Curved 3D layer background in AE – is it possible?

[Darby Edelen]

There are a couple of options for doing this. One would be to create a relatively large pre-comp of your curved plane (environment) and apply CC Cylinder to it. Then place the cylinder so that the camera is facing the interior curved wall.

Alternatively you could use CC Environment, which is part of the Cycore FX HD package (an extended version of the ‘free’ version that ships with AE):

Cycore FX CC Environment:

Another option would be cutting your curved surface into several flat surfaces and rotating them to form a crudely curved surface. This would take the most work and probably give the poorest result, but I find it easier to control the positions of these layers instead of the cylinder created by CC Cylinder

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Ken Latman]

Could you also fake it with a different type of camera in AE?
I would image that changing the focal length and lens style might create a plane that was curved.

[Darby Edelen]

[Ken Latman] “I would image that changing the focal length and lens style might create a plane that was curved.”

To my knowledge there is no such thing as a lens style in AE. The virtual AE camera assumes an optically perfect aspherical lens. In addition, the focal length does not introduce any distortion in an image, it only widens or narrows the field of view (which can cause layers spaced along the z-axis of the camera to appear farther or closer together even when they are not).

AE has the Distort > Optics Compensation effect available to simulate lens distortion. Several of the other Distort effects can be used to create interesting (although probably not physically accurate) lens distortion effects. There are also 3rd party effects available for this purpose.

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA