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PF Hoe. Help!
If any of you use and know all about pf hoe, i have a question. Just bought it today, and i’m fairly new to after effects as well. here’s my problem.
I shot a test scene of a box on the floor, as i walk around it, keeping the box centered. so basically the camera is rotating around it. i use pf hoe, track the motion, orient the scene placing the ground where it should be…basically i do everything you need to do in pf hoe before exporting.
okay so i import the scene and the pf hoe camera info into after effects and put them into a comp together. the nulls line up with the scene and everything looks fine. i add a new solid, and then make it 3d. as soon as i do it disappears. zooming out i see that’s a really far away so i adjust the scale and position to bring it into the scene. when i do a ram preview the solid, while moving with the camera’s ups and downs, floats out of the scene and doesn’t stay where the box is.
i then tried the same thing with the 3d invigorator. i just brought down a solid, added invigorator, typed the letter I, and the clicked use comp camera. once again it disappears so i find the I and move the object, not the camera, the object so that it is in the scene. when i do a ram preview, same thing happens. it floats out of the scene. why is this? ugh, i hate that i can’t figure this out. help please.
Kazden
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4 Replies
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Yeah, it’s a regular problem of PFHoe…
Someone once posted a link to a step by step tutorial, so do a search here at the Cow… -
Found the link, but the tutorial is down. He says it’ll be up again shortly, so i guess i’ll just wait. um, i don’t know why i wrote this. i could have just thought it.
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AAah! Guilty of site neglect. Sorry, I’ve been really busy lately (surprisingly), so I haven’t had a chance to update stuff.
Kazden, Feel free to ask me about stuff by using the email link on my site.
In the meantime, here are a few pointers:(1-Of course, I would suggest using my PF_Preflight script.)
2-In AE, Copy the position value of a tracker that is where you want your added object to be. Bring the object in, make it 3D, then paste the position value in. That should pop your object to the right place. Perhaps you’re already doing that…
<<<<<< rewind <<<<<< 3-When in PFHoe, Save your project before you scale the scene using the scale handles on (what I prefer to call) the perspective grid ("ground plane"). When you are ready to scale, grab a scale handle and scale the sucker down so far that the handles DISAPPEAR. I know this is odd (and the pixel farm doesn't seem to be in a rush to fix this problem), but this is just the way it works with PFHoe when using it with AE. I usually scale the scene to slightly beyond the disappearing point. You'll get the hang of it eventually. NOW, DON'T save over the project in this state, because those handles are gone for good. Leave the scaling for LAST, save before that stage, export the AE (.ma) file, and close without saving. This ensures having handles if you need to re-open the pfh project.
4-Never move the camera. You shouldn’t need to.
shoot me an email if you want …
-CG
p.s. here is some text from the old tutorial, but all of this is handled by my preflight script:
Importing and Preliminaries
When you import a PFHoe-generated .ma file into After Effects (make sure you select “Adobe After Effects” in PFHoe when exporting -
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