[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Except for the planar tracking it almost sounds like Commotion – that was an awesome roto and paint package years ago. Too bad Puffin Designs got bought out and Pinnacle made a mess out of it.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

PC or mac version? Do you have all the updates?

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

If you want a laptop that can handle AE, you need to look at a brand name (HP with the Elite Book series or Dell with xps or Alienware) Or at a Falcon or Origin PC for a custom build. These are expensive machines though.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

I would go for Mocha as well.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

For the image you posted there is unfortunately no simple way – here’s what I would try using Adobe Illustrator to start with due to easier manipulation of shapes and gradients:
Draw boxes (3 sides- front, side and top- distorted to match perspective) for each building on separate layers to have easy access.
Fill in each side with a grayscale gradient.
Adjust the values of the gradients to have lighter at the top and darker at the bottom. The trick is to have the values go darker as the buildings recede.
Then you need a second set of gradients layered on top of the first with gradients following the angle of the perspective and a Overlay transfer mode to blend them with the first set of gradients.
Lastly you need to create a bottom layer with a gradient for the “floor” that starts with the lightest of the grayscale values from the bottom of the gradients for the buildings and ends with a significantly darker one.
Open in PSD then as a 32 bit file and save as tiff or png.
Work in AE @ 32bit.
Hope I managed to make sense – it’s clear in my head but written down it may be a bit confusing.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

I would say that it depends- CrazyBump may not be able to pick up on the actual displacement on certain images, like the one you have and then drawing them in psd is the way to go. I would test both and check the result.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

CrazyBump will help you get a Displacement map that you can use in FreeForm. All you need is to export the Displacement map in a image format(jpg, png, tiff…) that FreeForm can use.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

I am not aware of any other plugin that will do a true 3d displacement of the layer (fast and accurate) besides the Mettle plugins.
The basic principle of a displacement map is that 50% gray is a flat surfacelocated where your layer is in 3d space. Whatever is lighter than 50% gray will be extruded towards the camera, under 50% will be away from the camera. So you need to create a grayscale image that will allow the plugin to extrude your 2d image and give it depth.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

You got a solution in the previous post answers. However, if you want to go the 3d route, you can either build (or download) a 3d model of your Sit n Spin, import that in AE using Invigorator Pro or Element 3d and animate the 3d object spinning.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

It’s unclear what you mean by “the layer starts being manipulated by the points”.
Maybe it’s because you have too many points and some are too close to eachother… just a shot in the dark though without more info. Maybe posting a couple of screen shots – one before the issue appears and one after- will help.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist