Brent Willett
Forum Replies Created
-
Hi George.
No, it’s not dumb question at all.
In Photoshop, you can make a selection of your layer, then go into the “Paths” panel and click the menu icon at the top right corner of the panel. Then select “Make Work Path…” You’ll then get an option to change the tolerance. A lower number will make a more accurate path from the selection, but it also makes more anchor points.
Another slightly quicker option is: after you have your selection, you can click on the little icon at the bottom of the Paths panel that’s a circle with anchor points and handles on it (I always think it looks like a girl with pig-tails). That will give you a path too, but it doesn’t give you an option to change the tolerance, so using this button oftentimes makes the path not very accurate.
Once you have your path, you can select it with the Path Selection Tool, copy it, and paste it into Illustrator. Or you can go to File –>Export–>Paths to Illustrator.
Good luck, and happy Zaxwerks-ing!
Brent
-
It looks like the link to my YouTube channel didn’t show up in the post.
To find my channel, go to YouTube, do a search for my name – “Brent Willett” – and look for the logo you see at the top of my posts. All of my videos are motion graphics; mostly show opens.
Thanks,
Brent -
Hi Anastacia.
It’s great to hear that you are having a good experience delving into new plugins. That’s what I have always loved about working in After Effects. It such a versatile tool, especially with all the 3rd party plugins, scripts, and presets that really open up the creative possibilities.
At first glance, ProAnimator might seem limiting since it’s timeline is apart from the After Effects timeline. But it’s easy to go in and out of the setup window. And after you get used to it, it really does offer more possibilities.
You could think of the setup window kind of like a pre-comp. In After Effects you could have a comp with a bunch of things animating that you have nested inside of another comp. To adjust the animations of the items in the pre-comp, you have to go into that comp to move the keyframes around. The workflow for ProAnimator is very much like that.
But like I said in a previous post, you can’t go wrong with either ProAnimator or Invigorator. And it’s great that you can try them out to see which one will work the best for you.
Here is a link to my YouTube channel with a bunch of examples of my work: https://www.youtube.com/user/brentcwillett
The “IPTV Sports…” open starts off with a combination of ProAnimator (for the state of Iowa) and Serpentine. And at the end of that open I incorporated some instances of Flag with the ProAnimator elements.
In the “WHO-TV 13 Soundoff Open” I used Serpentine throughout, but at the end I used ProAnimator, Serpentine, Flag, and even Zaxwerks Reflector all together. And in the part where the camera flies through the tube as the logo comes together, I used ProAnimator’s fragmentation capabilities to break that part of the logo up and have the pieces fly together.
The “WHO-TV 13 Breaking News Open” is a good example of using Serpentine with ProAnimator. The shiny “ribbons” were all Serpentine.
There are other examples in there too. Feel free free to poke around. 🙂
I have not done any tutorials. It’s something I’ve though about doing, but I’ve never gotten around to it for various reasons.
Once, a long time ago, I ran into a site that had put together a bunch of materials for Zaxwerks, but unfortunately I don’t remember any more where that was. Other than that, I have never seen anywhere that has Zaxwerks materials either for free or for sale. Luckily their materials are very easy to make. You can find lots of free textures available on the internet, and it’s very easy to create your own materials using any image you want.
Good luck with your continued exploration!
Brent -
Hi Anastacia.
I’m happy to help. And I agree with you, Element 3D is a great plugin. I use it frequently in conjunction with Zaxwerks ProAnimator for one reason or another to composite together different types of elements. One great thing about both of those programs is that they can use the After Effects camera, so everything stays together in the same 3D space. I also like to use Zaxwerks 3D Flag, and 3D Serpentine in this way too, mixing them in with the scene.
Another great feature of both ProAnimator and Invigorator is that they can import 3D files, like obj and 3ds files, so if you need to bring an airplane into After Effects, you don’t have to have Element. You can do it with Zaxwerks too, making either ProAnimator or Invigorator kind of an all-in-one solution.
I’m glad you were able to check out a Zaxwerks demo, and have found it easy to use. They really do make it easy to dive into 3D without knowing anything about 3D to begin with.
For what it’s worth, I would recommend ProAnimator over Invigorator in the long run, I use ProAnimator for all my heavy lifting. Edward’s right, there is a little bit more of a learning curve with ProAnimator, but that only applies to the timeline. Everything else is very easy to pick up right away. The only thing about the timeline is shifting how you think just a little bit, but not drastically. It uses poses instead of keyframes, but you can think of a pose as kind of a container for a whole bunch of keyframes.
Basically, you get your object where you want it in one pose by using the position, rotation, and scale controls. What you’ve done is essentially set keyframes for all of those properties all at once. Then you move down the timeline, and double click to add another pose. Now you move your object to where you want it to be. All the parameters you change are held in that pose, once again kind of like setting a whole bunch of keyframes, but it does it automatically. And now you have your animation.
At the base level, that’s all you have to do. You can end up doing a lot more with your animation by using the controls that are in the transition that is created between the two poses, and with the controls inside of the poses themselves, but you don’t have to. If you want it to stay simple, keep it simple. And you are in complete control of how long an animation is by dragging the poses back and forth. It’s just like moving After Effects keyframes around except you don’t have to select a whole bunch of them, it’s just one pose.
There are some presets that you can choose if you want, but you don’t have to use those. Personally, I always create my animations from scratch.
And, yes, this is all done inside of the ProAnimator interface. But there are a couple of things you can do in After Effects. I already mentioned using the After Effects camera. But you can also link tracks in ProAnimator to an After Effects null (or other layer).
