[Jimmy Brunger]

The alt-move-copy trick works quite well as long as your extrusion is one of 45 degree angles..anywhere inbetween and you get jaggys between each layer where it had moved more than 1 pixel at a time. This method matches the old Paintbox command though, which is good to know. Ta.

..Though you still have to select diff elements of the extrusion by hand to ‘mock-shade’ it though to give a 3D feel unless it’s a solid colour, aswell as there being no option to match perspective…but I suppose jumping over to Illustrator would be more viable if you’re going into that muchy depth and accuracy. Still a bit of a pain though.

I tried the stroking path with custom brush thingy…which seems to take a long time to set up accurately, plus like Eric said you can’t ‘preview’ where it will go. Also if you’re in 1.42 widescreen ratio then the brush shape gets squashed in the X and you have to manually re-position and stretch your stroke layer back out to fit the original word.

I just don’t see hat would be so hard about adding it as a layer style like drop shadow..with distance in pixels and an angle wheel? The perspective thing would be trickier, but something like a multipoint corner pin would do it, where you can place the pinning points before distorting it. I bet it’s not that hard..AE has got it standard.

Come on CS3 – show us what you’ve got!!!

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[Jimmy Brunger]

I must admit…I do find this RIDICULOUS that PS can’t do something this simple..

My old Quantel Paintbox Express which is 10 years old just has a ‘solid’ button you can add to an object and 8 direction arrows for where you want the extrusion to go, choose a fill colour and you’re done! I can’t see how that takes much programming to achieve that!? If that old Paintbox can do it (it’s sooooo basic), surely something as (otherwise) ACE as PS can!

I’ve lost count of the amount of times a client has said “can you make that text look a bit 3D” (without wanting to pay for real 3D) and there’s no quick way to do it without jumping into Illustrator, pulling in your secene flattened and trying to match the perspective and then save it out, iport and re-position back in your PS comp. THEN, if you want to change the text…don’t even get me started!

Sorry, rant over..but I’ve been waiting for this simple command/filter/layer style since PS5.

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[Jimmy Brunger]

Wow. Why would someone do that?!?

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[Jimmy Brunger]

Or if you’ve got the $$$ get Re:Flex morphing plugin..it comes standard in Combustion if you can get your hands on that.

Otherwise, Elastic Reality is still VERY good at morphing and was the industry standard for years. You might be able to get your hands on a secondhand copy on ebay or something? BEWARE though – ER needs a hardware dongle you fit on the back of your PC..if someone’s selling it without ask why.

AFAIK though, the Re:Flex product was developed by the guys who made ER, so it’ll be very similar, just a bit more upto date.

Any other good ways of morphing in AE ppl? There’s a very basic way of doing it with text in Illustrator and importing seqs into AE, but that has never worked when I’ve tried it!

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[Jimmy Brunger]

Anyone know if using this slows anything down in AE? Puzzles me why it wouldn’t just be the ‘standard’ de-interlacing option otherwise?!

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[Jimmy Brunger]

Haven’t d/loaded all the relevant demos yet…but in the opinion of anyone who’s used both; are you better off getting Zaxwerks Pro Animator to work with AE, or the Digital Anarchy 3D pack?

I mean, I know one is a 3D app (of sorts) and the other is a plugin for what is essentially a 2D app (AE) but which works the most seamlessly with AE?

Any thoughts appreciated.
Thanks.

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[Jimmy Brunger]

I’d go for XP64 if I were you. That way you take advantage of the 64bit OS and being able to use lots of RAM with Nucleo,etc and AE will also see 4GB RAM. Vista is just a fancy ‘aren’t I pretty’ OS for now…before XP64 alot of hardcore AE’ers used XP in classic mode or even windows 2000 or NT because it ate up less ram and kept it simple.

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[Jimmy Brunger]

I came to AE7.0 straight from v5.5 so don’t get me wrong, I have been astounded by the improvements in 7.0..it’s never going to be a ‘moving photoshop’, it’s so much more than that in many ways, but obviously PS has tonnes it’s own advantages aswell and the two will never totally meet, it wouldn’t make sense to – it’d just be a ridiculously huge and bloated app. BUT, the PS styles thing would be an incredibly useful addition to the next version of AE, as would exporting layered PSDs back to PS that were created in AE *with* editable text. They can already do it to an extent in the other direction, so why not back again?

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[Jimmy Brunger]

I was wondering about something similar to this the other day…After looking at an Autodesk Smoke demo where someone was using Smoke’s extended-bicubic warping to add some 3D realism to some 2D cutouts: https://www.autodesk.com/media/Smoke_Fire/NAB_2006_Master_Series/ (Check out CE Raum’s master class in Advanced Compositing & Effects – he does some cool warping with tree branches)

It got me wondering..Is there any 2D app around that has this kind of fuctionality? I’m pretty sure AE can’t do it out of the box (3D warping) but combined with a specific plugin could it be possible? Otherwise, does anyone know of any other apps that support this (other than Smoke of course?)

Thanks and sorry to thread-hop Speel-berg!

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[Jimmy Brunger]

I asked this a while ago on here and the explantion was that AE and PS are developed by two totally different teams that don’t really talk to each other. This is still baffling to me, as like you say – they are shouting about their apps’ integration and for AE to be the daddy of mograph (which it probably is) you’d think fundamental elements like styles from the ‘daddy’ of still gfx/retouching (PS) would be more integrated.

Photoshop will always be better suited to building your graphic layouts, etc than AE, but I hate having to flatten all my layer styles before importing my PSD into AE so the styles look right. It means keeping a backup PSD with everything editable which I have to go back to and clumsily replace bits with my flattened version when I need to adjust things later on. The convert editbale text function is great, but no use if you’ve got any bevels, etc applied to your text, because it will be flattened and rasterised.

That is my NUMBER 1 wish for CS3 and AE 7.5/8.0 or whatever it will be!

ARE YOU LISTENING ADOBE???!

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