RG Horizon in AE with camera rig problems

[Michael Szalapski]

Horizon’s normal behavior is to move for rotation, but not for position changes. It won’t get smaller when the camera moves back in z space, nor will it move to the side when the camera moves on x. Perhaps I misunderstood your problem. Does it do something different when you have a camera in your comp that isn’t set up with that rig?

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Jimmy Brunger]

Hi Michael,

Thanks for your reply. It definitely behaves differently when I move the camera via the null rig, as opposed to the camera itself. Didn’t realize Z-pos had no affect on the Horizon layer (perhaps it should partially?) but my problem is if I want to track the camera left or right, or up/down the horizon BG doesn’t move at all, whereas my particular stars, etc do move with the camera..

Quick fix at the moment is to make sure I tilt the camera as I track, ever so slightly – which gets the BG moving a touch and looks more realistic, but not ideal.

[Michael Szalapski]

Horizon is meant to be an image at infinite distance, whereas Particular is giving you particles at a set place in 3d space. Therefore Horizon won’t move in Z space since it’s an infinite distance (but of course Particular’s particles do since your camera is getting closer to them). If you want your stars to move with your sky (and I suspect you would), I would suggest putting your stars in whatever precomp you’re using for your Horizon map.

As for why it’s moving differently in your rig, I’m not sure why that is; probably a limitation of the plugin.

Here are my thoughts on why that is. (Take them with a bit of salt as my computer is in the middle of a render and I can’t test this and I haven’t used Horizon enough to have this problem.)
It’s possible that Horizon looks at the camera’s position data, but if the camera is parented to another layer it’s position data does not change. Perhaps if you used a parented null object and put an expression on the camera’s position to follow the null’s actual world position it would do the trick.
L=thisComp.layer("NULL_OBJECT");
L.toWorld(L.anchorPoint): or something similar…

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Jimmy Brunger]

Thanks Michael, will try that.