[Scott Geersen]

yeah, that’s not the issue, i know how to mask. thanks though.
when you expand the mask using “mask expansion”, the sharp points round out. in illustrator, if you stroke a path, the corners stay sharp unless you tell them otherwise.
i’m trying to figure out how i can expand my mask but keep the sharp corners i drew.

[Scott Geersen]

i am having the same problem and it’s incredibly annoying!
has anyone ever found a solution to this?
ae 8.02 on a ppc mac.

[Scott Geersen]

did anyone every work out how to apply circular position to this thing?
i am working on something similar, but more like a rolodex. a lot of cards arranged like they are standing on the outside of a cylinder… turn the cylinder to reveal new cards. however, i want the cards to “stand up” when they are at the top of the rolodex, and lay down when they are, say, 30degrees from the top of the rolodex in either direction. so as you turn the rolodex the card you want is standing up straighter than the others.

if i could have all the cards in a line and just apply some parenting and expressions similar to this, and have the expressions drive the diameter of the cylinder and their position (so that they are spread around the cylinder) it would make my life a lot easier.

[Scott Geersen]

Hi Serge,
Thanks so much for fixing this and all the others. Your work has always been very helpful and much appreciated!
Regards,
Scott.

[Scott Geersen]

I am having this same problem and it’s driving me nuts! Has anyone found a solution yet?

[Scott Geersen]

I haven’t got any photoshop layers or layer styles, just solids and illustrator layers (also none of which have effects or styles).
i can reproduce the problem with two solids in an empty comp – nothing else, just create solid x 2, click 3d switch, select the topmost one in the stack, push it back in z, and… it shrinks, but stays on top of the other one. what the heck??? seriously. weird.

[Scott Geersen]

I’ve been having this same issue but only in CS3. Stacking order of 3d layers seems to be determined by order in the timeline, not z position. It’s frustrasting me!!! Any solutions?
I’ve been using AE for years and

[Scott Geersen]

turns out it was my grain pass… i’ve swapped it for another method of adding grain, can’t visually tell the difference, and it renders much faster. still taking a long time, but quicker.

do shape layers take a long time to render due to their vectoryness? continuously rasterised illustrator layers always take a long time, too.

[Scott Geersen]

if you’re trying to do a greenscreen in a small room, and you’re going to make a loop out of it anyway, then by all means use the screen, but be prepared to do a lot of roto. i doubt you’ll get decent lighting for the screen in a small room, and if it’s a small space she’ll be casting annoying shadows all over the screen. use it, key what you can, be prepared to do a lot of roto and the eventuality that you may not be able to get a decent key at all (with no 3rd party plugins and dv it will be hard).

[Scott Geersen]

surely you can just align the layers in 3d space so that the end of one (say, the right of the first line) lines up with the next (the left of the 2nd line)? like creating a snake out of many small segments. if your layers aren’t touching/instersecting in 3d space when you look at the top/right/left views, then they’re never going to line up when the camera moves. if you don’t want to see gaps, don’t arrange them with gaps. 🙂 sorry if that sounds obvious.
it’s easier to work with two comp windows open at once. i prefer this to “2 views” as then i can make one of the windows (the top view) smaller and still see my comp camera view in the other window at full res.