any way to wrap a 2D atlas around a 3D globe in After Effects???

Thanks j1cark and Rick. To give you all an idea of exactly what I'm aiming at: I should have started this thread by posting this link here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg9UYGqc5RA

Please view the clip at 1:00 where you'll see the animated globe map.

This is part 1 of the movie "Enemy at the Gates" (2001, Jude Law). Actually it's not the official version, looks more like a comic spoof. But just focus on the map. Not to slam the movie but whoever produced this film committed a huge mistake with this animated map showing Switzerland overrun by the Wehrmacht. Didn't anyone check their facts? Anyway, ever since I saw this animated globe map, I've wanted to achieve the same effect for my WWII doc.
 
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You can always try Zaxwerks 3D Invigrator or ProAnimator if you don't have time to learn Blender or Cinema 4D. These are true 3D plugins for AE. It's true those would yield better results but Blender can be challenging to learn at first. Cinema 4D has a very easy to use interface but when I had it, it crashed my computer a lot and customer support wasn't able to resolve my issue. I've seen tutorials on www.zaxwerks.com of motion graphics designers creating 3D objects in 3D Invigrator/ProAnimator that are almost night and day to 3D apps. Check it out.
 
The best way to do this is in a 3D program like others have mentioned.

However after looking at the linked clip, it seems like you could definitely fake it with CC sphere. The problem is to get good up close resolution out of CC sphere, your layer or comp needs to be huge. I just threw a vector world map image i had into AE and added CC sphere. After Effects imported the file as something like 7000x4000, so it was gigantic. By animating the radius property, you can essentially zoom in on your sphere. On mine, I got pretty close in before any really bad blurring started to occur. To get a proper level of zoom, you might even have to make your layer/comp bigger.

To work with such a giant map, you could break it down into layers. Duplicate the map layer multiple times on top of itself. Then mask out each layer to represent just the borders of what is seen during that section of the animation. That way, as the globe gets larger and zooms in, you can continually turn off the preceding layers as they exit the frame. That should help ease things up on your system.

Hopefully that makes sense to you.
 
mmka1985 said:
You can always try Zaxwerks 3D Invigrator or ProAnimator if you don't have time to learn Blender or Cinema 4D. These are true 3D plugins for AE. It's true those would yield better results but Blender can be challenging to learn at first. Cinema 4D has a very easy to use interface but when I had it, it crashed my computer a lot and customer support wasn't able to resolve my issue. I've seen tutorials on www.zaxwerks.com of motion graphics designers creating 3D objects in 3D Invigrator/ProAnimator that are almost night and day to 3D apps. Check it out.
Click to expand...

Zaxwerks is also a good option, but can be pricey.
 
handsome pete said:
Zaxwerks is also a good option, but can be pricey.
Click to expand...

True but it's a worthwhile investment. I had a project recently where I had to make a 3D basketball animation and CC Sphere only took me so far.. I watched some Zaxwerks tuts on their site and figure out how to make a sphere primitive and use a basketball texture for the layer map and it looked fantastic.
 
Nicholas Natteau said:
Thanks j1cark and Rick. To give you all an idea of exactly what I'm aiming at: I should have started this thread by posting this link here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg9UYGqc5RA

Please view the clip at 1:00 where you'll see the animated globe map.

This is part 1 of the movie "Enemy at the Gates" (2001, Jude Law). Actually it's not the official version, looks more like a comic spoof. But just focus on the map. Not to slam the movie but whoever produced this film committed a huge mistake with this animated map showing Switzerland overrun by the Wehrmacht. Didn't anyone check their facts? Anyway, ever since I saw this animated globe map, I've wanted to achieve the same effect for my WWII doc.
Click to expand...

I've not done too much with mapping animated sequences on to objects, but I have tried a 'cube', and a 'cloth' in Blender. The cube was a 'bouncing cube with each side 'textured' with a mov clip'. The cloth was basically a 'flat' mesh, and given 'cloth characteristics, so it was animated as it fell and drapped on to a 'table' like surface.

These were experiments, but one of these days... I use them for more ambitious projects...

In your example from "Enemy at the Gates"(2001) the effect looks to be 1) flat image, with an a animated 'amorphous shape of grey' masked off by the outline of Europe. 2) is then given a curvature, but only a portion of the sphere is shown, rather than the whole globe... and 3) angled for the resulting camera POV.

I've not used any AE 'spherizing' filters, so I don't know if it would work better for just a portion of a globe, or whether you really need sort of like the Universal Logo view of the globe for your project...

If a whole globe is needed, I think a 3-d modeling program is in order. If it is a piecewize 'sphere', the perhaps just enough curvature to give the impression of a 'globe' would do.

As a note, while I do agree that the 'cloud' does cover Switzerland, and touches parts of Spain, one could argue that the 3rd Reich did in fact 'impact' these states, whether they were 'neutral' or not... Then during most of the film, there are no 'generals', only Khrushchev... who as a historical person, was at Stalingrad, but was not in any way responsible for directing military operations... it is debated whether Stalin was going to have Khrushchev shot after a failed military operation that Khrushchev was involved, or sent him to Stalingrad, hoping zee Chermans would do the deed for Stalin... And of course... that winter was one of the coldest on record, and yet everyone's hopping around as if it were the middle of a russian spring... From what I recall, the noting of the snipers, was only a brief passage in a much larger book on the Battle of Stalingrad, so there was a whole lot of 'poetic license' going on to make a movie...

But I liked the film anyway...

For a different view of Stalingrad... "Stalingrad"(1993)...
 
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Hi j1clark, agree on all points. Actually I read somewhere that Hitler did have designs on German Switzerland..."Operation Tannenbaum", but that was to take place only after the Soviet Union and Britain had been vanquished. I'll try going with zaxwerks then or else I'll just try increasing my map's size 3 or 4 times as suggested. Thanks for your input.
 
handsome pete said:
The best way to do this is in a 3D program like others have mentioned.

However after looking at the linked clip, it seems like you could definitely fake it with CC sphere. The problem is to get good up close resolution out of CC sphere, your layer or comp needs to be huge. I just threw a vector world map image i had into AE and added CC sphere. After Effects imported the file as something like 7000x4000, so it was gigantic. By animating the radius property, you can essentially zoom in on your sphere. On mine, I got pretty close in before any really bad blurring started to occur. To get a proper level of zoom, you might even have to make your layer/comp bigger.



To work with such a giant map, you could break it down into layers. Duplicate the map layer multiple times on top of itself. Then mask out each layer to represent just the borders of what is seen during that section of the animation. That way, as the globe gets larger and zooms in, you can continually turn off the preceding layers as they exit the frame. That should help ease things up on your system.

Hopefully that makes sense to you.
Click to expand...

Hi Pete,

Why did AE import it as 7000x4000? Did you set that number? Or did AE itself make that calculation? Question relating to the map size:

My map was originally done in Illustrator at a size of 1917x959. (essentially 2:1 aspect ratio so nearly 16:9). In AE, should my master sequence stay at that resolution? Or because the map will ultimately get inserted into a Final Cut Pro 7 720P/59.94 timeline, should I already be changing the resolution to 1280x720?

What I don't understand is that after wrapping my 1917x959 map around CC Sphere, I have all this unused space around it. Can the background itself not be deleted? Because if to zoom in, I would need the map to be 4x bigger (7688x3836), then I'm going to wind up with an enormous frame size.
 
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