• Adobe After Effects

  Shadow + Depth of field

  Posted by Nicolas Guionnet on March 10, 2019 at 7:33 pm

  Hi,

  I’ve been using AE for now 2 weeks. I need to give some 3D to a simple 2D animation.

  I read that :

  – Classic 3D –> no shadow
  – Cinema 4D –> no depth of field.

  Is there a way to get both ?

  Thanks !

  Nicolas Guionnet replied 7 years, 2 months ago 3 Members · 5 Replies
• 5 Replies

• 

  Nicolas Guionnet

  March 11, 2019 at 8:59 am

  Thanks Dave,
  I meant that I needed to extrude simple 2d shapes and then give them some shadow and add depth of field.
  And there is no way to extrude shapes in Classic 3d (that I know of).
  And there is no DOF in C4D.
  … I must admit that this is not what I asked. I appreciate your tact. ????
• 

  Max Haller

  March 11, 2019 at 3:59 pm

  Im not 100% sure you can do this in the Lite version of C4d, but you can render out a depth pass from cinema and use that in AE as a blur map for an effect like camera lens blur. Depending your scene you can probably fake it by masking off certain areas and just blurring the layers by hand. I havent had to do that in a while so I might be wrong but see what you can do about bringing multipasses into AE. From Cinema I believe its in the render settings. You’d probably want to export object buffer and depth.
• 

  Nicolas Guionnet

  March 12, 2019 at 11:10 am

  Tanks Dave, Thanks Max, (order of appearance ☺ )
  … mmm … it seems tough for a two weeks old baby like me (in AE) … and tuning it would probably be very time consuming. For the more subtle is the idea, the more efforts needed to find the good parameters to make it work … ☺

  I wonder if the time needed for me to learn all this is not longer than the time needed for Adobe to provide us with a new version of AE with extrude and DOF in the same 3D renderer.

  I am not the only one hoping for this I guess … DOF gives so much realism and even charm to a scene …

  Well I made my choice for the moment and will use Classic 3D for the sake of DOF (in a couple of clicks). There may be a way to approach the effect of extruded shapes …
• 

  Michael Szalapski

  March 12, 2019 at 7:29 pm

  [Nicolas Guionnet] “Well I made my choice for the moment and will use Classic 3D for the sake of DOF (in a couple of clicks). There may be a way to approach the effect of extruded shapes …”

  You can stack a bunch of copies of your layer in 3d space slightly offset on the z-axis and it’s a pretty decent fake 3d.

  – 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.
• 

  Nicolas Guionnet

  March 12, 2019 at 11:41 pm

  Hi Michael !
  Thanks ! Good idea. It will look like the radiator of my CPU if I enable shadow on the copies ( but I won’t ! )
  Without shadow and with a sufficient number of copies, this trick should work well !

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