After Effects Beta 3D models can't see textures

Thanks for your feedback. We are aware of this feature request (it's been requested by a bunch of customers). We're a small team within Adobe, though, and based on customer feedback, we prioritized animation scenarios first (ahead of 3D modeling and material scenarios) but these features are on our roadmap.

Adobe, aren't you ashamed? This problem has been around for almost 3 years now. I'm currently in version 25.0 and you still don't have the functionality to add textures from ANY jpg to ANY obj. What is the problem? The element3d has been able to do this for a long time, but you, a multinational corporation, cannot. Davinci once bypassed your premiere. You will slow down so much and one day the new program will cost your after. Keep it up, well done (no).

@seriouswoman If you can send (or link to) an example of a .OBJ (or an unbaked .GLTF) model from C4D that doesn't render the textures, I'd really appreciate it. Will investigate.

Thanks,
Tom

I had this issue today trying to import an .obj from C4D - I tried an .gltf too but that didn't work. But I found a solution that worked for me! Back in Cinema4D I "baked" the material and re-exported the model. I followed the tutorial "Baking Textures" for Lens:   https://docs.snap.com/lens-studio/4.55.1/references/guides/adding-content/3d/exporting-content/cinema-4d-3d-object-export#:~:text=In%20order%20to%20successfully%20export,to%20your%20selected%203D%20model. Hope this helps someone!

I'll give these settings a try. That level of "glassness" might be ok for the technical videos we want to produce. Thanks!

The tricky thing with glass is that Advanced 3D supports transparency and reflection of Environment lights but not translucency or refraction (as it's not a ray-tracer). 

Here's one way to give your models a glassier look, courtesy of Gwen on the AE engineering team. In Substance Stager:

• Reduce roughness to zero or near-zero.
• Make the base color a dark grey. It can take some playing around to get the right color and this will depend on what's going behind the model.
• Reduce the model material's opacity until it looks right.
• Also play around with metallic, different amounts of metallic (anywhere from 0 to 1) can make it look better or worse.

Here's a before-and-after render in AE with a model from Adobe Stock using this approach:

I find using a nice Environment light source also makes a big difference.

Having no luck with glass materials making the journey from Stager to After Effects with the new 24.5 update. Glass looks like smokey plastic. Still experimenting though. Decals and other materials seem to come through OK. It's still struggling with translucent plastics, they translate as waaaay too transparent and don't reflect the pre-import settings. Most of our products are glass. No glass support no go!

Please give it a try with After Effects 24.5 (Beta). 

Creative Cloud app | "Apps" | Beta apps | After Effects 24.5.

has there been any updates on adding texture to OBJ files?

Hi @christinar33414126 ,

Thanks for sending the links. I can reproduce problems with both of these files and I've asked the devs to investigate.

The six-sided die is a result of a rendering problem we're already aware of, where materials identified as "translucent" are rendered as opaque. (Note that "translucent" and "transparent" have different material definitions. This OBJ defines the semi-opaqueness of the surface as "translucent", which currently isn't working right in the conversion code After Effects Beta is using to read OBJ files.)

I have found that if you import the six-sided die OBJ into Adobe Dimension and export it as a GLB, that GLB imports into After Effects Beta as expected. Dn appears to be doing the correct work of translating "translucent" to "transparent".

The neon sign model is a different case. Our developers weren't able to reproduce the problem, which indicates that this may get fixed in an upcoming build of After Effects Beta. (They have been working on many different rendering issues, and this may have been coincidentally fixed.) Again, re-exporting this OBJ as a GLB via Adobe Dimension fixes the issue for me, so that's a temporary workaround you can use.

> Is there a way to update/relink the textures to the model?

Short answer, no.

While After Effects Beta imports the individual texture files as items in the project, the only reason it does this is so that when you use Collect Files to package the project, all dependent files are included. Otherwise After Effects wouldn't know to reference the files.

When After Effects Beta is rendering the file, it always looks inside the OBJ, GLB, or GLTF for the reference to the textures. There's not a way to override this. Yet.

We are working on a material replacement workflow for After Effects Beta. The main goal for this is to intentionally replace one material of an object with a different one. It wouldn't solve the problems with these files, where the materials don't render as expected. Those are bugs in the render pipeline. Replacing those materials with something different would only render the new materials incorrectly.