3D space that works like other 3D programs

[damianp66423253]

Will there ever be a 3D space like other 3D programs? It's mostly about the view and how you move around this space. For example, I open Blender and there it is very easy for me to move around the entire 3D space, everything works very quickly, despite the many objects on the scene, and the orientation and position of the camera around the selected element is just pressing one key on the keyboard and the camera orbits around the selected element.
In addition, everything is clear, despite the large scene, I can see all the layers, because I can easily zoom in and out of the camera.

Working in 3D space in After Effects is very strenuous for me, everything is slow and illegible. Even on smaller scenes, the camera often gets lost and I don't know where I am. Or maybe there are already some settings that make it easier to work in 3D space and I don't know about them?

[scrozier]

100% this. They need to speed up the interface rendering overall before anyone is going to want to use this 3D space. 

[howiemnet]

This is one of the biggest issues w working in 3D (or 2.5D) in After Effects - and probably one of the hardest things for Adobe to sort out. Big complex compound camera moves are hard to create and tweak in AE - partly because of the keyframe/graph view limitations, and partly because of the way AE's viewports work.

It's likely to be a while before AE is able to provide an interface that works more like 3D DCCs; AE was built from the ground up with "immediate view of a rendered 2D composition" in mind, and the 2.5/3D stuff that has been added has had to work around that. Leaving aside the technical issues of how do they code a better viewport, there are a whole bunch of hard to answer questions about what a better viewport should look like. Easy to say "well I want to be able to see my 3D scene like I can in Blender or Houdini" - but most of the stuff we do in AE is 2D and needs to be composited for us to actually see anything: so AE is focused on rendering that composition-bounded rectangle, not all the other stuff that falls outside the comp bounds.

I suppose one thing I'd find really handy would be a home grid - like in a 3D package - but that displayed only outside the comp bounds. That at least would help us orient ourselves. We can already see layer wireframes outside the comp bounds:

... and a home grid that displayed in the same way would be super helpful. Like you I often lose my camera if I try doing anything too ambitious 😉

[JohnColombo]

Hi @howiemnet,

Thanks for mentioning this! A 3D ground plane and extended viewer (outside the rendered area) were added in the 2022 version of After Effects, inside a new real-time Draft 3D engine that allows you to quickly navigate your scene and see how everything is laid out. More details are available here: https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/work-in-3D-space.html. The Draft 3D engine works more like you'd expect from a 3D package in that it doesn't display "full fidelity" but renders the layers fast so you can place them and create camera moves before switching back to the output renderer for the final look.

Note the ground plane and layer outside the rendered area in this screenshot from After Effects 2022. You can long-click on the Extended Viewer button to adjust the opacity of the display outside the viewport.

You can use it with both the Classic 3D (2.5D) renderer and the C4D renderer, as well as with the new Advanced 3D renderer in the current Beta builds.

Cheers,

- John, After Effects Engineering Team