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Activity Forums Apple Motion Building a drop-zoned filmstrip and moving and bending it in 3D space

  • Building a drop-zoned filmstrip and moving and bending it in 3D space

    Posted by Kevin Hamm on February 5, 2014 at 8:03 pm

    Ok, so I’ve been building a project for a friend, and it’s a puzzle of how to do it. It’s going ok, but I’ve hit a wall that I’m not finding a way around.

    First off, I built the filmstrip by
    1) creating a single frame of the film strip
    2) adding a drop zone
    3) making it an emitter and changing the settings so that it emits one ‘frame’ at a time, in one direction, creating a strip.

    What’s cool about this is that I can, in FCP, put a clip into the drop zone and it plays in the filmstrip. That problem solved.

    Now I want to take that filmstrip and move it in a swirl pattern thru space. Think of it as the track for a matchbox cars doing a loop. Or a roller coaster loop.

    Here’s what I thought I need to do, but I can’t figure out how to make it work right.

    1) Build the loop in 3D
    2) add a motion effect (move on path) to the group with the emitter from above.
    3) MAGIC.

    This has not worked. Can anyone help?

    Kevin Hamm
    Video, Web, Print, coloring books, jam and socks.

    Mark Suszko replied 12 years, 2 months ago 4 Members · 4 Replies
  • 4 Replies
  • Robin S. kurz

    February 5, 2014 at 9:16 pm

    Motion is “2.5D”. There is no way you will be able to create anything that occupies 3 axis of space at once. For that you’d have to look into something like mObject which gives you volumetric objects in Motion, but I have no idea if it would do that specifically.

  • Don Smith

    February 10, 2014 at 6:46 pm

    I have mObject. It has a library of 3d objects that are truly 3D but if you put the mObject in Motion twice in the same time frame then you’ll be back to the old 2.5D limitations of Motion. However, you can put a second object into one mObject instance.

    The MotionFFX.com YouTube channel is here:

    https://www.youtube.com/user/motionVFXcom

    One of those tutorials explains all this.

    NewsVideo.com

  • Mark Suszko

    February 13, 2014 at 4:47 pm

    I have an idea, might work or might not.

    You are looking to create a swirly, curly kind of path like a real strip of film loose on a table-top, past which you can fly your 3-d camera to get additional cool angles and fly-arounds…

    Okay, what I would try is to draw a path and have the frame of film with drop box be a replicated object along that path. I did this once for a project where I had a line of people icons travel along a path and fall off the edge like a cliff effect. it was a couple years ago using Motion 4 and I don’t recall particulars but I do remember it worked and that it should work with any repeatable object. You can also emit any object as a particle, so if straight replication doesn’t work, try creating a particle emitter that emits duplicates of your film frame, and constrain their travel, see if that gets you in the ball park.

  • Mark Suszko

    February 13, 2014 at 7:58 pm

    I played around with the replicator in Motion 4 for a while, this is a shot in progress…. the idea is to use the replicator to create the trip, but to make the replicated frames follow a straight or curved path, then use the 3-d camera to fly around it to make it more interesting.

    Maybe you can use this as a starting point and turn it into a template we can all use?

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