall to Earth, ..er, Pennsylvania, so I used a Public Domain photo of the Pennsylvania capitol, Harrisburg as the drop-zone. I also played with the Graph Editor to attempt to give the fall some realistic physics, although the ending it kind of abrupt. I even got to recycle my free wind clip!
So, after all of that I was able to finish this up in just under a week LOL! I always opt for the rabbit hole approach, and enjoy taking tangents into different aspects of the assignment. I find I retain the info better that way, and also grasp the overall concepts much better.
To sum up what I learned in this workshop, is that PNG files are great to work with on 3D layers, especially with clouds. I’ll definitely use them more frequently now, and sparingly integrate fractal noise/turbulent displacement in for a subtle animation. I was going to add some for this project, but after all the unexpected crashes, I’m calling it wraps. And holy cow this is rendering slowwwwwwwly!