Fly Through with Surrounding Background

[mjv-video]

Have an oddball situation that might not have a simple solution.  I have designed a fly-through type environment, using a very large working space- spanning 50,000 px in all directions.  The camera moves around to the various scenes as the story unfolds. What I am trying to figure out is how to get something other than a "color" as a background in the 360 degree surrounding space.  I could create giant photoshop abstractions and "wall-in" the fly-through arena.  But that seems like it might not work practically.  Thoughts?

[Jose Panadero]

I'm pretty sure you will have problems working on a 50000px composition in a 3D space. Anyway, you can create you 3D background using some techniques:

1.- Create a Cinema 4D file with a Sky with any texture. Import this native Cinema 4D file into your composition and chage the Cineware camera options to Centered Camera Comp. This way this "infinite 3D" sphere will act as a background reacting to the movement of your camera.

2.- Change your composition renderer to Cinema 4D reneder . This way you can create a curvature for any kind of layer to create a semi-cylindrical environment (you can duplicate and rotate this layer to create a complete cylindrical environmet).

[ShiveringCactus]

You could also take a look at the free Orb plugin from Video Copilot, https://www.videocopilot.net/orb/

You can set its radius to be massive, it responds to the AE camera and can have textures on it.

[Rick Gerard]

There is no real need for a huge working space for a large 3D fly-through. 3D layers can exist at the edge of a standard HD frame until they are needed. In these scenarios, it is almost always a better idea to move the actors (layers I often call my 3D layers actors) than it is to move the camera. 

It is also a great temptation to try and cover way too much time in a single comp. If there is a place to cut your shot, even do a match cut, then break up your comp into shorter sections and do the final edit in Premiere Pro.

Shortly after 3D layers were introduced in After Effects I created a fly-over of the entire WWII war in the pacific. It was about a five-minute scene. At first, I tried to arrange the stage with all of the layers distributed in 3D space in a single comp. It was a mess. I then rethought the entire workflow and set up about 30 separate layered Illustrator files, some with the same background layers. Each AI file was imported as a separate composition, the layers were arranged in 3D space using 4 views, and then a 3D Null was added to act as the parent for all of the actors. I flew the null through the scene by animating only the position. The camera was animated in Y and X with the point of interest always at the comp center si I could easily get any angle on my 3D scenes and find the starting point for the next comp with ease.

Some of my actors moved in the scene, like ships moving at the battle of midway, and there were animated arrows showing movements, but all of the transitions between different stages (comps) were handled by matching up first and last frames with the first and last frame of the preceding comps (shots). The project became manageable, changes requested by the director took a few minutes instead of a few days, I don't think I had a single comp longer than about 10 seconds which was a single sentence of narration, and 2 weeks before the deadline the rendered file was sitting on the editors' desk. If I had kept the project as one comp and tried to fly the camera through the whole thing it would have taken me forever and changes would have taken days to render. 

If you would like to share some screenshots I can probably give you some decent workflow suggestions. A 50K X 50K master comp with everything in it is probably not a very good idea at all.

[mjv-video]

Rick- some very excellent advise and experience-- thanks.  Would like to discuss your work flow at some point.

In my comp, there are dozen's of faces and people that I'd have to get the ok to share (it's a Virtual Musical Ensemble with a lot of reworking into 3d), so probably won't be able to post that here.  But from a work-flow angle, I have broken it down into scenes (10 precomps with lots of layers).    There are dependencies that sometimes roll all the way through the comp, and it is very frustrating having to continually update.  What I would like to figure out is a good way to eliminate keyframe dependencies between scenes.  Would also like to figure out a way to not have to expand outside of the frame view (and be able to use a comp-sized image layer as a background), but still accomplish complex and interesting fly-through effects.  Many comp's might just be the answer.  A lot of that is detailed pre-planning, and finding ways to trick the eye, but it sounds like you have developed a good flow that is dependency-proof.

Does that description give enough info for some work-flow tips?

[Rick Gerard]

You basically start with your main comp and the layers needed for the first scene. If it's a song then let's say the layers you need for the first 4 or 8 bars of the song. You set up your stage, position your 3D layers, add the stage null, parent all layers to the stage null then animate the stage toward the camera. When you get to the end of the first phrase you split every layer that will still be in the second 4 bars of the song including the null, select all of the layers before the split, pre-compose and trim the pre-comp to the length of the layers. Now you start adding the layers that need to be in the second 4 bars, animate them, animate the null and the camera height (y) until you get to the end of the second 4 bars. Then you repeat splitting the layers and pre-composing the layers that are in the second 4 bars and you repeat until you are done. 

If you need to go back and edit something you open up one of the pre-comps and make the adjustments to the layer's position just being careful that you don't foul up anything else. 

As long as you collapse transformations, the Main comp will treat all of the nested comps as if they were in the main comps. Lights, shadows, and everything else will work perfectly. 

The workflow is not that hard, it just takes a little planning and a little care to keep things lined up. 

[mjv-video]

Rick- Appreciate the flow advise.  Am going to ponder this, and also experiment with it.  Tell you what-- After Effects is a very nice app which can do amazing animations-- but it can also be a perpetual rabbit hole of revisions if a project is not thought out carefully in advance.  Workflow is at the heart of saving countless hours.