Definitely check out the tutorials. Zax and Alex have put out a bunch of good ones lately that explain the basics very well.
You can’t go wrong by choosing either Invigorator or ProAnimator. But as you get more comfortable with things, ProAnimator will give you more options for different kinds of animations. Some of which are very cool. Did I mention fragmentation? 😉
Good luck, and have fun!
Brent
-
Hi Anastacia.
Edward gave you a good rundown of the difference between Zaxwerks products. But I thought I’d give you a little insight into Element 3D. Element is a great plugin, and a really good way to be able to use existing 3D models inside of After Effects. But from my point of view as a motion graphic designer, it seems to be more geared toward special effects work.
Element is extremely tough to deal with if you want to put a logo together, especially from Illustrator files. It is able to extrude masks that are on an After Effects layer, but if your Illustrator file is a logo, or something else with multiple parts and different colors, you’d have to have each separate part of the logo as one mask on individual After Effects layers. Then you have to go into the setup window, extrude and color each one individually, then go back into After Effects and line everything up. Even if you have your masks in place in relation to each other on the After Effects layers, since you have to handle each one individually inside of Element, they all come out centered and at different sizes. It can be an extremely frustrating process.
Plus, Element doesn’t have any true shadows, only ambient occlusion (which darkens the areas where pieces meet), nor does it have reflections. It does render fast, though.
Zaxwerks ProAnimator and Invigorator are both geared for turning an Illustrator file, such as a logo, into 3D objects very quickly and easily. All you do is import the AI. Whatever is on a layer in Illustrator comes in as a layer in Zaxwerks. All the pieces are in place and already extruded. You just have to adjust the Z (front and back) position of the pieces (of course you can adjust a lot more if you want). You can even have the file come in with the Illustrator colors.
Like Edward said, if you already know After Effects, Invigorator is the easiest to learn. But I prefer using ProAnimator as a plugin. It has a bunch of ways to animate multiple objects almost automatically, it has real shadows as well as ambient occlusion, reflections, the ability to warp objects, fantastic lighting features with flares and trusses and fixtures, refractions when using transparent materials, easily customizable edge profiles, and more.
It’s versatility is what makes it so great. You can do something as simple as flying in a logo, or you can build a big 3D scene with lots of animating pieces and complicated camera moves (especially if you use the After Effects camera).
I’ve never used Shapeshifter, so I can’t speak to that one.
I hope this helps at least a little.
Thanks,
Brent -
Hi Theo.
You can’t do a direct export of textures. But here’s a decent work around: make you’re ProAnimator project’s frame size the size you want, add a wall plane that’s the same size, put the camera view to the front, and apply your texture to that. Then you can save that frame as a still image that you could open in Photoshop.
Brent
-
Hi Theo.
Unfortunately, no, there isn’t a way to export a texture with an obj file. And there isn’t a way to bake the textures of a model into a single still image either.
If you have an object in ProAnimator that has multiple materials applied to it, and save it as an obj, ProAnimator will then import that obj in separate pieces, one piece for each different material. This can be very useful when continuing to work in ProAnimator, or Invigorator. But, unfortunately, Element will not recognize those separate pieces. In Element, it comes in as one piece.
You can also export a 3ds file out of ProAnimator. The 3ds file will import into ProAnimator with individual pieces, and with each piece having a basic color version of the material it had when it was saved. I’ve had success importing a ProAnimator-saved 3ds file into Cinema 4D this way too. But, Element doesn’t import 3ds files.
The “Collect Files” command is a great feature to put all the texture maps you’re using in a project into one place. This is especially handy if you need to take your ProAnimator scene file to another computer, but it doesn’t help with exporting obj files.
Brent
-
Hi Zax. Thank you for the reply (and Ed to). You guys are always so good with customer service, and it is always greatly appreciated.
Yes, that is true about the obj models coming in white and that you still have to assign the textures inside of Element. The kicker is that the models come in as one piece, unless they already have different textures assigned to them. Andrew Kramer explains in his tutorials that Element automatically recognizes pieces of an obj file that have different textures, and separates out the model into different pieces accordingly. If the obj doesn’t already have different textures associated with different parts, it comes in as one piece. And there doesn’t appear to be any way to separate the parts once they are inside of Element to be able to assign them separate materials.
One way around this is to save each part as a separate obj file and import each one into Element, but the problem there is that Element automatically normalizes the size of the object. So if I’m bringing in different parts of a logo, I have to do a lot of messing around to get the separate pieces in the right place. The same problem happens if I build it from scratch using masks on AE layers.
So that’s why I was wondering if there was a step that I was missing in exporting an obj from ProAnimator that would keep the texture maps associated with the individual parts of the file.
Once again. Thanks for your time and your continued attention to your customers. You guys are the best!
Brent
-
I’m glad it works for you!
As with many tips, tricks, and workarounds, I stumbled on this by accident. I’m just happy I was able to be of help.
Thanks,
Brent -
Hi Mike,
I have what may be a work-around for this.
Set up your project like you described with the camera parented to a null, using the null to control the movement of the camera. Then add a keyframe to one of the values (for instance “Point of Interest”) of the camera, update your Reflector layer, and it should work just fine. You don’t even need to actually animate the camera, just add one keyframe.
I don’t know if it will work in all situations, but I have done some fairly complicated projects in which the camera was controlled by nulls, and there were even multiple layers using the ProAnimator effect, and the reflection worked perfectly.
I hope it works for you.
Thanks,
Brent