[Michael Becke]

This solution isn’t a magic bullet, but it is so much better than doing it all by hand.
It requires quite a lot of tweaking, but the outcome looks very good.

I had to get the amount of keys used in the auto trace right for it to look good (not cutting off some of the body) when I changed the bezier points to linear points. This required me selecting each keyframe with the mask points selected and changing them by cmd-clicking them, which takes a while, but way better than roughly rotoscoping it.

Thanks a lot for the solution Ted, much appreciated.
Mike

[Michael Becke]

Hi Ted,
I’m going to try this now and will let you know how it works out.
Thank you very much for your thoughts on this.
Mike

[Michael Becke]

Brilliant, thanks Dan, that worked a treat.

And for anyone else who finds this useful.

Copy that expression into the “starting point” and “ending point”

The “layer1” = “the layer that you’re moving about and want one end of the line to follow”

Thanks again Dan.
Mike

(for the search feature: Using Beam to follow two points in 3D)

[Michael Becke]

Hi Dan,
I can’t seem to get beam to work when moving my layers in z-space. The ends of the beam move away from my objects due to paralax. Any ideas?

many thanks,
Mike

[Michael Becke]

I did and it works for most parts, but when you move the element too far forward paralax reveals the end of the beam. Maybe I should make the objects bigger and work further from the camera. I’ll see if that works.

Cheers,
Mike

[Michael Becke]

Hi Dan,
I’m looking to do something similar to what you were talking about back then. A straight line between 3d objects, they don’t have to be true to 3d space/stacking. (ie the lines can be at the back.)

Any tips would be great.
Cheers,
Mike

[Michael Becke]

I’m not sure, how do I check these two things?

Many thanks,
Michael

[Michael Becke]

The Illustrator files are RGB, and we’re using “adobe RGB 1998” in illustrator. (under Edit/color setting/)

now that you asked what color profile I’m using in AE I found it in project settings. (I didn’t think you could choose) I changed it from blank to “adobe RGB 1998)

Doing this made it look more accurate, but still some of the layers didn’t look the same. I’m not sure if the layers with opacity settings in illustrator are coming through correctly. I shall do some testing, but thank you for bringing up the possibility to set the AE color settings.

Many thanks,
Michael Becke

[Michael Becke]

Thanks for the tip 🙂

[Michael Becke]

Thanks for the tip