Tracing 3d lines with camera movement
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Not sure the best way to approach this issue: I've got a 3d model from SketchUp that I want to trace in After Effects- going for your traditional blueprint line drawn animation, but with 3d camera motion. I can take stills from SketchUp from any perspective and trace them in AE, but then I can't have 3D camera movement. Alternatively, I can import the model into C4D lite (which I'm not great with) and probably figure out some ways to do basic camera movement. But I'm not sure how I'd pull off the line drawn animation there. I figure there's got to be a way to do this because I know I've seen things like it before. I've thought of trying to rebuild it in AE but it seems like there's got to be a faster way.
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You could put the model in Cinema 4D (possibly even the Lite version that's included in AE) and use animated materials to reveal the various parts.
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The plain answer is that such animations are typically done by animating parametric object types in 3D programs, be that animated extrusions or booleans. Getting this done after the fact on a "lump" exported from another program will be difficult. At the very least you would likely need to explode the model into its separate beams again using the respective C4D modelling functions. Then you could assign a material to each one of them and animate some stuff. In fact it would probably not be that difficult using Sketch & Toon if you had the full comercial version of C4D. The limitation is really going to be that you're stuck with basics like the simple toon and sketch shader, if you only have C4D lite and have to put in more work on animating the geometry. In any case, this isn't going to be a matter of slapping on some material and just swooshing around with the camera. It's more complex than that. That would even be true if you merely were to export a multipass render from C4D with each beam having his ownb object ID or something like that and then used masking and wipe transitions to reveal them...
Mylenium
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and see what I can do.
The other thing I'm going to play around with is to export an animation
from Sketchup and see if I can just manually animate masks in AE. Won't be
as comprehensive but it might work since the total animation is fairly short
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Yeah, if SketchUp has some sort of "Darw-On"/ Assemble animation type already, that would be preferable and then you only need to worry about masking out a bunch of things and retiming it in AE.
Mylenium
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I've done this kind of thing in the past using Blender. Doing it inside After Effects would be a tedious and difficult proposition. Blender is a very capable open-source 3D program with a huge support community. You should check it out: http://blender.org
I am not sure if there are enough tools in C4D lite to do the kind of animation you like. C4D lite is plenty capable of integrating the camera move. Video Copilot's Element 3D might work if you can set up the right kind of model.
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