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Bending footage in 3d
Hey all,
I’m working on a piece that involves moving the camera around in all directions. Ground on bottom, and the camera basically is finding text placed throughout the comp. Here’s my issue, I have footage of clouds in the background, but when I move to far to the left or right, you can obviously see the edge of the cloud video. What I would like to do is bend the video in a full circle around the camera’s path so that you can see the clouds from all angles.
I’m not interested in Arora Sky because it doesn’t look real enough. I’ve tried the Warp effect but it doesn’t change anything in 3d space.
Thoughts?
Ed
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6 Replies
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An alternative is to make a 2D cloud layer with Fractal noise and use it as a 3D background, Dan Ebberts shows us how in his tut, “Building the World’s Greatest Cameraman”:
https://www.creativecow.net/show.php?page=/articles/ebberts_dan/expression_cont/index.html
Or click Dan’s head and scroll (other greats there too).
Anyway the last section with the title,
—pan, tilt, focus, and zoom—
tells how to stretch the 2D Fractal Noise layer via an expression that ties in to the Offset Turbulence, all is revealed via a downloadable aep file. You get an endless cloudy background in AE’s 3D space.Most amazing.
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What about mapping it onto a sphere or a cylinder. Try CC Cylinder.
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Such perspective effects aren’t 3d objects.
bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”
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Ah-ha, you would think so. Actually CC sphere and CC cylinder react to the 3D camera just like 3D objects. The secret is to NOT turn on 3D for that layer. You can wrap your background in a cylinder and have it react to your camera moves.
I uploaded a demo file at:
https://www.motioncity.com/demo -
Like all 3D effects in AE, those two create a “movie” of a 3D object that “plays” on a flat “screen”, that is, a plane which is an AE layer.
You want that layer to be facing camera at all times, otherwise the illusion is lost and you see the “screen” obliquely.
To do that, you need to keep the layer “2D”, because if you make it “3D”, you’ll see the movie screen at an angle, and you don’t want that.
Let the 3D effect do its work, by creating a “movie” that reacts to the AE camera, yet plays on a screen that is always flat to camera. Because it’s been left as “2D”.
Does that help?
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These have all been very helpful actually. I have tried tinkering around with the cc cylinder but havn’t reached the effect that I need yet. I like the idea of keeping the movie on a flat plane however I think that it will be almost impossible to mimic real life conditions using this method.
When I was a kid, I went to Disney World in Orlando Florida. They had this exibit that was basically a 360 degree movie. You were flying in an airplane and you could see in any direction that you faced, in the theatre. That’s the kind of effect that I am trying to replicate, however the more I am playing with it, I’m thinking that maybe AE just isn’t the tool for the job.
I’d love to hear more about the flat plane approach.
Thanks guys,
Ed
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