isolate and export animation without background

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nomadum81
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Joined: Wed Nov 05, 2014 5:18 pm

isolate and export animation without background

Post by nomadum81 »

hello to everyone.

i'm pretty new on AS (9.5), and i'm just wondering if i can export an entire animation (avi or swf) of a object without background to use on Adobe after effect and Cinema 4d. I've found some old topics with description of isolation by million+ colours, which is obtained on the exporting settings (??) but probably i'm just really confused ...

Thank you
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Droxon
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Re: isolate and export animation without background

Post by Droxon »

Yes it is possible, and you don't have to set up anything really... all you have to do is export your animation in a format that supports transparency (like png or avi).
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Greenlaw
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Re: isolate and export animation without background

Post by Greenlaw »

What you want to do is set up Layer Comps. If you look in the Layers panel, the far right icon lets you define what will appear in your render. With this feature, you can essentially break out your entire scene to multiple layers. For example, you might want to set up Layer Comps for the background elements, characters, foreground elements and effects. When you render the Layer Comps, you will get the active layers for each Layer Comp with the background knocked out. (Assuming you are rendering to an image format that contains an alpha channel or transparent background like .png.)

When you set up a batch render (Batch Export), you can load your scene multiple times and then enable and select a different predefined Layer Comp for each copy of the scene. ASP will then render only the layers defined in each Layer Comp for each scene.

I find this feature very useful because I do all my compositing in another application.

Hope this helps.

G.
nomadum81
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Re: isolate and export animation without background

Post by nomadum81 »

Thank you Greenlaw for your response.

I tried to follow your instruction with the layer comp, but unfortunately it seems that can't be possible in my case, using an imported .Obj item (done on cinema 4d).
When i create a layer comp, i cannot incorporate any imported file, so when i try to render that animation on batch export, it proves without any object...
My target would use an AS animation of buildings made on Cinema 4d, and which it will finalize on After Effect. I try to find something on the manual, but i didn't find anything.

Maybe i wrong and it due by my little experience ..Hope i'm clear to explaining my trouble.... thank you
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Greenlaw
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Re: isolate and export animation without background

Post by Greenlaw »

This might help:

Image

Image

Image

As you can see, it doesn't matter that the layer contains an .obj. Layer Comps work with any type of layer.

Edit: Whoops...little mistake. In the description for the fourth image, I meant to say 'BG' of course.


You might also look into rendering in your native 3D program. I haven't tried this with ASP yet but technically you should be able to share camera data via FBX. I don't know how well it works in ASP but I typically use FBX to share camera data (animation and lensing) between various 3D animation and compositing packages. Just a thought.

Good luck! :)

G.
Last edited by Greenlaw on Sat Nov 08, 2014 9:27 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Greenlaw
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Re: isolate and export animation without background

Post by Greenlaw »

Just so I don't steer you the wrong way, I should add that it's not entirely necessary to use Comp Layers to render multiple passes for compositing. Obviously, you could simply create multiple scene files, one for each pass, each with the layer(s) you want to render in a given pass enabled. That should be fairly straightforward.

What Layer Comps gives you is the ability to define your passes within a single scene file. The usefulness of this method becomes more apparent when you want to break out a scene to several passes (ie., sky, distant environment, mid-ground, character 1, character 2, foreground, props, particles fx, etc.) Layer Comps saves you from creating all these special passes as separate scene files. Also, if you make any changes to the 'master' scene, using Layer Comps makes it unnecessary to revise all those additional scene files.

Hope this helps.

G.
Last edited by Greenlaw on Sat Nov 08, 2014 8:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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hayasidist
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Re: isolate and export animation without background

Post by hayasidist »

and just as a by the way, if you have a static background (or, indeed, fg) element you can save render time by exporting as a single image and using that in the compositor for however long the item is not animated ...

so, say you have that fixed bg in Greenlaw's example - that can be just ONE .png
or, say you have a parked car that's there for 10 secs before moving off, render ONE .png for those 10 secs of the scene then render the motion element which you bolt onto the end of that single image.

the choice of how long each "held" image will be is (for me) down to how heavy on processing that item -- IOW where you make the cut-off between just going for the whole lot as single frames or deciding to do just the motion elements as a sequence depends on the relative pain of sitting through a long render or spending time managing resources and setting up the compositor
nomadum81
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Re: isolate and export animation without background

Post by nomadum81 »

GreenLaw.

Really thanks, I got what I wanted!

N
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