• Adobe After Effects

  Export garbage mask to 3D app?

  Posted by Randomnumbers on May 21, 2006 at 11:06 am

  Hi guys,
  I’ve been processing some DV footage and due to the lousy quality (white actor in white clothes on a white background), had to set up an animated garbage mask.
  The resultant footage is being used in a 3D application (Lightwave 3D).
  Is there any way I can export the mask from AE?
  It would be so incredibly useful to have the shape information of the mask at each frame in my 3D app (for reasons somewhat complicated that I won’t go into here!).
  I tried searching the forum and googling all over the place but couldn’t find any info on this.

  I must confess I am very new to AE. Ended up having to use it for my current project, so I am really learning as I go. Not an ideal situation, but easy is no fun, right? Apologies if the question has been asked a thousand times before, or is completely idiotic.

  Thanks in advance,
  /Andy

  Randomnumbers replied 20 years, 4 months ago 2 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Mylenium

  May 21, 2006 at 4:27 pm

  Export with Alpha channel and then map it onto a plane. Or do you need the point info for morphs/ endomorphs?

  Mylenium

  [Pour Myl
• 

  Randomnumbers

  May 21, 2006 at 4:50 pm

  At the moment I am texture & clip mapping a plane.
  I would really like to give the plane some thickness, so I was hoping I could use the point info to generate an outline polygon to map onto.
• 

  Mylenium

  May 21, 2006 at 6:38 pm

  [randomnumbers] “I would really like to give the plane some thickness, so I was hoping I could use the point info to generate an outline polygon to map onto.”

  Phew, that would be hard, if not impossible. You’d have to copy&paste your masks for each frame into Illustrator, save the contours to AI/EPS and create a object for each frame which then could be loaded using Objecct Sequence object replacement… Not very practical, if you ask me. Even if you build your contours in LW with a few inbetween morph steps, you’d have a lot of work ahead of you. I think you will have better luck by using a plane “sandwich” object with 200 or so planes stacked tightly (1mm apart or whatever seems convenient) and apply your textures to it. It’s not really solid, but due to the antialiasing/ oversampling, you shouldn’t see any gaps unless you look straight thru the gaps.

  Mylenium

  [Pour Myl
• 

  Randomnumbers

  May 21, 2006 at 8:30 pm

  I was afraid you were going to say that!
  I think I have just decided I like it just fine the way it is.
  Thanks for the input.
  /Andy

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