sphere question

[Colin Braley]

Well, I think it would look best if done in a real 3d app but if I was to do it in AE I would use 3d stroke with a couple differently shaped masks and use the bend parameter to make them look somewhat spherical. I don’t think you would need to use the spherize filter. If you are going for a photoreal looking tangle of cords, AE won’t cut it. If you are going for a stylized look, 3d stroke and some bend should work okay.

~Colin

[Boardand4wheels]

thanks a lot, I have been trying 3D Stroke with bend but it seems to always leave a smooth curve… I will keep trying though. I do have Cinema 4D but I want to use my existing camera in AE to orbit the tangle of cords… Is it possible to use the camera I already have in my AE comp to orbit around the modle I make in Cinema 4D?? That would be perfect!

[Colin Braley]

Well, I don’t have C4D. (I use Lightwave) but I think if you made a model in Cinema 4D, saved it as an .obj, you could use it in invigorator. Also, If you rendered out a pass of the object in which the camera in cinema 4d rotates around it on eother the X or Y axis, you could use time remapping to get your AE camera to pan around the object (as long as all you need to do is move on the X or Y axes) This last part seems very confusing and is difficult to explain. I got the idea from this clever post:

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=2&postid=860989

That previous idea would only work for very simple camera moves.

If I was you I would try to create the tangle of cords in Cinema 4D and animate the camera in C4D. I would then render it out with an alpha channel, and whatever other passes I needed for compositing. I would then import the camera data from C4D into After Effects to place in whatever type of background, text elements, etc. you wanted to create. However, I don’t know how (and if its possible) to get 3d camera data form C4D to AE. (In some 3d programs, like lightwave, you can embed the data in a .rpf sequence)

~Colin

nice username too, by the way

[Boardand4wheels]

thanks a lot for your help! I’ll give it a shot.

[Filip Vandueren]

You could try creating some tangled wire textures with alpha in photoshop and use multiple CC Spheres on different layers, each with variations in the radius: that helps make it a bit more chaotic.

Problme is however, that CC Sphere does not use After Effects’ camera

[Chris Smith]

Try it in C4D. Create a sphere. Project a bunch of squigly curves onto the surface of the sphere. Then drop those curves into a sweep nurves with a circle profile. That should give you a bunch of 3D chords all over along with the right specularity and shading.

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com