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Fog 3D useless using only AE 3D layers?
I’ve done some digging around, and still can’t quite understand what AE is trying to give us with “Fog 3D”. The (basically worthless) Effects Reference makes no suggestion that the scene it’s using as an example can’t be created using 3D layers in AE, but the impression I’m getting from the forum is that it’s actually only related to footage that contains a depth channel.
reference manual link:
https://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/8.0/help.html?content=WS3878526689cb91655866c1103a9d3c597-7bd4.html1. Is this true?:
There is no way to set up a simple 3D scene in AE with a couple square solids in 3D space, and apply a light fog effect to the scene.2. As incredulous as I am that the effects reference would not give us a little more guidance on this effect’s abilities, if it’s true that you can’t use it with a stock AE scene, can I extract the 3D channel info that AE needs and re-import it back into a new AE scene?
In short, I’d like an effect that simply takes each of AE’s objects, determines their distance to the camera, and applies a color based on the z distance. Did I miss this feature? It seems a bit like a basic plug-in. Hopefully I’m just suffering from Friday-ism.
Thanks for the input,
Greg.p.s. I’m familiar with importing 3D channels, which has it’s own frustrations. I’m looking for input on the quick AE adjustment layer effect that does the same, only, just to keep this post simple. There are many other posts on importing depth channels.
Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezemotiongraphics.com -
5 Replies
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I can’t nose around when I’m angry!
Ok, agreed. I found your quote in the “about 3D Channel Effects”.
Am I correct in assuming that my second question’s answer is a big “no”, since AE doesn’t seem to render to any of the specified 3D formats?Is it also impossible to extract a greyscale depthmap from the 3D space in AE? I looked for plugs that might do that, but they all seem oriented to import, not export.
-Greg
Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezemotiongraphics.com -
LOL. True. Although what would you accomplish with 10 years?…. (why do I still keep my box?)
Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezemotiongraphics.com -
What is totally weird, is that they have figured out to do Depth of Field for the camera…..surely it would be an easy task to make things foggy when you can make them blurry according to depth.
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Hi!
After all these years i found a method to easily make 3d fog-like effect using only the built-in features of AE.So: you place your 3d layers along the Z axis, usea proper camera (not a necessity, but useful) and place a simple point light and adjust the falloff radius and feather.
That’s it, the light’s falloff shades the further layers. -
Thanks, Miklos.
In the last 8 years since I started this thread, I’ve also learned (or they’ve developed) the ability to link effects to the distance from the camera. With this information, for example, we can link transparency to the distance from the camera, and have objects (layers) become more transparent as they get further away. This, of course, doesn’t really help us if the layers overlap because we start to see them through the other layers. But with expressions we can also link other useful things like blur levels, or white levels, which can help obscure things as they get more distant.
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