[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

Sorry, that’s the last thing I’d want to do.
In fact, I am hanging around here just to help users.
I only gave my opinion on a terminology subject, that’s all 🙂

Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

2D text in 3D space is real 3D text, as far as the text elements are composited according to their 3D coordinates and not their stacking order.
What you call real 3D text is “extruded text”. It’s not more or less real 🙂

As for the original questions, yes, it should be a little more clear what you want to achieve.

Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

[Sam Young] “is it possible to create a comp in AE with 3d layers, save as AE project file, then import that AE project file into Flash with all of the 3d space and 3d layers intact in Flash, then make those 3d Flash layers clickable interactive objects?”

You can take the layers to Flash, and they will be “clickable”, but they will be video renders of the 3D layers. So, they will be composited according to order in the layer, not according to their 3D coordinates.
In other words, these elements won’t intersect/interact in the same 3D world.

There are workarounds that come to mind. For example, you can have a Pre-Comp version which will go as a single video asset to Flash, so you keep the visual results of 3D interactions of layers, AND also include the 3D layers just to define the interactive hot spots/clickable areas in Flash. It would take some tweaking and I am far from being a Flash expert, but it’s definitely doable.

[Sam Young] “is Flash 3d-capable yet?
if not, how far off is Adobe from achieving this integration?”

Flash CS4 introduced basic 3D transformations.
But compositing of elements is 2D (stack-based).

Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

Nubian:
As you can imagine, Windows 7 is not supported by the current release of After Effects. That’s usually the case for any major OS upgrade that is released after the application itself.
I’d love to help, but honestly I don’t have Win7 installed here and have my hands full helping people who are running supported OS/hardware configurations 🙂

Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

Not in a direct way.
I think that would make an excellent feature request.

Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

Yes, Shape layers can do everything the Stroke effect does and a million things more.
In this case, you want to add the Trim Paths effect (in the “Add” fly-out menu) to the shape group. It has the usual start/end/offset parameters. You will want to turn off the fill, and leave stroke on, otherwise Trim Paths will trim both fill and stroke.

If you wanted to have both stroke and fill, but only animate stroke, duplicate the shape group. Turn off fill in one, turn off stroke in the other. Add Trim Paths inside the shape group which has the stroke turned on.

Note that the stroke property group in shape layer has other interesting options, like dashes (which you can animte), caps/joins, etc.

Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

I forgot to add my e-mail address in case you want to send the project and screenshots.
arozenfe{a}adobe.com

Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

Yes, it would help.
Screenshots are welcome, but not sufficient per se, since we need something to reproduce and isolate. A project would be welcome.
Note that at this time I don’t know if this can be a bug, a limitation of the design or just a consequence of an operation performed by the user.

While we’re at it, you may want to check:

· There are no masks applied externally to the Collapsed Pre-Comps.
· There are no effects applied externally to the Collapsed Pre-Comps.
· There are no adjustment layers inside the Collapsed Pre-Comps.
· There are no layer styles applied.

These things are “bin breakers”, ie they break 3D compositing.

Also, make sure there are no strange blend modes inside the Pre-Comps (as Alpha Add, which is very common in this kind of project) since the inner blend modes interact with layers in the parent Comp when collapsed.

Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

Dynamic Link is currently one way only.
If you take a PPro sequence to AE, for example, any changes you make in PPro will be updated immediately in AE. But the sequence in PPro won’t be linked to what you do in AE.

In the case you mention, you may want to use the Premiere Pro project import feature (this is different from Dynamic Link(, so that all edits you made in Premiere are translated to AE layers. Then you can use Dynamic Link from AE to Premiere, if you want.

Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

I saw something very similar, also in a wildly complex project with multiple collapsed 3D Comps. In this case, intersections do work but the junctures seem to be affected The angle/tilt of the camera is definitely a factor.
It’s worth investigating, and I’ll do just that.

Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe