Having issues with LIGHTS and ELEMENT 3D in AFTER EFFECTS.

[Mark Whitney]

In the first issue, check for keys on your light. In the left window I can see a point light jump position significantly.

I didn’t go any farther than that as your 2nd problem might be related the the first.

[Samuel Rustenburg]

Thanks for responding mark. I looked for keyframes but I don’t have any on the light that is giving me issues. I just wanted to mention it jumps around because 1) I’m turning the layer off and on 2) I move my cursor before the light is activated to another light in a slightly different position, but when I hide the layer or adjust its in point its effecting layers it shouldn’t be.

My understanding of layers is that if your cursor isn’t on the layer it shouldnt appear. Maybe this rule doesn’t apply to lights and no matter where the in and out points are it will effect all layers…..I cant say that’s the case when other lights turn off and on when I cut in and out points.

I have another video that shows the issue of how my light is behaving that I don’t understand why. I don’t consider myself and expert but I have been using AE for about 10+years and consider myself Intermediate and feel like I should know what’s going on here but its going over mine and co-workers heads.

https://vimeo.com/237121682/4b34958ab7

Thanks for the help!

[Mark Whitney]

Very strange. Hard to tell w/o actually having the entire project to dissect. Lights in AE can be confusing at times and Element can certainly get fiddly.

Probably only suggestion I can make is save a copy of your project & start picking things apart, tossing the extraneous & keep simplify the basic idea until you find what’s offending. Obvious there’s something in there lurking.

A thought though: Have you checked your geometry for surface normal settings? I’m assuming that’s your Element object.

[Samuel Rustenburg]

Thanks Mark

I ended up gutting it last night (WHAT A PAIN) but it seems that I had multiple issues going on. I had one light with only intensity keyframes but it was turning off and on – ended up duplicating another camera moved it into the buggy camera and it resolved that issue. Afterwards I still had 1 light colour change in my object file – it looked like my object was going “Negative” colour mode. But nothing was on it, turns out it was my element layer. So I duplicated a previous element layer and replaced and it resolved my issue.

Looks like Im good to go, but still not sure “Why it happened” or how to resolve outside of deleting those layers. From your last comment, im curious to know more what you mean by “Have you checked your geometry for surface normal settings?” With my last troubleshooting of element im wondering if it was a texture/object setting that may have been turned on for that layer in the element 3d settings that im unware of (just getting my hands dirty with element 3d finally).

Thanks again for the help Mark
– Sam

[Gabe Blank]

Hey Samuel,

I am having the exact same problem now. I have several lights throughout my comp and almost all of them seem to have this issue. Some of the lights have absolutely no keyframes.

I’m lost. Wondering if after solving it for yourself you learned “why” it happened? Or if you found out anything else in future projects that helped you avoid the problem.

Thanks, man!

[Samuel Rustenburg]

Hey Gabe

To be honest I can’t remember the situation to well and how I fixed it. I think what I did was I just made those elements not working into its own comp and had my 3D animation happen in the comp instead of the main one.

The other thing as well is that some of the layers in the material options of the layer, there are some options to “ACCEPT LIGHTS”.

Lastly – the lights might be to far away from your object and its not absorbing light, maybe there’s a layer obstructing the light. Turn on 4 camera view under the window and take a look around to see if that reveals anything.

Unfortunately im not an expert yet. But I did manage to finish that project.
https://vimeo.com/237801347

[Michael Szalapski]

If you move light layers in time on the timeline, it can cause weirdness. You may need to create all new light layers and match the position, color, brightness, etc. of the existing ones and then delete the old ones.

– 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.

[Matthew Macar]

I have found the same problem. With bigger jobs where I am reusing the same Element3D “scenes” or objects repeatedly from shot to shot, I tend to use TrueCompDuplicator to create distinct instances of each scene, and then use rd_CompSetter (these are fantastic scripts from AE-Scripts.com, btw) to extend or reduce the new duplicated comp’s duration to the duration necessary for the new shot I’m working on. I find that all of my lights will turn off at the original last frame of the comp I duplicated from, even though I’ve duplicated the original comp and extended the composition’s layers to be long enough for the new shot. I learned, through a painful process of trial and error (and probably discovered it accidentally while maniacally swinging my keyboard and mouse above my head) that the easiest solution is simply to drag all of your light layers to the end of the composition, so that their original first frames (heads) are now on the last frame of the comp (tail), and then extend the heads of the light layers you just moved back to the beginning of the comp. As another poster said, when you mess with duration and timeline position of lights, you get strange behavior, but this seems to reset them without having to recreate, reconfigure, and replace existing lights with all new ones.

Matthew Macar
DP, Motion Graphics, Editor
vimeo.com/mattmacar