[Mark Whitney]

Maybe expand your Render Queue settings & post a screen shot. Might be something there your missing.

[Mark Whitney]

Hey Steve,

Wasn’t finding what I thought i was looking for, but have you looked at what is probably quite outdated but Red Giant’s Shooter Suite and in that the Opticals effect for doing dissolves? Not specifically what your were asking but it does give you several film response options.

[Mark Whitney]

If you have an image in in your time line and it’s actual name is ZZZ.jpg and you elect & rename it to Mine (doesn’t even need an extension) in the comp, then simply clicking where it says Layer Name will toggle between the two in the comp.

If you now just only select Mine and then Alt drag AAA.jpg onto it from the Project window onto Mine. the image will change but the name in the Comp will remain the same UNTIL you again click the Layer Name. It will then show the actual source file name.

So I guess in your case, just make sure you’ve named them correctly in the comp layers initially as they’ll always have to refer to an actual file in the project. That way it’ll always remain named Upper Left, but might be pointing to BobsCat.jpg.

Probably the easiest way to deal with this & stay organized. You don’t even need to know thefile name; just refer to the layer name.

[Mark Whitney]

You don’t say what your using for your tracking but couldn’t you just track markers and export them back into your 3D app as nulls? Many offer that feature anyway. From that you could build a “Wire” frame model and end up actually having it in your 3D app. Just a matter of rendering & comping at that point I’d think.

Not every solution is 100% AE.

[Mark Whitney]

Take a look at this first. It’ll pretty much give you the idea in the first minute. You build complex shapes from simple, basic shapes is all & then can extract the outline or isolate parts as desired. Paper cut-outs on steroids.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTnT-PDPp7g
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Illustrator+Shape+Builder+Tool

Beyond that it’s a simple matter of copying & pasting into a layer mask in AE.

Also: Unless enjoy paying monthly “tribute” to Adobe for perpetual betaware…

Affinity Designer
https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/
No subscription. Only $49.99

Check out their other items while your there.

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[Mark Whitney]

Do you have Adobe Illustrator or equivalent that can work with .ai, eps, etc., vector files? If not you really should get one for working with AE.

Anyway, it’s hyper easy that way. I just did a quick test; took less than 30 secs.

Opened AI & created a new project at HD size, 1920 x 1080. Match your sizes in both AI and AE. I could have opened or imported nearly anything but simple looked for something easy already on the system & chose a symbol item of a boot.

Drug that into the workspace, scaled it up to desired & then, since it was a symbol, I broke the link making it an independant item. From that I simply flipped the stroke/fill so it was stroke only, selected & copied the outline (in this case there was only one), switched to AE, selected my layer & Ctrl-V pasted. Select the maske & applied Stroke & animate.

Done.

There are terabytes of vector files out there to essentially kit-bash. Between that and the shape making tools in Illustrator, one should rarely need to make anything completely by hand unless you want to.

If you need a vid demo, let me know but I think the description should get you there w/o.

[Mark Whitney]

You might want to take a look at this as it goes into a lot of the thinking on shapes to use, & placement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qhe7IO2hwY&t=2s

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[Mark Whitney]

Yep. And Walter here can probably give ya all sorts of ways to do it natively in AE.

Or, you might check out this free version of the Animation Composer script:
https://aescripts.com/animation-composer/

There are others but this is pretty straight forward & easy to use.

[Mark Whitney]

[John Wooltorton] ”
Sorry, I didn’t know it would embed it instead of showing the link.

2:24″

Best guess is it’s an overlay of something done in Plexus.

[Mark Whitney]

There’s a zillion & 1/2 tutorials on youtube of course, some good, some less than.

Or for a relative pitance…

https://aescripts.com/m-s-halftone/

Think it’ll do pretty much what you’re looking for. Really study the presets & watch the video.