Rotating arrows around octagon shape

[Roei Tzoref]

Adjusting the curve means redoing it from step 1. You will find that the motion around tight corners is not that great. I think that’s the best you could do in Ae. I would then explore the spline wrap options in C4D for a better workflow.

Roei Tzoref
After Effects Artist & Instructor
♫ Ae Blues Tutorials

[Kevin Camp]

when i first saw what you were trying to do, I thought the biggest issue would be getting smooth animated arrows around those hard corners. and (like Roei and Rick) the way i thought of to avoid that was to use a motion path wth rounded corners for the arrows.

i would propose keeping the smooth arrow movement (around the rounded corners), but then trying to use a octagon with hard corners to as a matte to get the hard corners back… this will mean increasing the thickness of the animated lines and arrows to fill in the hard corners of the matte.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Roei Tzoref]

thanks Kevin. this makes sense to just adjust the basic octagon shape to be linear, leaving the movement of the arrows to be on a smoother octagon.

all this mess just to get an object to bend along a spline. if this is painful for you to watch, please submit a feature request:
https://www.adobe.com/products/wishform.html

Roei Tzoref
After Effects Artist & Instructor
♫ Ae Blues Tutorials

[Colin Wood]

Hi guys, me again! Thanks for all your help with this. As mentioned, I put it on hold as he client was happy with the circular rotation for the time being. Now the client has finally come back to me, so I thought before I jump back into thing i’d reach out on here again first.

Mainly, i’m now thinking of tackling the issue in Cinema 4D (as suggested here earlier). I’ve done a quick test with a n-sided spline and a cube with an Align to Spline tag, and it pretty much works flawlessly (i’m a 3D artist by trade so I don’t know why I didn’t go down this route when suggested originally).

What will be uncharted territory for me however, is bringing in the vector files, and projecting/rendering the C4D animation as a 2D animation ready to bring into After Effects. Any advice on how to approach this would be great, as well things to consider (having each of the 8 arrows as a separate layer in AE would be great for example. Ideally I want to keep some sort of link between the fully animate-able vector file and the animated arrows using C4D.

Thanks guys.

[Roei Tzoref]

HOLD THE PRESS. our prayers have been answered! a new plugin than can warp along a spline like a mesh deformer in C4D. check it out:
https://aescripts.com/bao-boa/

Roei Tzoref
After Effects Artist & Instructor
♫ Ae Blues Tutorials

[Colin Wood]

Wow wow wow. Just tried the demo and that is perfect!

Unfortunately, I don’t really have a budget for the project so I can’t justify buying the plugin. If I did more AE work then maybe I could take the hit. I may have to stick with the C4D route but at least I know that if the client is pressing then I have a backup option.

[Roei Tzoref]

[Colin Wood] ” I don’t really have a budget”

just so you know, there’s still 25% off available (although it was due on Friday) so that means it’s about 50 bucks.

Roei Tzoref
After Effects Artist & Instructor
♫ Ae Blues Tutorials

[Michael Szalapski]

You can render it with alpha out of Cinema 4D. You can make the material have no color, no reflectance (or no specular, if you’re using an older version of C4D), and just put whatever color(s) you want in the luminance channel. Than you’ll have a very 2d/vector-looking animation even though it was made in a 3d app. You can easily recolor it in AE too. 🙂

– The Great Szalam
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