newbie help from old post

[Filip Vandueren]

once the anchor point is moved away from the layer, you need to make a lot of copies of the layer, progressively scaled from 0% to 100%, then you can add a radial blur or shine to those layers to smooth them together.

If I have time I’ll create a step by step walkthrough tonight (CET)

[Filip Vandueren]

here’s the walkthrough in HTML form with pictures:
(if this looks messy in your emailclient, just click on the link to read the thread online)

1. Make a comp with your 3D
   layer and a camera.
2. Move the anchorpoint away in Z-depth. That’s where the projector
   will be.
   
3. duplicate layer and camera
   
4. precompose the duplicates
   
5. in the precomp:
   • set the layermode to “Add”
   • give the scale of the 3D-layer this expression:
     (index-1)*[3,3,3];
   • give the opacity this expression:
     value – (index-2)*(value/33);

   

6. create 33 duplicates of the 3D layer.
   
   thanks to the expressions, each copy gets 3 percent larger, and 3
   percent more transparant, creating a sort of sliced beam effect.
7. Go back to the main comp, and collapse geometries.
   

So now we want to smear that out a little bit so we don’t see the
discrete steps.
We’ll us a radial blur for that.
CC Radial blur is ideal, because you can set a negative amount: it will
blur towards the ‘projector’ and not towards and beyond the screen.
I don’t have CC filters for AE CS3 (yet?), so I’ll have to do it with
plain Radial Blur here:

8. add a Radial Blur, set it it Zoom
9. We want the center of the blur to be at the AnchorPoint, so use
   this
   expression:
   thisComp.layer(“screen”).toComp(thisComp.layer(“screen”).transform.anchorPoint);
   (I’ve changed the layer’s name to screen)
   
10. Adjust the Blur amount to taste.

You can go back to the precomp, select all layers, and lower the opacity if the rays are too bright.

An extra tip: keep the camera ‘behind’ the projector, if you move the camera forward, you’ll notice the beams get a lot weaker, that’s because your looking at the sides of those 33 copies, and they have no depth, so you see almost nothing, no matter how much you blur.