(3d?) particles in the SDK

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
April 24, 2021
2 replies
477 views

Hi

I'm just starting to play with the AE SDK after a good few years away from it. I was looking for the old AE SDK forum, but it seems to have gone - very sad, so much useful reference material gone from there.

Anyway, I have been playing with particle and fluid flow simulations and thought it might be interesting to have a play with them in an after effects plugin.

The Stardust and Trapcode particular both seemable to create 3d clouds of particles that the camera can move around and through. I wondered what part of the SDK makes that work? Unfortunately the move to online docmentation for the SDK makes it really hard to search and I'm having no luck.

Any comments on 3d and the SDK to put me on the right track would be welcome.

thaks

Phil

Mylenium

Legend

AE has no built-in 3D functions other than retrieving layer's transform properties and the camera projection. Everything else is custom code in these plug-ins and you have to write your own renderer.

Mylenium

P

philrosenberg2013Author

Inspiring

Ah, so they're "faking it". You couldn't then put another layer in amongst those particles. Because after effects can't know that some particles stick out in front of the layer.

Thanks for the help, and good to see you are still around on the board Shachar.

S

shachar carmi

Community Expert

indeed they are. AE doesn't offer any native spatial mixing of generated 3D content.

and yes, i'm still around. i have 2 kids so this is where i hide.

S

shachar carmi

Community Expert

such effects get the perspective matrix of the active comp camera, and do the rest of the processing without the help of any AE SDK callbacks. they just render their 3D objects in the right perspective as any 3D renderer would.