How to ‘thicken’ a 3D layer/object in AE?

[Aharon Rabinowitz]

go to https://www.creativecow.net/aepodcast and you’ll find a recent podcast on creating 3D text. It covers several of the methods discussed here. They can be adapted to non-text objects.

Hope that helps.

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Aharon Rabinowitz
arabinowitz(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com

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Click the link below to subscribe to the Creative Cow After Effects Podcast, and get free AE video tutorials:

https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=111087911

[Antoni Jones]

Maltannons 3D extruder is very awesome and can be downloaded free!!

Download it here:

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/drozda_jerzy/CEShapeExtruder/ProjectFiles.zip

And a tutorial on how to use it here:

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/drozda_jerzy/CEShapeExtruder/Video/shape_extruder.html

-Regards

[Mike Clasby]

Great tut but you need CS3, another reason to update.

[Mike Clasby]

The only thing I would add to Aharon’s excellent rundown of those three methods, is that for the first, many layers stacked in 3D land, is to add this expression to position, instead of offsetting each layer manually:

position+[0,0,(index-1)*1]

Add the expression, by 1) Copy the expression, 2) Alt0click the Position Stopwatch, and then 3) Paste.

You can also mass add an expression to several layers at once, by selecting the expression in one layer, Edit>Copy expression only, then selecting as many other layers as you like, and then Paste.

Now duplicate the layer as many times as you want it to be thick. The expression tells the layer to be offset 1 pixel in the z direction for each layer it’s down in the layer stack. You can even change the *1 to something like *0.1 at the end of the expression and each layer will be stacked 1/10 off a pixel apart, allowing you to get to within 89 and 91 degrees of end-on (90 degrees Y rotation of the text) before the effect falls apart. But it takes 100 layers 1/10 apart to get a final 10 pixel thick text stack, which renders surprisingly fast if you machine isn’t ancient.

It also holds up better if the middle layers are a solid color with no stroke, just stroke the two outside layers.

You can even bevel the front and back with Perspective>Bevel Alpha (quite nice, really).

It’s nice to see all those methods on a video tut, it’s so much easier to follow that way.