[Will Cavanagh]

Doing 3d in AE is always somewhat of a battle. Your best bet for 3d Text and the like is using an external program like 3DS Max, C4D, Maya, Houdini, etc. If you do wish to do the 3d in After Effects, tricks exist to make 3d extruded text (look into using Shatter 3D) and you can also look into a 3rd party plugin like Zaxwerks’ 3D Invigorator.

As for importing from Vegas — I have no experience with this, but I would speculate that your only option would be to import an RGBA file (i.e. an AVI.) I may be wrong here.

If you want to do 2d text in 3d space (not extruded) then yes, importing from Photoshop or working entirely in AE is a definite possibility.

Hope this helps.

[Will Cavanagh]

Make sure you have the light source and lamp both set with “Cast Shadows” turned on, make sure the light transmission value for the lamp layer is 0, and make sure your floor and wall layers are both set to receive shadows.

[Will Cavanagh]

Ah! Yes, that would be a problem 🙂 An obvious method would be to make that comp big enough that it looks good at whatever res you need it to eventually be. This would of course mean adding a lot of weight to the project and wouldn’t be an optimal solution.

Maybe there’s another way to accomplish your end goal — what are you trying to do?

–Will

[Will Cavanagh]

Make sure Caps Lock is off.

This sounds like OpenGL rendering is enabled, but preview isn’t… not symptomatic of refresh being disabled.

[Will Cavanagh]

3d Stroke allows you to bend and move a stroke in 3d space and add dimensionality to it. You can’t perform these same transforms on the layer it is applied to, thus it doesn’t allow you to reveal that layer.

Were you to want to use a stroke to reveal a layer in 3D space, I would do the stroking and reveal on the layer in 2d first, then precomp this, and make this precomp 3d. This will preserve the dimensions, and allow you to visualize what you’re doing better. It will likely also solve your initial problem.

3d Stroke is much better for cool “organic” looking 3d stem/stalk effects than it is for revealing layers. It’s also great for making a signature unwrap or move in 3d around stuff for example, just not revealing a picture with a signature.

[Will Cavanagh]

You might want to look into the 3D Stroke plugin from RGS/Trapcode… I believe there is a free trial, and it gives you some cool features beyond just putting strokes in 3d space.

[Will Cavanagh]

Double check that the values you have set for the XY and Z sliders are all 0, that the layer you’re attaching to is in 3d space, and that you have a camera in the scene.

Try orbiting around to see if the particles are lined up correctly on one or more axes, but not on others… Is the Z correct, but XY not? Without seeing what’s happening it’s hard to say what went wrong.

I’ve also never used Horizon, so I don’t know if this could be affecting things (I would hope it would play nice with other RGS/Trapcode products.)

[Will Cavanagh]

Since presets are just memorized settings for Effects/Plugins, you can’t change the “About” link on the effect. Think of presets as bookmarks – you can’t change the content of the site, just which page initially loads… It’s a weak analogy, but hopefully you get what I’m trying for 🙂 Next time I’ll try a car analogy instead.

–Will

[Will Cavanagh]

This wouldn’t happen to be a *cough* special copy of AE, would it? If this is a legit copy, I’d give Adobe a call — sounds like s problem they might have previous experience with.

[Will Cavanagh]

This is fairly straightforward using expressions. I like to add the “Value” parts of these so that you can adjust things later if you wish. If you keep these in, you will need to set the value sliders to 0 first (set the emitter position to (0,0) in Particular, and set your camera’s POI to (0,0,0).) If you don’t need to use these just remove the “+value” part from each expression. Keeping them in will allow you to keyframe the relative position of the emitter, and have the camera tilt/pan.

First, to link Particular’s emitter to the layer…

Particular uses a seperate XY and Z property, so we’ll need to attach them seperately. First set the XY emitter position equal to an expression like this one:

temp = thisComp.layer(“YourLayer“).transform.position;
[temp[0], temp[1]]+value

Where YourLayer is the name of the layer you’re linking to. Then, set the z similarly with:

thisComp.layer(“YourLayer“).transform.position[2]+value

Then, to set the POI of the camera, use something like:

thisComp.layer(“YourLayer“).transform.position+value