Position Data to After Effects

[Elvis Deane]

Is there any way to export position data of something within CA to After Effects?  I have a character carrying a torch as they walk, and I want to link a few different layers in it to illuminate my background, but having a helluva time tracking the position in AE.  Was hoping there's a simple way to do this.

[alank99101739]

I vaguely remember someone using a colored dot that AE then could track... but no other data I know of - just the image

[k_oshiro]

I also think it would be useful to be able to pass Adobe Character Animator's location information to Adobe After Effects.
However, it seems that we can only hope for that in the future version.

Have you tried motion tracking in Adobe AfterEffects?
Can you track the torch to control the position of the light?
I think that is the simplest and easiest way at the moment.

Here is a reference tutorial.
https://youtu.be/tqWWhChc8RA
https://youtu.be/JUCoG7qwYNo
https://youtu.be/Vt0JuFNHi-U

[k_oshiro]

Here is a tutorial that may be more helpful

https://youtu.be/y1AYSpmWlxo

[Elvis Deane]

Thanks for the links.  I've actually done a fair bit of motion tracking in After Effects previously, with both the built in tracker and Mocha, and for whatever reason this footage just will not track.  First I think it was because my source from CA were 8K PNGs and Motion Tracking and Mocha wouldn't even start even though I'm on a pretty high end system.  Then I tried a Dynamic Link file, which had better results, but would slip off after a handful of frames in regular Motion Tracking.   Mocha had better results.

I guess the answer is lower resolution 🙂

[oksamurai]

Sadly there isn't an easy way to do this currently. I have done the colored dot trick a few times for motion tracking in AE. I would love if there was an option to make AE nulls out of any CH custom handles, but unfortunately we don't have that ability yet.

[Elvis Deane]

That's too bad.  If I remember the way it was handled in particleIllusion 20ish years ago, they just exported the X Y screen position coordinates of an object with a script and spit out a text file that said

1 (1846, 1066) 

for each frame. I guess there's no scripting in CH to do this sort of thing.