faux 3d box

[Steve Roberts]

Not sure what you’re asking for:

1. A 3D box made up of four planes? AE can do this. Make a new solid with the dimensions of one side of the box, give it maybe 50% opacity and click the little 3D box. Make a 3D camera. Don’t work in 3D without making a camera, or you may get hosed later. Dupe the four sides. Rotate them and move them into position to forma a square.

2. A box in isometric perspective as you’ve shown? Sorry, AE doesn’t do isometric. To make this, you’d have to fake it with a flat illustration of four parallelograms, but it wouldn’t be 3D.

[Steve Roberts]

Sorry, now I understand. You wanted to make #2, but now you know you can’t do that in AE. 🙂

And I was wrong — that’s not isometric, that’s a cavalier or cabinet projection, if my sources are accurate.

[Martin Stacey]

yeah, cheers for the help anyway.

[Sam Moulton]

you can do it if the sides of your box are not squares. using the jpg as a guide create a solid say 300 X 300 pixels, make it 3d, set the z anchor point to -100, rotate the x value of 1 by 90 the next by -90, the next rotate y by 90 and then last by -90. now you have a box with sides that are too big. create a camera with a zoom of say a million and then position it so the box is approximately in the same position. now use the mask tool to trace the angles of the box using your jpg as a guide and fine tune the orientation to make them line up. I did it in about 5 minutes using your jpg. You now have a 3d box that looks just like the jpg. the only problem is when you then move the camera. it gets real funky because the box isn’t square.

[Justin Productions]

That’s very easy to do with the Zaxwerks Invigorator plug-in. Just did one and it took me less than a minute.

Cheers.

Justin Productions
Tangerin01@hotmail.com
Adobe After Effects 6.5 Professional