Animating floating ribons

[Steve Roberts]

Ah, yes. You’re running into the 3D limitations of AE. You may already know that, regarding 3D in AE:

– AE is made up of flat planes.
– anything that looks like real 3D is a live movie playing on a flat plane (e.g. Invig, CC sphere).
– the only paths that really exist in 3D space are motion paths.
– any other path or mask has to reside on a layer, and thus only has two dimensions.
– The path of a stroke made with Trapcode’s 3D stroke is only controllable within two dimensions: the plane of the layer holding it. The other dimension is not as controllable, since it uses the 3D stroke controls.
– Unless Freeform has changed significantly, it uses a NURBS object to change its shape. This is nice, but still limited.
– going from “around something” to “not around something” can be hard, since effects often do just one thing, and switching requires connecting an effected layer to an unaffected layer. Yick.

You might be able to use Invig for this, but I haven’t used it in so long, I’m no authority. You might also be able to use CC Cylinder (multiple times if necessary) — Google “what the helix”.

However, I found that when it comes to precise positioning and interaction between objects, real 3D (e.g. Maya) is the way to go.

Of course, I could be wrong. Anybody else?

[Michael Szalapski]

Here’s a useful tutorial part one and part two.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Pierre Paré-blais]

thank you both for your replies.

I had completely forgotten about that Tutorial which I now remember seeing when it was posted!
Eran also mentions this tutorial https://library.creativecow.net/articles/langley_david/3d_ribbon_text.php which I found also quite useful because I like working with expressions…

as it turns out, after making my post here, I decided to give Maya a shot and see what I could do without wasting to much time… and well I’m pretty satisfied with the result so far, but it’s going to take a bit longer to render…

so I haven’t decided what I’ll do just yet, but most likely I will created a first draft version in AE so the editor can put it in his timeline, and also rough in the pacing of the shot, and then I’ll probably make the final shot in Maya.

thanks again

Pierre P. Blais
Multimedia performance and VFX artist
Pierre P. Blais Productions
Perception Films
https://www.vimeo.com/user1771129