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relative 3D positioning…
I’m trying to make a butterfly fly around the screen, and I’ve been pretty successfull in programing a realistic wing flapping motion, but I’m having one little problem.
See, everytime a butterfly flaps its wings, they rise a little bit, as the draft pushes them upwards, so I tied the rotation of the wings to the the yPosition element of both wing layers and the body layer. Unfortunately, when I turn the butterfly sideways, so that you’re looking down on it, everytime the butterfly flaps, the butterfly still moves “up” relative to the screen, which, from that perspective, makes it moves sideways.
How can I make it so that, with every wing flap, the butterfly is pushed “upward”, relative to itself, and not the direction of the screen, so that when you’re looking at it from overhead, it just comes toward you a little, instead of moving sideways.
I’ve tried just having it be still, and then moving the camera around, but let’s face it, camera movement is a PAIN IN THE ASS.
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4 Replies
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Precomping is the fix. Precomp the butterfly (with it’s up and down movement) then when you animate the precomp layer by rotating its X to get it on it’s side, the butterfly will still move relative to it’s body.
So do the side-roll and basic movements to the precomp layer but in the main comp, and animate the wing flap and relative up/down in the precomp.
Be sure an turn on the collapse transformations icon when you make that precomp layer 3D in the main comp.
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WOW! I just did a little dance! I had no idea that you could pre-comp 3D and maintain the Z-axis! That’s AWESOME! Excuse me for being so excited, but that just opens up a whole new world of possibilities. Is this new to CS3 (since I’ve been using AE7 for about a year now), or did I just miss it?
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Think you missed it, cause it works for me on 6.5. Just keep those that Collapse Tranormations swithed on and keep on dancin’.
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You mentioned that AE Camera moves are a Pain… I agree, here are two threads on using Nulls with Camera moves, the second even has a project file, very helpful.
This post by Chris Smith on how he uses Nulls with camera movements:
https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=2&postid=878237
Here is an AE project file (aep) for a nifty camera move Australian commercial by John Dickinson, very cool:
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/2/872881?
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