• Adobe After Effects

  How to make a 3d mask/Motion Path

  Posted by John Winthrop on March 5, 2017 at 9:27 pm

  I want a ball to be “orbiting” a pillar in 3 dimensions. I can do it manually be keyframing the 3d postions and looping those keyframes, but it is very hard to get it to be a perfect circle.

  Making and object circle in 2d is simple enough, just make a circle shape and copy the mask path onto the position of the layer I want to move. I tried to do this in 3d, but no matter how I rotate the layer the mask is on (to be a perfect circle surrounding the central object) when i copy the mask path and paste it it still applies it as a 2 dimensional layer.

  How can I get the mask (or any other “path”) to occupy the z dimension so that when I paste it on the postion layer of another 3d object it will apply that position to the z depth?

  Michael Szalapski replied 9 years, 2 months ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Ken Teutsch

  March 6, 2017 at 4:44 pm

  If you really just want the object to move in a circle, and unless I’m misunderstanding, a simpler way would be to just move the anchor point of the orbiting object and then keyframe the rotation. You don’t need a motion path.
• 

  Michael Szalapski

  March 7, 2017 at 5:34 pm

  Or make a null object, make it 3d, scoot your main object to the side a little bit, parent it to the null object, and then rotate the null object on the y axis.

  – The Great Szalam
  (The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)

  No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

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