Apple’s Front Row look?

[Elgato7]

I just read through this thread really fast so maybe someone already mentioned this. In AE6.5 to get the objects to always face the camera you can go to Layer > Transform > Auto Orient > Orient to camera. Does exactly what you want without the math.

[Tcelos]

Never tried that. I need to see if I can do it in AE 6.0 though. But thanks!

los

[Joel Berry]

True. And believe me, that option is VERY useful. But in the case of the animation of the three revolving rectangles, that wouldn’t work.

It is important that they face only parallel to the camera, i.e., always face the infinite plane of the camera lens, not the actual camera, otherwise, when they revolve, they would be “looking” straight into the camera lens, not out behind the camera into infinity.

As far as I know, this can only be done with mathematical expressions (varying their angles based on the camera’s angles, or by hard-coded animation keyframes.

[Joel Berry]

As stated earlier in this thread, I have used “fake” reflections and expressions to simulate items sitting on a very, very well-shined white floor with an infinite white background.

I am working on a promo video for our company, and created the following videos as an example of this technique, which allows the reflections to be see from any camera angle as they adjust themselves automatically to the position of their “non-reflective” or source layer, so really all you have to do is set up a bunch of fake-reflected objects, and animate the camera through them (a very popular technique nowadays):

HIGH-RES https://www.theretailcoach.net/downloads/reflections_camera.mov (9MB)
LOW-RES https://www.theretailcoach.net/downloads/reflections_cameraLg_Prog.mov (300KB)

Now, I am no Dan Ebberts, but I guess my question is: would anyone be interested in a tutorial on how I set this up? Or has this way of doing things been beaten to death, and would I be wasting my time and insulting the intelligence of all the AE users here?

Thanks,

jdb

[Joel Berry]

How do I get to your iDisk? My Mac is at home (no Internet), and I am at work on my Windows machine… Check out my .MOVs below and see if you recognize any techniques for faking the reflection!

Thanks,

jdb

[Kevin Snyder]

I would be interested…it never hurts to learn a new technique for doing things.

KMS

[Tcelos]

You should set it up so people can have a reference. Never hurts. And if you are on a PC and need to get to my iDisk, you might need to search on the Apple site to see how its done. I don’t own a PC, so I don’t know how to.

los