CGTalk - RLA/RPF and AE or other post apps?

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brammelo

09-07-2003, 01:32 PM

Hi guys,

This question popped up when examining some of Pasto's movies on his site (www.pasto.tv). In a couple of this EuroSport trailers, sports movies are aranged in a cilindrical manner - for instance in the fourth one of the Sidney Olympics series.

I was wondering wether this "bending" effect of the sports movie was achieved in Cinema (applying a movie texture to cilindrical geometry and then rendering it out), or in post (using the AE-plugin or RLA/RPF), by sticking the movie layer to the geometry?

Reason for asking is that C4D can export RPF/RLA and seems to support UV-coordinates. But once opened in AE 5.5 (as footage), I have no 3D-info. So to summarize: can AE layers be bent by using data exported from C4D, of is this simply not possible and should this be rendered out in C4D? And: are there other compositing apps like Combustion or Shake that can bend layers using RPF/RLA info?

Thanks in advance and kind regards,
BaRa

P.S.: I know that with the AE-plugin you can easily place AE-layers in 3D, so that is not the issue - it's realy deforming the AE-layers in 3D that I'm interested in.

fxgogo

09-07-2003, 04:04 PM

Without a plugin, you can't bend layers in 3D. I don't know of any plugin that can, but I am not a plug-in type guy. Combustion does use the uv mapping channel of an RPF, and you can use it to map bitmaps or movie files to the same 3D space of the objects that have already been rendered. It is a great asset to have. So it will do that 'bending' of a bitmap you want. Not sure about Shake, but I would be surprised if it didn't.

brammelo

09-07-2003, 04:20 PM

Originally posted by fxgogo
Without a plugin, you can't bend layers in 3D. I don't know of any plugin that can, but I am not a plug-in type guy.

Thanks for the feedback, fxgogo. Is this still true for AE 6?

Cheers,
BaRa

fxgogo

09-07-2003, 05:18 PM

I don't know. I have only glanced at the new features, but I don't remember any extra support for RPF files. Pity really as AE is great otherwise. It just needs more tools for actually directly messing with the layers by hand, which hopefully the new paint tools will do. I have always said the Adobe should run their product line as modules, that join together under one roof as you install them on your machine. Just imagine being able to animate you illustrator files with the functionality illustrator gives, but in an After Effects environment. And you can choose the interface you want to work in.... sorry getting carried away their.

SeanL

09-07-2003, 06:56 PM

I probably would do something like that EuroSport piece in Cinema (as you say, projecting a movie onto cylinder geometry).

The reason being that I am more comfortable with Cinema and rendering something like that in C4D is actually surprisingly fast.

There's no question that it can be done in AE, but I wouldn't know how. You might try the AE forum at cgtalk -- there is a long list of tutorial sites at the top of the forum.

Let us know how you do it.

Sean:thumbsup:

brammelo

09-07-2003, 07:10 PM

Actually SeanL, there's no reason for me to figure it out - it would be enough if Pasto dropped in and explained how he did it. He is after all using C4D and AE, and he made the clip :)

pasto

09-09-2003, 01:10 PM

Hi Brammelo,

Don't know exactly what you want to understand, there is no special trick here.
I just did it in C4D XL6 some years ago, and I think it is just a simple cylinder, with a simple cylindric projection. the process in XL6 was very fast.

In french : C'est une simple projection cylindrique sur un cylindre découpé. J'ai peut être pas capté ce que tu cherches à savoir Brammelo.

pasto

brammelo

09-09-2003, 06:28 PM

Merci Pasto

C'est exactement ce que je voulais savoir - it was exactly what I wanted to know. I thought it was done in post in AE, but I didn't see how you could possibly have deformed AE layers in a cilindrical manner.

Ciao,
BaRa

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