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Parenting a country to a Globe?!
This is in continuation to a previous post I’ve had, but I’m on to the next step:
I’m building an earth (harder than it sounds). I have a grayscale political map of earth that I’ve CC Sphere’d. Simple enough. Now, I have to parent a country in place that’s a different color. When I rotate the globe, I want the other country to rotate with it, as though it’s a highlighted country. How do I parent it’s position to stay with that globe?
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13 Replies
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Right, sorry … when I tried that, am dollied in with a camera, the resolution looked terrible. That’s been one of the huge pitfalls of this whole project. Is there a way to pre-comp at a high resolution or something?
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The way I’m seeing it, yes. So, “probably not.” I tend to make things harder than they need to be. As I’m thinking right now, I probably wouldn’t have to parent the countries so much as just place them, ad use the camera to fly around to different places. That way all of the built in countries would stay where they need to be without moving anything and getting it all out of whack. So if I just pre comp it, then fly around, that should work, right? Am I making this too hard again?
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actually the 3d camera doesn’t work with the cc sphere effect unless you use expression to link the the cc sphere properties to the camera’s properties…
it may be easier to create a large comp for the map, with any of the highlighted regions created in that comp. make it as large as will be needed to zoom in and not look pixelated.
then bring that map comp into a standard sized comp and apply cc sphere to it. manipulate the radius and rotation of the sphere to create the animation of zooming into the highlighted areas.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
I had to do something similar recently and didn’t have a hi-res earth map so I used Illustrator’s autotrace feature to create a vector version of the map. It won’t add detail where there is none but it will smooth out the detail that there is and make it look like you meant to do it that way. You can get some really great looks if you play around with the autotracing options. And it’s very easy to do, once you get the hang of it.
Once you have a vector map you can scale it to any size you want and it will stay crisp. Illustrator’s autotrace is the one way I’ve found that you actually can polish a turd. (To some extent, anyway)
If the vector map renders very slow in AE then convert it to a .psd or .jpg rasterized image at the resolution you need. That will take a big load off of AE and it should speed things up at render time.
Hope that helps.
-E
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Thanks for all your help, guys! After numerous failing attempts, and file sizes big enough to send CS4 crashing, time constraints have bumped this to a flat map image. It makes it a lot easier, but not as interesting.
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What version of AE do you have? If you have the new CS4 and Photoshop Extended CS4 you could try the new 3D model option of converting your planes in Photoshop to a sphere and rotating the 3D object that way.
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that’s actually what I spent most of this morning on. It’s easy to create, and it’s actually a 3d image. Unfortunately now, when I import these into AE, after I import the second one, AE crashes. Every time. I’ve rebuilt everything from ‘go’ and it still crashes. I have 4 GB of Ram recently installed, so that couldn’t be the case. I just don’t understand why I can’t catch a break on this. This project hates me.
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Can’t you have a layered or smart layer based layer converted into a 3D sphere layer? If you can animate the movement of the flat layers independently and then composite that into the 3D sphere is what I’m thinking. I haven’t tried it myself, but it maybe possible.
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Hmmm … I honestly don’t even know what you’re saying. Can you explain a little further?
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Sorry. If you not too familar with Photoshop, you can combine a bunch of layers into one layer into what is called a smart object. When you double click that smart object layer a window opens that shows a new image with all those layers. Sorta like a precomp.
Going back to the smart object layer you can make a new shape from that layer into a sphere.
Save the photoshop document and open it in AE making sure you recognize 3D objects from photoshop
Over at Planetphotoshop dot com, Corey Barker has a brand new tutorial on making 3D billiards in PS CS4 Extended that might help.
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