Tutorial: Projection Mapping onto extruded shapes in CS6

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

Cool!!! Thanks for sharing.

HTH
RoRK
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[Matthew Keane]

Interesting tutorial, thanks. One question which springs to mind, which I’m asking here because it’s more of a general AE question…

With all the processing power and clever software we have at out disposal, is there not an easy/better way to recreate a 3D scene from a still image than doing it by eye? I ask this as I’ve tried but not found anything that worked for me:

Vanishing Point always seems to create wacky camera settings, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to input known camera data – so even though I know my photo was taken with a 28mm lens, VP creates a scene with a huge long lens and some really distorted walls.

Camera Tracker lets me input the camera data, but whether it’s the built-in Adobe tracker, or the Foundry’s version, they only seem to work when there’s motion to track, so I got nowhere with that either.

Do any 3D packages have tools for this? Blender or C4D maybe?

[Mike Sevigny]

good question Matt.
I’ve been experimenting with this technique for some time now. It’s been recommended to me to use projection man with cinema 4D but I’ve yet to check that out. The workflow between C4D and AE is tightening every version.

I’ve also been trying to speed up the process of the scene building in AE. I did not include that in the tutorial because it required many additional steps (to a tutorial).

Faster scene build: When you take the picture, take a small video with parallax as well. Complete your camera track in your favorite matchmove software (AE now does 3D camera track) and then use the point cloud to quickly position your objects accurately. This requires that you have control over the shoot when the image is taken, which is not usually the case.

I don’t think there’s any software that will know where everything is in 3D space based on the still.

Thanks for the feedack,
Mike Sevigny

[Matthew Keane]

Hi Mike,

Shooting some video with parallax is a good idea – although, as you say, only likely to work if you can control the shoot and are using something which shoots stills and video so that the lens settings are identical. Anyway, thanks again for the tutorial.