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Participant
August 25, 2025
Open for Voting

Use Compositions as 3D Model's Texture

  • August 25, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 113 views

Previously requested but wanted to add a few addendums to this really desired item:
Love the increasing native 3D capabilities of After Effects and I really wish the workflow of nesting compositions to build complex animations was reflected in the new Advanced 3D renderer. I would love to be able to select or reference a composition from the project panel to be used as a 3D layer's texture.

As an animator / designer for screens for live events, we often use After Effects not only to build out large pieces of content (multiple synchronous 4K+ feeds) but also to previsualize in real-time what our content will look like. This is super helpful because we don't have to round-trip still frames or large renders between AE and another DCC. However, creating these previsualization setups can take a large amount of time, much of which having compositions UV-mapped onto 3D objects would save an immense amount of time. For instance, for a curved screen we often are cutting up a composition into multiple slices and rotating them individually in 3D.

2 replies

Known Participant
May 9, 2026

YES. It’s the only way to have animated textures, and it’s much more quickly customizable. This lacking feature is what is keeping me using Element 3D.

RomanRaw
Participant
April 22, 2026

I have the same issue with curved and corner screens, and using Element 3D for that is not very convenient cause Element 3D can’t properly reference to a layer that is already using another instance of Element 3D, so yes, this feature would be an incredible workflow speed up