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3D camera rig and continually rasterising layers
I’ve rebuild a website in After Effects so I can animate the elements flying in from different directions to make up the finished site.
I’d like to be able to zoom into the different parts of the site.
The whole comp is in several pre-comps. All layers have motion blur applied and I’ve got the switch on. I’ve tired turning on the continually rasterise button and at the top level, when I switch it on for the comp, the 3D camera has no effect. I really don’t want to drag each individual element to the top level as this will be very messy and time consuming.
The only way I can get the 3D camera to work is if I turn off the continually rasterise button. Which obviously isn’t an option.
Olly Lawer
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5 Replies
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Olly –
Are you outputting this to Flash (FLV, or F4V)? If so, as I remember, you can only output vector elements from AE to these formats, which somewhat limits your choices. Of course you can output it as a movie, then convert it to Flash, but the file size is going to be very large. I think that this is why most web elements you see from AE are rather flat looking; you need to go to Flash (the program) to get more functionality – that’s what it’s for. And I believe that the “motion blur”, even in Flash, is really a combination of keyframing effects using a blurred image and a sharp image. Anyone who knows more on this feel free to weigh in.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
what do you mean by “the 3d camera has no effect”? are the layers inside your pre-comps 3d toogled also?
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All of the layers inside the continuously rasterized precomps must have their 3D layer switches enabled in your case.
Darby Edelen
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I think my AE does funny stuff. In the end, turning off the continually rasterise switch fixed the issue. Then when I’ve done the camera moves, I switch back on and all is good.
But the comp won’t animate in 3D if the switch is on.
Olly Lawer
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I don’t quite understand how you’ve set things up, but here are some pointers:
If you have a main comp with a 3D camera and a 3D subcomp WITHOUT collapse transformations (cont.rast), the subcomp will behave as a flat layer in 3D space, regardless of whether it has 3D layers/camera/whatever inside.
If you have a main comp with a 3D camera and a 3D subcomp WITH coll.trans, AE will ignore any camera/lights inside the subcomp and instead use camera/lights in the main comp. But otherwise your 3D layers inside the subcomp will behave as if they were inside the main comp.
Basically if a subcomp has camera/lights and you want to use them, you can’t enable coll.trans on that subcomp when you put it in a main comp.
Also beware that if your subcomp contains a mix of 2D and 3D layers things can get very weird if you enable 3D and coll.trans. on that subcomp.
Effects on a 3D comp with coll.trans. will cause it to not interact in 3D space with other objects in your main comp.
And two last points which has caught me out a few times: layer styles will break 3D as if there was a 2D layer above and below the layer. And ‘3D on 2D’ layers like layers with Particular, Element and other ‘3D’ plugins will act as a 2D layer for the purpose of interacting with other layers.
3D in after effects can be very interesting..
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https://www.jonbagge.net
Jon Bagge – Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects
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