How to place 2D art on a 3D surface?

Question

Hi. I've just started getting into 3D in AE, and one thing I immediately wanted to do, but couldn't quite figure out, is putting a 2D artwork on a 3D surface, and have it behave as if it were a "sticker" if you will. I designed a circular manhole cover with a logo on it. The lid has a bunch of holes in it that go straight through it, so, coming from an Illustrator background, I instinctively combined the holes in a compound shape in Illustrator and used the "minus front" pathfinder to punch the holes through the (still flat) lid. I then put the logo on a layer on top of that, and imported both layers into AE. I figured I could precomp the two layers and make them both 3D, but leave the extrusion on the logo layer at 0, while giving the lid some depth. But when I precomped, the holes in the lid were warped into more oval shapes rather than the original circles, so I ended up animating the logo layer and the lid layer separately, but with the exact same keyframes, which seems like a lot of unnecessary extra work.

So I was hoping someone could introduce me to a better approach. It's possible I just didn't find the proper search string, but googling didn't give me the answer 🙂

RobShultz · Answer

I would try the 3D Camera Tracker Effect.

Let it proces the footage and triangulate between 3 points and find a flat target. Right click and choose create solid and camera. Select the solid in your timeline an hold down option/mac or alt/windows and drag your illustrator file onto the solid. Release your mouse first.

Hopefully your footage has been tracked well and this will replace the solid an have it move with the shot.

You could then rotate it to match the angle of the footage.

I hope that this helps.

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