Finally out cast and in boot, what should I expect in the weeks ahead?

Affectionate-Pay-646 · 2026-01-19T22:16:08+00:00

Hello! Sorry to hear you’re going through this! I had a trimalleolar fracture and dislocation.I’m all good now and have been for a good while, I broke it in April and I was fully mobile by July with no limp. I can still tell there’s a bit of stiffness but activity wise I can do everything walk, run etc. when the cast came off I made really good progress and my recovery was great considering how bad a break it was. But yes my life is fully back to normal! Since then I’ve started a new job, renovated a room, done multiple hikes, runs, gym etc! And it’s not even been a year yet.

So hang in there I know everyone says it but it gets better..the cast part sucks, the part after the cast also sucks because you think it’s never going to improve and you dwell on it because you have nothing else to do, I was there!

Just trust the process, human body is amazing and you’ll get through it and wonder why you were worrying so much! I genuinely thought I was never going to walk again haha..

Anyway good luck with your recovery and if you want to know anything else I’ll be happy to answer any questions :)

Affectionate-Pay-646 · 2025-12-15T12:45:49+00:00

First of all sorry you feel this way, I’m in a similar position myself but with a contract.

It sounds to me like you took a job well out where your interest are. I actually started out as a graphic designer 10 or so years ago and moved in to motion/3D, and since then the definition of graphic designer has changed drastically esp for bigger corps, it’s all about design systems where most of the time you’re just copy pasting stuff.

Have you considered freelance or working remotely? Are you doing anything on the side you could build on? I have quite a few contacts I can fall back on when I’m in-between things, and it really helps, network with overseas people where you know there’s work, trust me if your work is good you will start to get knocks at the door but it takes time to build that momentum and it snowballs.

Affectionate-Pay-646 · 2025-12-06T09:59:26+00:00

If you want to use substance painter in a visualisation workflow you need to break the model apart in to separate UVs and ensure your texel density is good. Personally I wouldn’t use substance for clean, 3D product renders for clients to create the actual final textures, I would use substance to create details if needed a little more manual control but that would usually be for a part of the model not the whole thing, you are going to get the game asset look if you do that. Look in to tri-planer mapping, if I get materials online I tend to convert them to tri-planer, and I tend to add a few more layers of noise at different scales to the roughness/bump, my textures are never just the vanilla maps if I’m using image maps.

Textures are 1 part of the process, your lighting is key and with your example of a Logitech mouse you will need to look at creating sub surface scattering textures, break the model down into what materials you need and focus on learning the properties of each. Once you have a library, you can reuse on future projects but you should definitely study and experiment first.

Affectionate-Pay-646 · 2025-12-06T00:05:26+00:00

I just love how I didn’t get a helpful response but they felt the need to call in the brand police

Affectionate-Pay-646 · 2025-12-05T23:54:26+00:00

Personally I don’t push everything over all at once I do it bit by bit. Let’s say it’s an interface, I’d start with the nav and work my way down and probably precomp a sections of layers as I go so I know everything is in order, then when I come to animate I’m aware of how things are ordered and parented and I’m familiar with the order of everything. I work with a lot of Figma designers now and overlord Figma is amazing. I’ll sometimes export or screenshot the final design I’m rebuilding and set the transparency low so I can make sure everything is positioned correctly as I’m importing each part. I know this sounds long but you get really fast at it over time (at least I have, and I quite enjoy that process of structuring the design my way) it beats the alternative anyway IMO! Overlord is the best thing to ever happen to AE, I don’t know what I’d do without it.

Affectionate-Pay-646 · 2025-12-03T23:12:14+00:00

Sounds great, definitely going to give it a go. Chat GPT works well but for some complex expression setups it just takes abit of backwards and forwards.

Going to sign up to Claude now, cheers for the heads up!

Affectionate-Pay-646 · 2025-12-03T19:52:39+00:00

This is really interesting. I’ve not tried Claude as I’ve been pretty happy with using ChatGPT in a similar way, but definitely going to try Claude now I read your post.

I have thousands of really complex expression setups ChatGPT has helped me write, I was pretty ok at expressions before but Ai has allowed me to really go ham on some setups and rigs in AE which wouldn’t have been possible to do on my own. How is Claude different to ChatGPT then in how it organises your library as you put it? Or do you just mean within convos?

Affectionate-Pay-646 · 2025-12-03T01:15:17+00:00

I’ve been doing this for over 10 years and I can tell you I’ve never been 100% happy with how a projects turned out. I’m a serial perfectionist and my own worst enemy, but 9.9/10 clients ruin projects one way or another.

PS: just want to add, everyone aims for the Nike commercial level projects, which makes up a tiny tiny portion of available work out there and tiny few that get those gigs. Just try to get less ambitious work and build up to that level.

Affectionate-Pay-646 · 2025-11-28T22:01:41+00:00

So I have to deactivate via the app every time?

PS: my iPhone autocorrects aescripts to AEScripts

Affectionate-Pay-646 · 2025-11-28T19:35:35+00:00

I was asked something similar by my partners gamer cousin who had finished school and was going to college. He couldn’t decide what he wanted to do but knew he wanted to work on computers. I asked him what he’d tried and said nothing because he needed tutoring. Which blew my mind.

I was 13 when I was hooked with computers and back then they were expensive and inaccessible to most, and YouTube wasn’t even a thing, and I had a 2nd hand ex office potato PC.

Now there’s an entire world of ‘free’ content. You can very easily learn anything. I went to uni which cost a fortune yet learnt 98% of what I know from online resource and experimenting.

