Embedding a movie via alpha channel

#1

Hello all

I’m an experienced Max user but new to After Effects.
I’m making a movie in max where theres a plane marked with an alpha channel, and I want to export the movie and import it into after effects so that I’ll be able to embed a movie file onto the plane in after effects…
(As if the plane is some moving television screen - I want some movie to play on it while it moves and so on)

Is this possible? Is this even the right program for the task?
I need this for a client pretty urgently so I’ll really appreciate any answer you could give me.

THANKS in advance!

#2

Just so I’m clear… you want to play back a movie on a plane object (as in the primitive, not an aeroplane)?

I assume you don’t just want to place a movie file in a texture and put it on the model?

#3

Yeah, I’d like to play a premade movie file on a plane (basic object, not the transport vehicle) object. I know how to do this using Max; You just use an animated texture. Thing is my client wants to be able to switch to a different animation in the future, and he doesn’t want to have to render the whole thing again.
So I thought about marking the plane with an alpha channel and embedding the movie over it using After Effects - In after effects I will then be able to change the movie from time to time and re-render, and hopefully it won’t take as long as it takes in max.
Maybe theres a simpler solution, I don’t know.

Anyways I’d love to get help on this - I’m not expecting anyone to write me a tutorial - It would be great if you could post the name of the tool or tools that I need to use in order to do this, so I could google them, or maybe a link to a tutorial that explains this.

Thanks :slight_smile:

#4

Already done - sort of: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/aftereffects/articles/3d_integration_pt1.html . Just doesn’t cover MAX, Maya or XSI, since I don’t have access to these programs anymore, but similar techniques should be usable there as well. It’s definitely possible by creating a UV gradient shader in Maya/ Mental Ray and I believe newer versions of Maya output the UV pass correctly natively as well. Since MAX also uses MR, it should be possible, too.

Mylenium

#5

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