Cinema 4D problem and error message

[michaell62021032]

Hi,

I am have trouble with my 3d rendering. I am using After Effects 17.6 CC. I was trying to cast a shadow on one object to another. very simple. when I turned on the 3d on the object I was supposed to get the little handle bar that would allow me to move the shadow around. There was no 3d on my object. and I couldnt get the 3D to show up in a layer so I tried switching to 4d in Geometry Options. Now that doesnt work at all - My objects have wierd black boxes around them and are extremely high contrast and when I restart I get this crazy port message (see JPGs)  I'm totally stuck. I just want to go back to 3D and have it work. 

Any help would be appreciated!

Michael

[Rick Gerard]

There is no shadow handle. If you have Show Layer Controls turned on in the View menu you will have a 3D cursor on 3D layers at the Anchor Point position. 

Your cropped screenshots are pretty useless for diagnosing the problem. Assuming that the comp is 1920 X 1080 the Parallel Light is at the default position, Layer 2, the ship is set to cast shadows and it is at the default position, and layer 3, the rock is at the default position so I'm assuming that layer 3 is supposed to receive the shadow.  Layer 2 cannot cast a shadow on layer 3 because they share the same exact position. You will have to move one of them in Z space so there is room to cast a shadow. If Show Layer Controls is turned off in the View Menu you will not see the 3D cursor. 

The error message you uploaded just tells me that you need to re-boot and relaunch AE. You may also need to update your build of AE or your graphics driver if a reboot does not fix the error message.

It sounds like you need to spend some serious time with the User Guide. The Understand Layers section of the Beginners course has a tutorial on 3D layers in 2D space that you should look at.

By the way, it is a lot easier for us to diagnose problems if you use the toolbar to embed your images or just drag them to the reply field on the forum so we don't have to download them to see them.