How to make this deceptively simple 3D shape?

[spawklz]

Hi. I'm working on a simple animation of a funicular I've designed in Illustrator. It has a curved front and rear part, and I thought I could just make them as rectangles (1) and bend them in AE. I couldn't for the life of me figure it out, though. I think I get kind of confused as soon as that 3rd dimension is added. So I ended up drawing a simple curve with a stroke and no fill in AE and then extruding it (2)It did sort of work, but surely there must be a more elegant way about this?

[Andrew Yoole]

The built in 3D modelling capabilities in AE are not very powerful, and really just designed to build and distort primitive 3D objects like planes, spheres and cylinders.  I'm not saying it won't work for you, but it may be a bit tedious and frustrating, compared to a genuine 3D modelling tool like Cinema 4D or Blender.

The key will all be in the mathematics.  The curvature of your side panel has to be uniform, ie it can't curve more steeply at the base than the top, which it appears to in your sketch.  For example, if your side panel's curvature is 70 degrees, then you'll need to draw the front panel's rounded edge with exactly that curvature along the edge in order to marry the two objects - or manually mask it once the side panel is in place, I suppose.

I tried to roughly mock up what you're doing - see the GIF below - and you'll see already there are some visible errors along edges where the mathematcs is not perfect.   Stick to the maths religously and you might get what you're after, but otherwise consider using a real 3D tool to build your model.

 

[spawklz]

Thank you very much for your replies, @Andrew Yoole and @Mrtn Ritter! I'm making a series of animations that are meant to be very naivist and simple and cartoony; most of them are 2D, and I did a couple with some 3D layers just to add some perspective without spending a lot of time keyframing 2D shape paths. So the models don't need to be perfect, as they're only used for a single scene.

I haven't tried any external 3D modellers previously, but would you recommend one over the other if ease of use is important? I'd like to learn, but I'd also like to get results quickly 🙂 

[spawklz]

Also, the extruded curve with stroke kinda worked, but it was challenging to get the details on top of that again to line up (I had some windows and a bar on top of the front element).

[Mylenium]

I'd like to learn, but I'd also like to get results quickly  

None of this will be a quick ride. you have to underrstand the program's tools and things like topology, surface flow and generally what to do and what not as best practice. Ultimately it deosn't matter which program you choose. In this day and age even a free tool like Blender does offer excellent options from a mere technical standpoint. It realyl boils down to how quickly you can understand it.

Mylenium

[Mrtn Ritter]

AE is not a 3d software so there is not way to make this elegant.

You can fake the perspective using shape layers (or disort effects, puppet pins, whatever) and animating the paralax. Or you can create the funicular as acutal 3d model and insert it as 3d object using cinema4d.

*Martin

[Rick Gerard]

If you want to stick with After Effects try creating a shape layer with the side view of your gondola. The one in the center of drawing 1. Just do the outline. Next, create your animation with a camera move but don't worry about only having one surface. When you are done, save the AEP file, select the Comp and choose File/Export/Maxon C4D file.

This will give you the AE camera and the shape that you can extrude and texture, and even make windows in C4D lite. I don't have time to show you screenshots and a true step-by-step. On one of these days, I should do a tutorial. I export 3D shape layers and 3D text layers all the time to C4D files. 

The other option, and one that is free, would be to go to http://blender.org and download Blender. It is an incredibly powerful open source (means free) 3D program used by many professionals and it integrated amazingly well with After Effects. You can get some truly amazing results if you spend a few hours using their free training tutorials. I use Blender all the time.