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Need very large but detailed layer for ground
I have a project where a 3d car (thanks Element 3d!) drives around on a ground layer, revealing various pieces of text. To fake the effect that the ground goes endlessly into the distance, I need it to be like 8000 pixels by 8000 pixels, with a circular matte fading the “horizon”. At first I just used a solid color matte at 1000% size. But I want it to be a pavement texture in order to create a sense of movement. The pavement has to be sharp enough and so when the camera is right down there at floor level, the ground still looks sharp.
So what’s my best option to take a small pavement texture and use it to fill a giant layer? I assume it’s CC Tiler? Won’t I run into image buffer problems with such a large pre-comp? Just wanted to check with the experts and see if there is a better solution I’m overlooking. Thanks guys.
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6 Replies
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Eventually you will run into a limitation of the layer. My suggestion is to use a large precomp with a round feathered mask and animate a texture inside of it to move as the car moves.
Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist -
I can’t just animate the texture because the whole point is to see the car moving OVER the texture. The texture gives the car a sense of scale and speed. If the texture is parented to the car’s motion, then the car looks like it’s standing still. Maybe what I need is a 2000×2000 layer, and duplicate it 16 times to make an 8000×8000 grid. Will AE like that better than one giant layer?
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Can you explain a little more? If you’re talking about leaving the car stationary and moving the ground to create the illusion of forward motion, I don’t see how that helps. The ground still has to move as much as the car would, so the layer has to be just as big.
Maybe what I can do is make the ground a medium size layer at 500%, but then put smaller patches of high res ground texture on top of that wherever the camera is going to stop. So just in the spots where the camera isn’t moving, you get the full res texture?
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Here’s a short clip of what I’m working on:
https://vimeo.com/75707955The car is zipping around a track which is almost 4000 pixels wide. I want to make the ground seem like pavement, not just a smooth plane. Maybe I could get away with a 4000×4000 texture layer for the ground, with a larger layer underneath with NO texture that gives the effect of it stretching endlessly to the horizon? But even a 4000×4000 image will make my computer sad.
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digital juice has nice collections of repeating patterns. Or there are online resources with free ones such as cgtextures.com. We’ve done well in the past using tileable textures and the CC RepeTile effect to create ground layers.
you’re still gonna have some limitations based on the size the layer can extend.
-mattyc -
[Matthew Belinkie] “Can you explain a little more? If you’re talking about leaving the car stationary and moving the ground to create the illusion of forward motion, I don’t see how that helps. The ground still has to move as much as the car would, so the layer has to be just as big.”
Not if you make the road texture seamless. (Take the image into Photoshop, apply the Offset filter, select an area around the seam and use Content-Aware Fill plus whatever cloning/painting is necessary to cover it.)
Then instead of animating position, you can apply and animate the Offset effect to create the illusion of infinite forward motion with a finitely-sized layer.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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