RVA8

Wooooaaaahhhh! It's back! Nicely done Zack!

If you set your Spline effector mode to "Relative" and then put a Step effector above it in the hierarchy, you can use the Step effector to vary the positions of the clones relative to each other while still following the spline. I just used a regular Linear Cloner with clones in Y, then set the Relative Offset Axis to Y+ in the Spline effector. R

We've got a freelancer in right now who absolutely swears by Renderman and from what I hear it's pretty sweet. And since it's been around forever it's apparently exceedingly stable. But it's definitely geared towards larger productions, high poly-counts and big pipelines. I always found C4D's support of Renderman a bit of a tease anyway since C4D's viewer buckles like a belt under even modest poly-counts. I'd still like to play with it though...

I was afraid of that. I figured it would have been implemented a long time ago if it was easy to do. It would be HUGE though!

And global variables for expressions?

While we're on the subject, can you back the "X" to close a panel instead of having to go through the drop-down menu? And bring back "New Comp Viewer" to the comp viewer drop-down? Please R

I've always found Tracers to be a bit squirrely, but I think cacheing is a good place to start for sure. You might also try setting uniform intermediate points on your Tracer spline. R

Flash has some pretty unique drawing tools that make this kind of thing much easier to execute than AE.

Dynamics tag with custom initial rotation will get you the tumbling. Set your gravity in the Dynamics menu to 0 or use a high Follow Position value to keep your object in place. R

Yes! Also, Old Man Gloom. There's not a ton on Spotify (only their most recent) but their album "Christmas" is real solid. Oh, and Buried At Sea (the band) too.

I'm not sure if it's practical for you or your needs, but I actually do both and it works well for me. I've got a 2009 MacPro that I use for working on and then a PC I built last fall for rendering. I figure that way I get the flexibility of being able to upgrade my rendering hardware easily without having to sacrifice my OS X workflow and when my MacPro takes a shit I can move to an iMac and it'll likely be comparable if not a bit faster for working on. Downside is I have two desktop machines, which takes up a lot of space in my small apartment. R

I'm calling it right now: posterized lightning-gun-toting noir gangstas are the new deer head.

Shit yeah man! WAY better!

I absolutely agree with AromaKat - the white-text-on-black-background ending just a bummer. The tracked type for the intro is fine, but the composite isn't great, which might be forgivable if there was some really bad ass animation or something fun happening, but it just sort of sits there. That's really an opportunity to do something that 100% you and it sort of falls flat, which also doesn't do the good work in your reel any justice. It sets it up with a "meh" instead of a "YEAH!", ya know? Reel wise, you've got some good work in there, but I feel like that edit could use some tightening. There's lots of spots where you lose momentum and it makes it feel slow. You could probably trim out a third of the work, or make the edits much quicker by eliminating some of the dead space and get it down under a minute easily which would help keep the pace feeling snappy and interesting. Also I think there are some good cues in that track that you aren't taking advantage of yet that would really help add some character and energy to the reel as a whole.

I'm not sure the site itself makes me uneasy, but this message sets off my spam-sense. Especially since this post is literally a copy/paste from their "about" page. It feels, if anything, a bit disingenuous. The lack of contact info could simply be because it's a new site and what they have is essentially place-holder. But it does seem...dubious.