[Gene Felice]

Hello:
Thank God for people like you. I moved the anchor point to the landing gear and now scaling works as I would have expected. After seeing the problem it now makes perfect sense. It now is very clear as to why the scaling did what it did. Thanks again !!!!!!

[Gene Felice]

Hello:
I will try to be more specific. First some background info. My grandson and I are both into special effects and “how did they do that”. About a year ago I picked up AE and, as something we could do together, we have been learning AE and using it to do effects. We have done many of the Creative Cow and Andrew Kramer effects with reasonable success. Because GI Joe came out we thought a helicopter landing in the culdesac I live on. We found a 3DS Max obj helicopter sequence on line. We took a photo of the street from my front porch. We animated the helicopter to fly in from a distance, hover over the street, rotate a bit so it was clear the helicopter was not 2D, and land. All want well and looks great. Problem is the helicopter is to small and doesn’t look real because there are cars, etc parked on the street that are larger. My though was all I need to is scale the helicopter up. When I scale it up it gets larger as expected but also appears to move closer. By the time I get it large enough it is sitting in my front yard and not the street. If I look at the 3D scene in top view it shows that the helicopter has not moved in Z space. It is sitting at he same spot I placed it. However, from front view the helicopter has moved closer. Not only is it larger but it has moved completely off the street and into the front yard. No matter what I do I can not get the helicopter to stay visually in the center of the street and get larger. It seems to me that placing a 3D object into a scene at a specific spot and size would be a common task but I can’t seem to make it work. I thought that maybe I needed a larger 3D model and that the scaling needed to take place in 3DS Max so I found a larger 3DS model of a truck and tried it. Same problem. Any assistance would be great. Thanks

[Gene Felice]

Hello:
I was using Photoshop only because I needed some way to see if I could accomplish my goal without spending money to find out that I could not. My plan is to purchase Elements 3D from Andrew Kramer. Problem is, when I look at his demo it seems that he basically does the same thing and uses a control Null.

My way of thinking is this: An object should have and X & Y. In 3D also a Z. The further back in Z the smaller the object would appear in the composition. That said, the object should also have a scalable size. If I took a 3DS Max model of a building and used it twice in my comp. I put both building on the same Z plane. They would both be the same size. However, if I wanted one of the building to be a much larger building I could simply sale it up. It would still be sitting on the same Z plane, it would just be a bigger building. Is there some flaw in this? I ask because now matter what parameters of the objects I adjust this does not work
Thanks

[Gene Felice]

Hello: Thanks for the replies but they do not seem to solve my issue. Being new to AE I am sure I am doing something wrong but I have no idea what. Please let me go into detail as to what I have done in the hopes that someone can assist. I have a photo of my street that i added to a composition. I added a grid and oriented it so it lays on the street. As a test I created a shape layer with a rectangle. I set the shape layer to 3D. I moved the rectangle back in Z space to a specific point on the street grid. I then scaled the rectangle up to the size I wanted. I now had the proper size rectangle at the proper z position. All worked as expected. Problem is it’s not a true 3D rectangle and if rotated to the side becomes a flat layer. Now to the problem. I have a 3DS Max model of a helicopter in obj format. I tried to import it into AE, no go. I then found a Creative Cow tutorial called Importing 3D models into Adobe’s After Effects. It showed me how to use Photoshop to convert the model to PDS and import it. Worked great. I now have a 3D helicopter in my composition that looks and acts just like a real helicopter. I now moved the helicopter to the proper point on the street grid. Problem is that point is further back in my scene so when I move it back it starts to look like a toy helicopter. I then assumed I could just scale it up like I did with the shape layer but no mater how I scale it also gets closer and changes position on the street grid. Obviously there has to be some way that I can have a 3D object in the scene at s specific location and size. Thanks for any help.