Text Disappears when converted to a 3D layer

[willunger]

I don't have much experience with After Effects, but been teaching myself a lot over the past few months via templates and YouTube videos.  I'm working on making a lyric video.  The text of the song has been typed in individual layers and a 3D camera has been added to the composition.  When I click to convert the text layers into 3D, all of my text disappears.  I've also tried going to "Animation > Animate Text > Enable Per Character 3D" but that also makes the text disappear.

Any help would be appreciated.

Currently using After Effects CC 15.0.0 (Build 180)

[willunger]

I have updated to 15.0.1 (Build 73) but still have the same issue.

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

You have to be looking at Active Camera and the text must be properly distributed in AE's 3D space. The best way to check is to open up 4 views and check the position of each layer. You should also be using the Classic 3D rendering engine. If you don't immediately figure out what is going on the select all the layers giving you problems and press the U key twice. This will reveal all modified properties of the layers. Start turning effects off and resetting values until layers start showing up.

If you are still stuck then PrintScreen and paste a screenshot of the entire UI here so we can see what you are dealing with.

Watch out for YouTube tutorials, more than half of them are produced by amateurs that don't know what they are talking about and they present dead-end workflows and in many cases promote ideas and techniques that do not work. Vet your trainers. Anyone starting to use AE should spend some time on the Adobe AE product page and use the links to some decent vetted training there. You'll save a lot of time if you start here: Basic AE

[willunger]

Thanks!  I really have no idea what happened.  I have ended up completely restarting the project from scratch and everything is working fine now.  Don't know what I missed or what I pressed that was incorrect, but at least I know it was user error on my end.  Thanks for your help and advice.

[editinge71107041]

Check if your monitor is set at "Active Camera". It should be like this for you to see it properly.

[Ali Hassan5C06]

you're right, as always. one should start creating comp with 3D classic rendering engine.

[resovere]

Wish you could answer every posts' questions - gotten your answers twice in a row now and both were straight to the point and 100% correct. Thanks for this.

[williamr79010438]

I know you have already solved this problem but I wanted to elaborate for future readers who find this discussion due to similar problems.

I often get this issue when working with cameras that I've imported from other 3D software. When I convert graphics into 3D objects they seem to disappear. I learned that they are always somewhere off of the canvas in 3D space, I'm not sure why they end up there but that's why they seem to disappear. The solution is to zoom way out and hopefully they will appear, sometimes I will have to switch to 4 views to find the layer.

Once I've found the object, I will grab it and snap it to a 3D object that's within my canvas. Then I can zoom back in and scale and position the item where it needs to be.

[CS5-CC]

Hello,

I am an Identity/Graphic Designer that has been working within After Effects for a couple of years now. I'm not a professional in motion what so ever but I have to set up some AE projects within the entertainment industry. This was perplexing me when building out a tool kit but I found a simple solution.

If you are utilizing a text layer and make it 3D with transparency simply select the "T" box between Trikmat and blending mode. This makes the text object stop disappearing and preserves underlying transparency.

[Taruna0101]

Hey i got the solution, my layer(composition) was displaced after turning it into 3D so i just adjusted it. It was actually overlapping perfectly over another composition so I couldn't see it at first. Hope this helps.

[crispybug]

Seems this was solved but the Active Camera solution didn't work for me. Using AE 22.6

When I tried to change a layer to 3d - object dissapeared (vector (AI) imported using Overload).

Once I put the Camera view to DEFAULT - worked like a charm.