[Kyle Hamrick]

Sounds like sort of a lot of work to get something AE already does for you.

Is this somehow superior to just using Layer>Auto-Trace? That’s totally automated, and you can do it for every frame in your work area, if you so desire.

Or am I simply missing something here?

[Kyle Hamrick]

While I may be slightly misinterpreting what you’re going for, you can always add an adjustment layer (or other 2D layer) between your 3D layers to help force the render order. Sometimes AE just isn’t smart enough to do what seems logical, so you have to trick it…

[Kyle Hamrick]

Good ol’ AE.

Change your view (probably to “Top”) and take a look at the movement paths of your camera. They’ll be bezier curves, which AE gave you to be “helpful.”

Use the suggestion in the post above, or use the Pen tool to fix your motion path. If you Alt+Click over one of the vextexes with the Pen tool, it’ll swap between bezier and linear. Sit back and watch your fabulous new cam moves.

If this doesn’t quite fix it, don’t forget to check both the camera position AND the point of interest if you’ve got both of them animating (which is likely from the way you’ve described your setup.) Sometimes you’ll drive yourself crazy trying to fix one, then realize it was the other all along. Using the top view, you can easily see your camera position (you may have to zoom out some.) The POI will be the dot at the end of the line coming from the front of the camera.

Good luck!

[Kyle Hamrick]

So it goes. You can sometimes simplify things a bit, though. You might go ahead and apply your stroke, then go through and click on the masks one at a time to find where they are, and see if you can go without some of them. Many of them will be tiny, one- or two-point things that really aren’t even serving any purpose for what you’re doing.

Also, if you’re trying to make it all draw as one object – sort of an Etch-a-sketch effect – you’re probably (unfortunately) going to have to do a lot of manual masking – possibly simply connecting them so they all flow together.

Telling your Stroke to do all masks sequentially MAY work… but you’re probably going to have to go through your hundred of so masks and re-arrange them to make sure they’re in the correct order. Depending on what you’re doing, it may be easier to simply bring your original image into AE and trace it in one long, continuous mask.

Hope this helped a bit.