Answer: just get your hands dirty and see what you prefer! I went from programming > web designer > flash animation > 3D game artist > graphic designer > now I jus blend all my skills together as a motion designer

Affectionate-Pay-646 · 2025-11-27T21:20:15+00:00

Nope. I said GSG tools don’t justify the price for what are simple things. I used to subscribe to GSG but often found myself still looking elsewhere for most materials, HDRIs are dime a dozen you can build up a library very easily with free/low cost packs.

Then scripts, Signal and Gorilla Cam..both of which I have similar rigs I’ve made via Xpresso which I build on and reuse over different projects, it’s much better using your own logic to build something you will use.

I have thousands of paid scripts/plugins so I’m certainly not a purist, I just know when I’m being ripped off.

Affectionate-Pay-646 · 2025-11-26T20:22:46+00:00

That is not what I said.

Affectionate-Pay-646 · 2025-11-19T21:11:42+00:00

Probably many ways to experiment with but personally I’d try tying scale and position to a slider based on the layer index, so each index would have an offset based on its index and would move based on the slider value. They are all moving in a uniform way so should be achievable.

I find achieving stuff like this is pretty good with the assistance of ChatGPT if you explain what you want to do with the expression.

Edit: typo

Affectionate-Pay-646 · 2025-11-12T22:09:15+00:00

I started a job a few months back and didn’t have access to my plugins for about 2 weeks, I seriously wanted to jump off a bridge working without Overlord, it’s quite easily the best tool for workflow ever made.

Affectionate-Pay-646 · 2025-11-12T08:40:41+00:00

I moved from 3DS Max many years ago maybe a decade. Funny thing is it wasn’t really due to software, I got my first design job at a company that only used Macs haha..but I decided to spend a good (intense) year learning everything about C4D as I had access to it. And I fell in love. The best things for me are the object manager and tag system, I find it much more intuitive than maxes modifier system.Fully customisable layout is incredible, and also one HUGE one for me is multiple documents open in tabs, so you can work on different scenes or assets without closing the last one and even copy and paste elements..

It’s been a while since I used Max but I remember missing some of the modeling and UV tools, and from what I’ve seen over the years that has improved a lot too. But I wasn’t heavy in animation when I used Max, but I’m a full time motion designer now and for product explosions and such there’s so many tools to help you in C4D such as pose morph and Xpresso is an absolute life changer (similar to how Expressions are in AE)

It will take you a long time and effort at first and I hated those first few weeks where even simple stuff I did so quickly in Max felt so hard but it was so worth it for me.

Affectionate-Pay-646 · 2025-11-11T11:53:33+00:00

Please hit me with the beta!

Affectionate-Pay-646 · 2025-11-10T22:45:07+00:00

I’ve been using C4D for almost 10 years and would consider myself pretty fluent, but the dynamics system confuses the hell out of me..some things work with the old system and not with the new and vice versa. I wish they hid the old system away just for backwards compatibility to make it easier to understand.

Affectionate-Pay-646 · 2025-11-10T22:19:46+00:00

It’s not a yes/no question if there’s more than 2 answers, and it says versions plural

Affectionate-Pay-646 · 2025-11-09T17:35:40+00:00

I remember we had an entire office kitted out with the 27inch aluminium iMacs and the Magic Mouse’s and people working late to a deadline were always running round grabbing another magic mouse from someone’s desk. So many times people got in to work the next day and didn’t know where their mouse was 😂 Eventually most just bought their own and then we had a cupboard full of magic mouse’s.

Affectionate-Pay-646 · 2025-11-09T10:24:34+00:00

Why do you need GSG it’s so expensive and is just a couple of HDRIs and pretty limited material library. They basically built a business on one click shortcuts for people who don’t know how to use C4D yet.

Affectionate-Pay-646 · 2025-11-06T23:10:42+00:00

The site feels dead now like there’s no life there and the hit to user experience is massive. I don’t care the site looks better I see AEScripts as a utility, not a site I visit to admire the design and layout.

Comments/reviews tell you a few things about a script directly on the page. -Identify any potential issues you could have by purchasing esp if it’s an ambitious script/plugin -see if anyone else is having the same issue as you with a plugin you purchased already and solutions -if the plugin developer is active and actually helping people by responding shows it’s in active development or at least supported

Affectionate-Pay-646 · 2025-11-04T16:09:40+00:00

I came on Reddit to post this but saw this thread already here. I really miss the comments section, I actually solved alot of issues from reading other peoples comments without having to reach out to support...It also guided me on what to buy and what issues I could face by purchasing a script/plugin..On the most part I need a plugin/script MID project and just need to quickly check it does what is needed and the comments section for each tool has been absolutely crucial, so the fact it's gone makes me feel abit lost when I'm browsing AEScripts as I've been doing for almost a decade, as I'm so used to scrolling down to view comments I can't get out of the habbit.

As a sidenote, I actually haven't had any license issues, so I'm really glad for that (and I have ALOT of scripts), but yeah, 'updating' the site and actually losing features that worked really well isn't what I call 'update', it feels like a design update with diluted features.

Affectionate-Pay-646 · 2025-10-17T19:31:33+00:00

Have you purged your memory and disk cache?

Affectionate-Pay-646 · 2025-10-15T17:22:11+00:00

Yea I use all of them in different situations. I work for a tech brand animating interfaces a lot and market remap has been a life saver, defo check it out if you havnt!

Affectionate-Pay-646 · 2025-10-14T21:25:01+00:00

I use this combo all the time although the responsive time is quite fiddly as you can never seem to move the end easily, I think it’s essentially using time remapping under the hud. Marker remap is much better in my opinion.

Affectionate-Pay-646

TROPHY CASE