Please help. How do I make a drill bit turn in AE

[Filip Vandueren]

I’dd do it in a 3D app, preferably one that has sketchy or cellshading options.

If you’ don’t mind it having a real ‘blue-print’ kind of feel to it, you could try to seperate it out into a lot of crossection transparant layers,

what kind of bit is it ?
a Straight or cross bit for screwing, or a real ‘corkscrewed’ drill for making holes ?

[Mojod20nick]

Thanks for your reply… the drill I am trying to achieve is a corkscrew type. The type a machine would use to dig into the ground

[Filip Vandueren]

Perhaps Trapcode 3D stroke: this has the option to twist lines.
nowhere near photorealism though, like I said, it might work for a ‘line-drawing’ type of look.

You might get away with using a few CC Cilinders, but it’s a pain to lign them up in a 3D world since they use their own camera system.

Do you need to match a certain graphic look, if so can you post a screenshot ?

[Filip Vandueren]

Dude,

I just had an epiphany 😉

Remember those videoclips that have people twisting in all kinds of weird ways because the delay the timeing of different parts of the screens ?
Well, i do, and here it is applied to a simple rotating box, the gradient controls the ‘delay’
this is by no means an accurate perspective look of a drill, but hey: it’s fun:

You can find the project file at:

https://www.vandueren.be/forumstuff/fakedrill/

[Joseph W. bourke]

So you are looking to animate an auger. Sometimes the best way to do a complicated project is the simplest. I would suggest getting an auger (would your client give you access to one?) and either shooting it stop motion with a still camera, or doing a greenscreen and keying it in to your shot. If you shoot stop motion, I would get at least 15 frames of it going through a full rotation, then you can use it at any speed you need.

Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV

[Steve Roberts]

I like Filip’s tricky solution …

… but you may also want to consider: when viewed in profile, if the auger is clean, its thread just appears to go “up”, not “around”. Do you see?

So if you have an image of an auger in profile, you might be able to use the offset effect (or motion tile) to slide it up indefinitely.

[Chris Zwar]

Not perfect, but may get you started:

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=1&page=https://www.creativecow.net/articles/zwar_chris/cogs3/index.html

-Chris