PreComp Tears Apart in 3D Move

[Jeremy Allen]

Could you pre-render the puppet effect with alpha, import that and then put the spin on it?

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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 18GB RAM, OSX 10.5.8

C4D 12
AE CS5 (10.0.2.4)
FCP 7.0.3
QT 7.6.4

[Jeff Breuer]

Dave, thanks for the link. I’ve been going over this several time. If inside my PreComp is my Vector based text and shape and my 3D movement, and in my main comp, Continuous Rasterization is off and the Puppet Tool applied to the PreComp, according to this article, that SHOULD work, should it not? It doesn’t seem to work for me.

Thanks,

Jeff

[Jon Bagge]

I’m not quite sure I understand what you’re doing here, but I know the puppet tool very well, so here are some pointers:

The puppet tool remembers what the layer looked like when you apply the tool. Specifically it tracks where the edge of the alpha channel is. You can then warp it with the puppet tool. This means you can’t change the layer itself to any great degree without breaking the puppet effect.

So if you apply the puppet tool to a pre-comp, and then animate inside the pre-comp so the position/shape of the alpha channel changes, the puppet tool will break and you will get some strange tearing.

This also means you can’t use continuous rasterization/collapse transformations with the puppet tool. For example if you’re applying the puppet tool to an illustrator layer, you can’t turn on continuous rasterization. This is because it will change the render order and apply transformations before the puppet tool, which may break it for the same reason as the first example.

Does this help?

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https://www.jonbagge.net
Jon Bagge – Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects

[Jeff Breuer]

Jon, thank you for your excellent explanation of this phenomenon. Your first example is exactly what I was trying to do. I tried Jeremy’s suggestion of doing a pre-render, but apparently that is still in conflict with this alpha channel issue. So I suppose even if I made a movie w/ alpha channel and brought it back into AE, it would still have this issue.

Thankfully the part that was breaking was a solid color so I just rotoscoped a solid color matte over the breakage. I would love to find a way to pull off this effect in the future, but in the meantime I suppose it will just have to be an effect that sounds simple in my head but is ridiculously complex for AE.

Thanks for all of your help, tips and explanations everyone, it was much appreciated!

Jeff

[Jon Bagge]

What exactly are you trying to achieve?
Also using other warp effects might work too. Things like mesh warp is agnostic about what you do to the underlying layer.

Another option is to apply the puppet tool to a layer/precomp that temporarily has an alpha channel that is bigger than anything that will happen later. The puppet tool will remember this alpha channel even when you remove the temporary alpha and replace it with your animated precomp.

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https://www.jonbagge.net
Jon Bagge – Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects

[Daniel Futerman]

Having exactly the same issues as you Jeff.. Quite frustrating..

[Austin Hill]

Not sure if CS6 handles the puppet tool any better than in CS5.5 but I also find it to be wonky town.

this might be worth a look if you are doing a lot of bone rigging on 2D. But more if for “puppet” type characters…

just throwing it out there. I used to play around with it a bit back when it was called “moho”.

[Austin Hill]

Oh, oops…

it’s called Anime Studio Pro

https://anime.smithmicro.com/