3D-particles in After Effects

[Brian Charles]

It’s currently not possible to have particles with 3D extrusion in After Effects, you may need to wait for AK’s Element.

You could use a plugin like ShapeShifter or Zaxwerks Invigorator to generate extruded 3D shapes in AE but they couldn’t be used as particles.

[Chris Bobotis]

You could pre-render or pre-comp a sequence using ShapeShifter AE then use that as a particle (Sprite) in Particluar.

Or you could use ShapeShifter AE’s built-in Generator to create instances and animate them depending on what your animation is like.

See: https://www.mettle.com/Products/ShapeShifter-AE.php there are several examples of ShapeShifter AE using the built-in Generator.

Cheers,
Chris
mettle.com

[Erik Waluska]

You could render out the 3D music notes as movies and then use those as custom particles in particular. You may need to use several instances of particular depending on how many music notes you have. Also, check out this tutorial.

[Walter Soyka]

Here’s an example showing how 3D custom particles look with Particular’s different particle types.

In the two lower examples, I use an animation of a rotating asterisk as the custom particle. Particular’s “Sprite” particle type always auto-orients the particle to the camera, so the illusion of depth is more or less preserved (though perspective is not proper). Particular’s “Polygon” particle type allows free rotation of the texture on all axes, breaking the illusion of extruded depth.

If you need to have any x- or y-rotation, you must animate in and render it from C4D. Bring it into AE as a movie. Use the movie as the texture for Particular, and choose your time sampling accordingly. If you want to have multiple different notes, make them all movies of the same length, import them all into AE and precomp them together (head to tail), and use one of the Split Clip time sampling methods.

Using C4D’s native particle tools is another option, too.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events