AE - Any way to retain text extrusion in pre-comp?

legrevedotcom

legrevedotcom

Veteran
Heya

I'm sitting with an AE project where I'm using a pre-comp of letters (1 frame each) as a source for Particular, so that the letters are sprayed upwards from the emitter while twisting and turning.
The letters get rendered fine, but the extrusion I put on them in their own composition is no being carried over to Particular, and so they look flat instead of having thickness.

Is what I'm trying to achieve even possible with AE alone? Is there some work around to do this?
Or can this only be done in a completely different way?

Cheers....
 
If I understand correctly, effectively, you want to emit in Particular 3D objects. To my knowledge, Particular cannot do this.

oF course, you can render your extrusion as a layer and use it in Particular as the particle source, but that wouldn't look good. To make it look good, you may want to use a 3D modeling software that have a particle system.

As far as AE is concerned, there is a plugin called Element 3D which is a particle system capable of emitting and working with 3D objects. It's big limitation is that it cannot emit millions of particles like Particular. Actually I don't know what's the limit, but regardless, working with many 3D objects will make your system crawl no matter what SW you are using. But E3D can nicely handle many thousands of objects including twisting, moving, and turning as well as realistically lighting them with all 3D features like shadows, ambient occlusion, etc, so it all depends on what exactly you want to do with letters.
 
Thanks guys.... Yeah, I was hoping particular would emit 3d but oh well and also hoping I wouldnt have to sit down and compose it in real 3d as the client really isnt paying for 3d :/
Its like a 1 second thing where the letters in hurray is being spewed upwards from a phone on a table.

Ill have a look at Maya and C4D today and see what I can come up with.

Cheers for the help!
 
After some fiddling around, C4D is coming pretty close to giving me what I want; point emitting 3D letters in a pyramid shape up towards camera out of the frame.

If anyone would ever need to do the same here's what I read myself to doing:

For single letters being emitted:
- Make a MoText for each letter. I ended up doing a couple of some of the letters for a better result.
- Child all those MoText under a cloner.
- Turn that Cloner into an object
- Child the Cloner under an emitter.
- Play around with "pyramid" and "cone" as well as the angle and size.
- Add lighting to suit your project.
- Export as png with alpha channel
- Import into your editing program.
- Profit.

it's not done yet... will do some fine tuning, but it's getting close.

test.jpg
 
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If you want to do this completely in AE, try rendering out each letter with the spinning and so on you want, as animation-with-alpha - you'll have a clip that has the 3D look. Then use that clip as your sprite - you'll probably need an instance of particular for each letter, but particular won't be spitting out many sprites per instance so it may not be a killer processor-wise. I'd try it that way anyway, I've done 3D objects just that way and they've looked good.
 
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