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Flattening a 3D composition?
Short question: Is there a way to “flatten” a composition of layers (located at various locations on the Z axis) so that they are treated as one flat 3d layer elsewhere?
Longer explanation:
I’ve been using a variety of techniques together in my animation rigs. The good news is that it lets me animate the way I want, but the bad news is that some of them don’t play well together. Long story short is that in order to get things to work correctly, I’ve had to push things fairly far apart on the Z axis.
This works fine until I try to incorporate lighting. Since different parts of my characters are quite a lot further in front than others, the lighting is odd.
My hope had been that if I precomposed these layers, they’d be treated as a single “flat thing” in 3d space in the new comp, but the Z positions are retained. Is there a way to “flatten” the new layer but still have it exist in 3d space?
Hopefully that makes sense…
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3 Replies
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If you turn off the collapse transformations switch, it’ll be flat. If you turn it on, they’ll retain their position in z space.
– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
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Not much sense…no! lol!
You want it to recieve ilumination as a single layer, yet still behave as it were 3d?
you can precompose, make a slave camera inside this composition(parented to your main camera). Then you’ll have two options. Either uncheck collapse transformations and turn this comp 3d, your camera movements will be doubled but light will be casted/recieved. Or you can leave it 2d and add a 3d black layer on top with add/screen mode.
In case that’s not what you wanted…keep in mind that you can also add 2d layers inbetween 3d layers to break the 3d interaction.
Most of my similar problems are usually solved with duplicated cameras/comps and track mattes.
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Thanks guys. Those answers will work – especially the first and third.
It’s funny, I thought I’d tried Micheal’s solution, but it wasn’t working. But now that I revisit it, it does just what I want it to.
Thanks!
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