External Compositing Tag Solid Issues in After Effects CC 2014

[Cassius Marques]

Something about that fracture object… Once I put the phone out of it, the solid appeared in AE.

Can’t tell about that lagging behind on your first try without seeing the AE file.

[Joseph Nilo]

I do a lot of iPhone 3D model work and instead of replacing the screen in AE I do it in C4D. Save out the screencaptures as a video in the correct aspect ratio of the screen and load it into the color channel of the screen material. Click the preview of the video in the material editor and go to its animation tab and press calculate. Then go to the Editor tab of the material and check the Animate Preview box.

This adds to the realism, especially if your iPhone model has a glass screen with reflections and refraction.

Joseph Nilo
HiLo Media
http://www.hilomedia.com

[Brad Magnus]

Thank you for checking out the C4D file! I have the phone in the fracture object so I can use the delay effector to smooth out the motion. Is there another way?

I’m rendering out from C4D with the animation texture. But I’ll get the Ae file together so you can see what’s going on. Hopefully you can see if I’m doing something wrong. I’d really much rather composite in Ae…

[Brad Magnus]

That was my last resort, I don’t like committing to graphics like that until the client has given me full write off. Now if they make a change I’ve got to re-render the Ae file, and then re-render C4D… I really do appreciate the suggestion though! I know you saved me some time looking for what I was doing wrong not having the “Calculate” button pressed or the “Animate Preview” box checked! Thanks!

[Darby Edelen]

I’m going to guess that the delay effector is the source of your troubles. There are two possible problems.

1) The delay effector in R15 has a tendency to forget to work, so it’s possible that the C4D scene is not delaying the object but the delay is being properly added in the compositing information. The only way I’ve found to ‘wake up’ the delay effector is by dragging it’s strength value in the attribute manager a little bit (do NOT type in a value and press return/enter).

2) The delay effector is working properly in C4d but not through the cineware/AEC pipeline. In that case you should apply a MoGraph Cache tag to your Fracture and cache it. Honestly I’d do that even if it turns out #1 was the problem. For animations that require data from previous frames (e.g. dynamics, delay effectors, etc.) you should always cache.

The easiest way to confirm that the delay effector is the issue would be to disable it and see if things line up in AE.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

If you render the screen black then making the screen appear behind the reflective glass isn’t too tough in composite. The aptly named ‘Screen’ blend mode does a great job.

Pretty much the only time I ever consider rendering screen content in 3D is when I need reflections or illumination from the screen to fall on other objects.

Even then I’ll sometimes render a UV map of the screen + reflections to map the texture in post.

Darby Edelen

[Brad Magnus]

I thought I had tried that before, but just to be sure I just tried it again. I deleted both the delay effector and the fracture object from the scene, and similar results.

It’s really strange because the solid appears to be rotating the opposite direction. (appears, because I guess it could be the camera too).

Any other suggestions? I would really prefer to composite in Ae. Rendering the video texture from C4D for now.

[Brad Magnus]

I should point out that the green background image above, is from Cineware. That’s been a big issue for me. Previously, the rendered aec files weren’t even importing solids either. I’m going to test if I MoCache if the solid will come in from the aec.