3D Stroke

[Marco Salsiccia]

Here you go:

https://www.trapcode.com/products_3dstroke.html

—
Marco Salsiccia
Engineer of Insurrection
Digital Anarchy

[Kevin Camp]

if you are talking about trapcode’s 3d stroke, yes, sort of… if your talking about ae stroke applied to a 3d layer, not really, but you may be able to fake it.

with 3d stroke, your masks will be 2d (on x-y plane), but you can rotate that plane to create depth, either by rotating the masks via the tranform properties in the effect or the camera settings in the effect or adding a 3d cam to your comp and setting the effect to use the comp camera. your stroke will still be on a x-y plane just rotated in space.

with ae stroke, you’ll have to make the layer 3d, turn it or rotate/postion the camera to create depth. but you will need to try to compensate for the flattness that you will encounter and there will be limitations.

you could, however, create a line with a 3d particle system, like trapcodes particular. the emitter can draw line and its position can be animated through 3d space. check out andrew kramer’s tutorial for ipod nano like light streaks.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Nathan Trenkamp]

Thanks for the feedback. I guess I’ll just have to get the Trapcode Particular plug-in. Rotating the stroke in 3d space was a good idea though, but like you said, it’ll look flat and it won’t be true 3d. Thanks again.

[Kyle Hamrick]

Depending on what you’re doing, a quick (and cheaper) solution could also be to simply make several duplicates of your stroke layer, and push each one 1 pixel further back into Z space. Just make as many as you need to give it the desired depth.

You could even decrease the brush size as you get further from the “home position” if you wanted it to taper on the Z axis.

Kyle Hamrick

Editor/Motion Graphics Artist

http://www.kylehamrick.com