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Effectors, Objects, and Compositing in After Effects, can it be done?
Hey creative community,
I am stuck.
I have a C4D scene of a bunch of TVs stacked up as a wall. Each is a unique object.
They are all in a null, with a shader effector with a noise shading animating their position outwards in Z space. (I used the noise to give them some randomness)
All looks pretty good. I can render out this scene fine, but I need to get it into After Effects and give my client the ability to swap footage out on the TV screens.
I know you can extract layers/camera/lights, create object buffers, multipass, etc. which is not a problem, but the layers that need to move on the TV screens are static. They do not move with the TVs.
I notice that the effectors do not move the actual Axis point of the object, which makes it so that even if I get a layer to stick onto the screen in C4D, if I extract or import that layer into AE, it is static, unmoving.
Constraints, parenting, none of that seems to do the trick. Can anyone help?
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1 Reply
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Here’s what you need to do:
1. Give the null a c4d> external compositing tag. In the tag’s properties check the cache, children, and solid boxes. Set the solid dimensions to the same dimensions (in cm) as your screens;
2. In your render>Save settings, under the compositing project file section, check the save and include 3D data boxes.
Now when you render you’ll be prompted to save an .aec file. When you double-click to open the .aec file you’ll get an AE project that contains all of your footage, any additional passes you may have rendered, and solids for each screen that should be animated properly. You’ll also get extra solids for the null that was holding the screens and the shader effector, but you can just delete those.
This, of course, assumes that you’ve installed the C4DImport plugin that you’ll find in your Maxon>Exchange Plugins directory.
hth
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