[Paul Roper]

I’m guessing the existing road stripes are white, and you’ll undoubtedly have a bunch of other white-ish things in the shot, so rotoscoping is probably your solution. Unless it’s a really black road with really clean stripes and you can isolate just the road area with a matte – then you might be able to replace the white relatively easily.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Hmmm….I can’t get that to work. I’ve tried putting that expression into a Source Text (it returns “null”) so I tried putting it in a numerical thing (rotation). It returns 0.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Paul

[Paul Roper]

I sent Adobe a feature request for this, but I don’t think the team who work on Illustrator care about these – it feels like such an ancient, un-updated program. I’d imagine that there’s an email script at the Illustrator department, like at Apple, that sends feature requests and bug reports straight to the trash.

In the meantime I’ll just continue creating as many vector graphics as I can in the wonderful world of After Effects.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Eight and a half years! A pretty long time for this thread – and a horribly long time for an error to still be hanging around.

I’ve moved over to Cinema 4D now – it works much better with After Effects, so haven’t used the Maya import workflow for a long time.

But in response to your references question – references are Maya models that are linked into another scene. For example:

I have five scenes, all containing a table, a chair and a person. Instead of importing the table, chair and person, it’s much better to reference them, so if the client says “I want the table to be taller”, you can open the model of the table, change it, and because your five scenes only reference (are linked to) the table file, they automatically reload it and are updated. It also means file sizes are much smaller – you’re not storing the same data five times. It is a fantastic way of working on all but the simplest of scenes, and now I’ve moved to Cinema 4D I really miss it. Cinema 4D is completely and utterly bloody hopeless at references. Very annoying, seeing as it claims to be a pro-level piece of software, and using references is one of the most basic, essential tasks and the concept has been around for many decades – I remember using AutoCAD in the early 90s and setting up very complex, multi-level nested references with absolutely no problems at all.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Yeah – I get around!

I feel another feature request coming on…maybe it could be a JDI.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Yes, it can be done, but it’s going to be very hard. Each face’s angle is offset from its neighbour in all 3 axes; one of these angles is 36˚, and you’ll have to do some maths or research to find out the other two.

When working with 3D shapes (you’ll want to start with a 5-sided polygon shape layer) I always try to set as many things (position, anchor points) as possible to 0,0. Make your comp square – something like 1000 x 1000. Create your polygons by double-clicking the polygon tool in the toolbar (this will create them in the exact centre) – don’t just start dragging out shapes anywhere or you’ll end up having to position stuff at really weird co-ordinates. You’ll also probably want to move your anchor point to a corner to aid positioning the corners of the polygons at the same point in space. If you’re using After Effects CC, use the snapping option.

Having said you’ll want to use a shape layer, you mentioned that you’re going to want something on the faces, so you’ll want to use images instead. Add a pentagonal mask to the image, again by double-clicking the polygon tool, not just randomly dragging something. And make sure your images for those 12 faces are all the same size and shape.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodecahedron

Most 3D programs can create a dodecahedron with one or two clicks. You could probably learn Cinema 4D or Maya in the time it’ll take you to create a dodecahedron in After Effects!!

If you do manage to make it (in AE) I’d love to see a final image of it here!

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

I suspected it was a long shot.

But presumably if I’ve got ftp access to a server, it might be possible to access a file from that?

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

I can’t find the “SOLUTION!” thing in this thread…because that is, indeed, the solution!*

The “thisProperty” is the key.

THANK YOU!

– Paul

*Aha! It’s probably because I didn’t start this thread.

[Paul Roper]

Hi Dan,

I’ve made a simple example here:

But instead of Group 2’s rectangle position being:
content("Group 1").content("Rectangle Path 1").position+[0,100]
I’d like it to be something like:
content(THISGROUP-1).content("Rectangle Path 1").position+[0,100]
…so I can create a lot of these groups and they’ll each reference the group above (and not using the Repeater – I need to add a different fill to each one). In the project I needed this for, I’ve ended up making a lot of layers, achieving the same result (but less elegantly) having each layer reference the position of the “index-1” rectangle. It works, but I’m not a fan of unwieldy multi-layer comps when it can probably be done more concisely with a few lines of an expression.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Bob Ross!