Current Approaches for 3D in After Effects?

[Gotta Dance]

Hi Everybody,

I have to animate a horseshoe magnet into a comp and have objects fly into and stick to the ends of it.

This magnet has to have more than one color (red / grey etc.) but it's more cartoony than it is photorealistic by any means, it's for business graphics so serious rendering/texturing/HDRI etc won't come into play. 

I've seen a number of ways one might approach this with/without 3rd party plugs. 

...Extruding Shape objects

...Importing OBJ 

...Heavily repeated PNG

What would make the most sense for something relatively basic like this? It's been a while since I've taken on 3D elements in a 2D space. I was wondering what was up-to-date, available in AE, or what might recommended for something like this.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

[Mylenium · Accepted solution]

Kind of a "Whatever works for you" question ultimately. I suppose getting things 3D-ish will be the least of your worries, anyway, with the objects needing to stick to the ends being the primary concern. It could be a lot of work to animate and align them. that being the case I'd likely rely on an AE native method like stacking 3D layers or extruding shape layers so you don't have to worry too much about confusing coordinates...

Mylenium

[Gotta Dance]

That sounds like a pretty good approach. I'm able to create objects in 3D, but I just want to bring in a textured object, not the whole 3D scene. As AE can't color portions of an imported 3d object (that I know of). 

I import a C4D object but the whole thing is a like a smart object on steroids. 

A long time ago I made a 3D coin using Photoshop and brought it into AE without a whole stage render, depth etc. hassle. But Photoshop doesn't support 3D anymore (probably cuz it's reaaaallly sluggish on most computers).

Looking to do the same roughly, but still circling. I might just resound to parenting together shape layers to conjoin them as one 3D object. It's kind of a band-aids approach, but I'm thinking with regards to ease of scene, bg, "lighting" etc. it might be the smart approach.

Thanks Mylenium.