3D layer query

[Yianni Papanicolaou]

sorry i wasn’t being clear, I need the layer to be visible even if something moves in front of it in 3d space, to stop a floor covering up a vertical layer when they intersect

thank you in advance

Hannah xxx

[Yianni Papanicolaou]

ok, I’ve drawn two characters sitting on a sofa in illustrator. They are at an isometrical angle. I’ve then build a rudimentary room from 3 layers. I want to sit them in the centre of the shot on the floor and use a camera to do a pan across and a truck in. Problem is that the ideal place to put the layer containing the characters and sofa has part of the layer below the floor line. I’ve tried moving the layer up and i’ve tried moving it towards the camera but both just look like they’re hovering above the floor and the camera moves don’t look good, also the shadow cast is wrong also implying hovering

does this help

H x

[Bill Kelly]

I think I can see what you’re getting at here. Have you tried precomposing your 3 layers that form your rudimentary room and making that precomp a 3D layer, then put your sofa & characters layer in 3D space just a little (say 1 or 2 pixels) in front of the precomposed room layer?

[Peter Van der zee]

To me it sounds like the perspective of the sofa is different from the one of the room,
you could try a different lens on the camera, like fisheye to deform the walls and floor more…
rotate the room until it coincides perspectives (may put 3d off for the sofa during matching)
if putting back on 3d for the sofa, it deforms, you can always have that layer orient towards the camara
(layer_transform_auto-orient_orient towards camara)

http://www.zeemotion.com

[Alexander Cama]

I think there is a tutorial by Aaron R. about breaking the 3d space. If you insert a 2d layer in between two 3d layers, it changes the way after effects composites them, forcing them to act like 2d layers would, but still exist in 3d space. So you can make something further back in z space appear on top by separating your 3d layers with a 2d layer. I just tried it now with a solid scaled to 0 (so it stays invisible, turning off the solid didn’t work.) I don’t know what kind of seperator Aarron R. used… it might have been a tip inside another tutorial…

If you just take one 3d layer on put move it’s layer order to the top in the timeline, it will not act like a 2d layer would and lay on top, because it is acting as it should be, further back in z space is behind everything else closer in z space. If you want one 3d layer to appear to be in front of another 3d layer, you need to use the above technique to trick After Effects into doing it.

[Alexander Cama]

Actually I think Aaron used a 2d adjustment layer (without effects on it obviously) to break the 3d.