Layer disappears after enabling as Envirorment Layer

[Tom Daigon]

I have never seen the layer disappearing problem.

Heres some info that might help with your second question.

https://www.video2brain.com/en/lessons/environment-layers

https://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-after-effects-cs6/3d-environment-map/

Tom Daigon
PrP / After Effects Editor
HP Z820 Dual 2687
64GB ram
Dulce DQg2 16TB raid
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com

[Michael Garske]

Thanks for those. I’m wondering if it has something to do with the properties of the layer. Do environment maps have to be a certain resolution or are there any other requirements?

[Tom Daigon]

Not that Im aware of. It would be mentioned in those links if it were I would think.

Tom Daigon
PrP / After Effects Editor
HP Z820 Dual 2687
64GB ram
Dulce DQg2 16TB raid
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com

[Joseph W. bourke]

Do you by any chance not have a camera in the scene – that could be your problem – you also might want to check the “Appear in Reflection” setting. There are three possible settings, one of which will make the reflection disappear from the background, and only appear in the 3D object it was meant to show up in. Check out this tutorial:

https://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-after-effects-cs6/3d-environment-map/

Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

If you have a camera, are you sure you’re looking at the Active Camera View and not at a Custom view?

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Jason Jantzen]

If you’re trying to use a layer as your background as well as your environment map, duplicate the layer, then set one of them to the environment map. Hit “AA” on the keyboard and click “Apear In Reflections” – set it to Only – and you should see your image as your background and the environment map will only show up on layers that have the reflection parameter turned up.

As far as footage, I don’t know, but if you haven’t tried it, go try it, it won’t hurt 🙂

Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj

[Michael Garske]

Hey guys,

Sorry for the delayed response. I’ve got a camera in the scene, I am in active camera view, and I duplicated the environment layer so one has “only” and one has “on” for the appears in reflections setting. I tried this with both footage and a still image so that doesn’t seem to be the issue.

Sorry I should have specified also, I’m not using any ray-trace items. I have some extruded text from Element 3D but I’m less interested in making this work as an environment map for reflections than I am in just getting it to work as a background.

I’ve tried this on a couple of machines with the same result. Anyone have any other ideas?

I tried looking else where but it seems that the feature is fairly straight forward making this problem difficult to research. Is there anyway to achieve the same thing through Element 3D?

[Jason Jantzen]

Sounds like you have TWO layers set as environment layers, is that right? If you want one of those layers to act as your background, then you can’t set it as an environment layer because it’ll get “converted” to an HDRI image and look like it’s disappeared. It actually just gets REALLY big and blurry.

So disregarding that whole process since you’re mostly interested in just using it as a background and want a way to do it with Element. I’ve done this before a couple of times and it’s REALLY easy. Here’s Andrew Kramer’s tutorial on how to do that – https://vimeo.com/46868290

Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj

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[Michael Garske]

Thanks for that! Great work around.

[Corey Holtgard]

So I just had this happen to me, only I really wanted the environment layer to be used as a reflection, so the background workaround mentioned above was no help to me. After bashing my head on the wall a couple times, because the other 3 projects I just did worked fine doing this, I realized my “Fast Previews” was set to “Fast Draft” instead of “off”. So turning this to “off” instantly made my environment layer appear. From which I set to reflection only and so on……

Head of Production – Outhouse Entertainment – outhousetv.com