[Alan Flood]

Before you go rendering again, if you haven’t changed anything int he scene since you last rendered it you can just slick on the ‘save compositing file’ button nad just output the compositing file without having to render it all over again. It might be worth your while just to try it first and see and by the way, you’ll need to copy the “CINEMA4DAE.aex” exchange plugins file over into your AE plugins directory too so that AE knows how to properly parse the compositing file.

Good luck 🙂

[Alan Flood]

Are you adding in your own camera George or using the one the cinema exports in the .aec file? In order to get everything working correctly you need to check the option to save the compositing project file in the render settings save dialogue and you’ll also need to check the option to include 3D data – cameras, lights and nulls or other objects with the external compositing tag applied to them.

When you render Cinema will save an .aec file into the folder where you chose to save your output. It’s usually a simple matter then of importing that .aec project into AE and tweaking it to suit your needs.

If you’ve already done all this then I apologise for posting stuff you already know but it’s not clear whether you followed the correct procedure or not. Cinema usually integrates flawlessly with AE. The only thing I can think of that might be wrong here is that you didn’t actually export the 3D data that you need.

[Alan Flood]

Thanks Brian. I appreciate the reply. I’ve been fooling about it for ages thinking I’m missing something – I was kinda convinced there was some setting or another that would set the points up to translate linearly to the closest point on the target mesh but I guess not.

Even if dragging the points around in the structure manager didn’t destroy the polys …. that’s still an awful lot of work considering there’s 1,977 points in each mesh. Doable but boring as hell and time consuming to boot.

I’ll see about hacking two separate passes together in AE. Thanks.

[Alan Flood]

I’m grinning from ear to ear here Dan. You rock! Thank you so much – this is a gem 🙂

[Alan Flood]

It’s most likely you had the points hidden – perhaps you accidentally hit one of the hide selection options? I don’t know but I do know I’d done that before. I was hiding selected polygons and what happened was I switched to point mode but forgot I was still in point mode. Then when I hit the ‘invert visibility’ button apparently nothing happened – but I had in fact hidden all the points because none were selected so the invert made them all hidden. So I switched back to poly mode none the wiser at this stage and inverted the visibility of those and continued on working. It wasn’t until I went back into point mode that I found all my points had disappeared and it literally took me hours of fiddling around to finally figure out what had happened. It was one of the most frustrating time i ever remember when using cinema. All the other models I opened had their points visible so knew it wasn’t a problem with Cinema itself. It was just that model. I was truly stumped and it was such a simple thing really. After hours or hair-pulling I went into point mode and selected ‘unhide all’ and voila! there they were 🙂

[Alan Flood]

Excellent Adam – thank you very much. Perfect!!!

[Alan Flood]

You can use the mograph tracer object to connect stuff together with lines. It’ll take a bit of setting up – multiple tracers tracing each segment – but it can be done with the tracers no problem 🙂

[Alan Flood]

Thanks a lot guys – you’ve all been really helpful and I appreciate it a lot. I’ve only got 4GB of RAM on my home machine and while it is a 64bit system with a 3Ghz quad core I don’t think I’m up for this just yet so I passed. It wasn’t actually the kind of video-editing I thought it might be anyway – it’s basically a mountain of rotoscoping, keying and color correction which would be a nightmare for me in any case but with the small amount of RAM I’ve currently got at home it’d probably be a right killer altogether.

Thanks for chipping in with the info though everyone. It’s very much appreciated.

[Alan Flood]

First of all – I don’t have an answer for you Greg, sorry. However this is something I’ve often wondered about too so I said I might as well chip in with something that is very much related and which I find extremely strange. If you draw paths in Photoshop CS5 with the pen tool or even the shape tools, choose ‘export -> paths to illustrator’ and then merge the .ai file that it outputs into the C4D scene it imports flawlessly. When you’re exporting the path from photoshop it gives you no options insofar as illustrator formats go – the only option is to export the path as .ai so this makes me wonder – does Photoshop CS5 export Illustrator 8 format .ai files? That would be strange. You’d think with both apps being part of the same family that the paths in one would be the same as the paths in the other.

[Alan Flood]

I’ve been using Cinema for a little over 6 months now and I honestly can’t say enough good things about it. That said, I haven’t really spent much time in Maya, Max or any other 3D application other than Lightwave so I can’t really speak for them. Compared to Lightwave however Cinema’s integration with AE is truly spectacular. I’ve never enjoyed compositing so much. What used to be a nightmare with Lightwave is now a dream with Cinema. Having said that however it must be pointed out that Lightwave has a bit of a bad reputation for not being too friendly with other applications – AE included.

But we’re talking about Cinema and with Cinema, when you render a scene you have the option in the save dialogue to save a compositing file for a couple of different compositing apps. I’ve only used the AE option so I can’t say very much about the others. You can also choose to render out frames without any 3D data and this will basically just render out your multi-passes and arrange them for you in a comp – all set with the appropriate blending modes. Alternatively you can opt to export 3D data and this is just awesome. Any cameras or lights in your scene will be exported along with their motion paths and settings.

If you are looking ahead and you want to composite in a flare or a shape layer – anything at all – in AE but want it to follow a particular path you can create a null object in cinema, use it to create the path and then assign it an external compositing tag. This null will then show up in your AE composition along with it’s name and motion path relative to the camera and you can then parent whatever you like to it. It’s so fantastically easy it’s almost unbelievable.

All this in conjunction with Cinemas excellent multi-pass rendering – specifically the object buffer rendering – makes it a huge hit in my book. I don’t think I’ll ever use anything else when it comes to 3D to be honest. The modeling tools are also excellent, as is the configurable interface and with R12 the integrated linear work-flow and color management is again excellent. Then there’s the really awesome dynamics engine, hair rendering, character rigging tools, effectors ….. I could go on and on. Like I said, I can’t say enough good things about it 😀