• Adobe After Effects

  Recessing Brick Animation

  Posted by Ari Grunzeweig on May 8, 2014 at 4:42 pm

  Hi,

  I’m working on an animation where bricks move backwards randomly to a specific point in the wall. Then a second layer of bricks will move back. See attached animation for first layer moving.

  Brick Test V1

  The problem is that do get nice shadows I have to set the shadow map resolution of my comp to 4000. When doing this, I get RAM errors when rendering out my animation at 1080p.

  The bricks are all made in a precomp where 5 jpeg sides are arranged to form a brick. No back wall, as we never see it. They all those precomps are put in a master comp with collapse transformations and then arranged to make the wall.

  So my questions are as follows?

  1. Is there an easier or more automated way of doing this? Perhaps with a script or something similar?
  2. If not, does anyone have any tips to make this less heavy on the rendering/RAM/processing? Basically, make the setup more efficient.

  I am using an i7 iMac with 16gb of RAM with AE CC on Mavericks.

  Thanks so much!

  Thanks,
  Ari

  Roland R. kahlenberg replied 12 years, 3 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Ari Grunzeweig

  May 8, 2014 at 5:13 pm

  I had a feeling that would be the case.. but I only have minimal experience with C4D. Any clue where I start on something like this?

  Thanks!

  Thanks,
  Ari
• 

  Walter Soyka

  May 9, 2014 at 3:40 am

  [Ari Grunzeweig] “I had a feeling that would be the case.. but I only have minimal experience with C4D. Any clue where I start on something like this?”

  The tools that would make this animation really straighforward — the cloner and effectors in the C4D Mograph module — are not included in C4D LITE.

  That said, you could still build and animate this pretty quickly by hand, but you should expect a bit of a learning curve. If you’re looking for training, I think the best place to start is Cineversity.

  Walter Soyka
  Principal & Designer at Keen Live
  Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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• 

  Roland R. kahlenberg

  May 9, 2014 at 5:22 am

  You will also get nice shadows with the Ray-traced Renderer. The issue it may introduce is increased render times.

  HTH
  RoRK
  Gaudy Teaser for an upcoming AE Type Gizmo.

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