[Paul Roper]

…and indeed AE CS6’s 3D features are a fantastic addition – I use them a lot for simple 3D as Todd described; I just wish they’d work faster. But even a slow render time is often faster than setting up the scene in Maya, rendering it (quickly, using CPUs), importing it into AE for comping/grading. Peter, do you use ‘BG Renderer’? https://aescripts.com/bg-renderer-basic/ It allows you to render your comp in the background while you get on with other stuff. You could set up your own script using the command line to do exactly the same thing, but for $15 I let someone else write it.

But I think the big question everyone thought of when AE’s 3D was extended when CS6 came out, was “can I import an OBJ model?”. Maybe CS7? CS6.5? Please?! Or is Adobe’s thinking more along the lines of “well, Element 3D can do that, we’ll leave it to them” (in the same vein as Particle Playground not being updated for years, presumably due to the existence of Particular).

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

I’ve got a pair of Quadro 4000 cards in my Mac Pro, and they speed up 3D rendering in AE to a just-about-usable speed. The difference with most 3D scenes to render is in the area of 10x – 20x faster on the GPU (just a vague guesstimate – it depends on bucketloads of factors). But it’s still woefully slow compared to a dedicated 3D program like Maya. I haven’t had the chance to play around with Element 3D yet, which uses the power of the GPU, and seems to fly along.

[Paul Roper]

If you have a card with CUDA cores (eg. an Nvidia card), AE uses it when rendering (Make Movie) as well as previewing. However, it only uses it for the new Raytraced 3D features and one or two other effects. Most of the processing is still performed by your CPU(s). I’m hoping that future releases of AE will push more effects processing onto the GPU.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

That’s the easy bit (assuming you mean the rotor blades). Just draw a couple of long thin rectangles in a shape layer to form a thin cross (assuming you’re after a 4-blade rotor setup). Making sure your anchor point is in the dead centre of the blades, make the layer 3D, and animate the z-rotation (or write an expression by option-clicking the Z Rotation and tpying in time*1000 into the expression field). Set the X Rotation to 90˚, parent this layer to the top of your helicopter layer, and wherever the helicopter goes, the blades will follow, spinning happily. Make sure you switch on motion blur for the layer.

You’ll have to view it from a non-front angle to see the fun – maybe switch the view to Custom View 1.

If you really wanted to, with the new 3D features in CS6, you could control flexing of the blades and the amount of twist applied depending on how the pilot’s controlling the collective!

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

You could produce the whole video in After Effects, but unless it’s really short (like 10 seconds) you’ll probably want to separate the project into different shots/scenes, create each one in After Effects (preferably making each one a little over-length to allow for slight timing changes later on), render them as QuickTime movie files, then edit those together in FCP or PPro, where you’d also add sound effects/music/voiceover etc. or maybe tweak the colours a little, or even change the background if you’ve rendered from After Effects with an alpha channel.

So basically: do your drawing in Illustrator or Photoshop, do your animation in After Effects and edit it all together in FCP or PPro.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

There are one or two apps/websites out there that can magically transform a load (about 50-80 seems to be the norm) of photos you take of an object, and create a 3D model from it, such as:

https://www.123dapp.com/catch

I’ve never tried it out, but it’s the kind of magic normally reserved for people in movies saying “enhance” to their computers when faced with a low res, blurry image.

The process seems to involve just moving around the object, snapping photos, then uploading them to the website, and voila! It creates a 3D object! How you actually convert the .stl file to something After Effects or a 3D program can work with is another matter which I haven’t looked into. You can also order 3D “prints” of the models, so if you want another toy helicopter (probably costing far more than the original toy!) then you can get one made from your photos.

To have the helicopter fly around in 3D, you’d have to render it in a 3D program (anything from Maya or Cinema 4D if you’ve got a few thousand £ or $ to spend, to Google SketchUp which is free) then comp the rendered images onto a background in After Effects.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Todd, you are a STAR! (Even if your points don’t always snap…!!)

“I’ll go down the hall and check with the engineer responsible for this part of the code and check”

This is one of the reasons I LOVE After Effects*…try getting this kind of response from Apple!

*Although CS6 does crash occasionally, which almost never happened with previous versions.

[Paul Roper]

Bug report submitted.

[Paul Roper]

As Tudor Ted pointed out, more RAM! Whether you’re planning on upgrading to CS6 or not, you really want as much of the stuff as your machine can handle. I’ve got 64GB in my machine, but if I want to allocate the maximum 3GB RAM per processor for multi-processor rendering, 64GB just isn’t enough – it wants at least 72GB (plus RAM for other applications).

[Paul Roper]

Right – I’ve discovered it only under fairly specific circumstances – looks like a bug to me; I’d be interested to have other people try it out:

1. Create a new comp.

2. Using any of the shape tools (polystar is a good one – plenty of points to move around) hold down option/alt BEFORE and while dragging to create an editable path shape, not a parametric one.

3. Drag a guide onto the comp and ensure ‘snap to guides’ is on.

4. Drag one of the points around, all over the guides, with no snapping. You might have to open up the shape layer and click on the word ‘Path 1’ to get to the points without moving the whole thing.

5. Just to make sure that some snapping is on, drag the whole layer, and see it snap to the guide.

If anyone else can recreate this, I’ll send a bug report to Adobe. In fact we should all let them know about this.

– Paul