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Preparing a Polycam Scan for After Effects
Hello, everyone. This is Evan Abrams for Polycam, and in this video, we're gonna cover how we can get an object from the real world through Polycam and into Adobe After Effects.
Capturing a Scan With Photo Mode
I'm using a scan of this owl candle holder created using photo capture mode. I've just been sure to capture enough angles and elevations in ample, even lighting. After the scan has been processed, I find the most versatile way of exporting geometry out for use in After Effects is the .obj object format. Once you download the archive, extract it to find the geometry here in the .obj file and the corresponding textures that will be wrapped around that geometry. You can also preview your .obj in a macOS file browser, as you can see here, and since it all looks normal and correct in here, let's get ready to move into After Effects.
Understanding OBJ Files in After Effects
However, natively inside of After Effects, while we can import the file and place it on the timeline of a composition, nothing is being rendered into the viewport. That is because until we look at the geometry through an effect or a system of some kind, the data that makes up the .obj doesn't have form yet. There are many effects, plug-ins, and methods that can render the geometry for us. Some of them are a little bit pricey and niche in their application, so we'll be covering a handful of those later.
Using Cinema 4D Lite With After Effects
The vanilla out-of-the-box method that comes with After Effects is actually to launch the free Light version of Cinema 4D that comes bundled with your After Effects install through Adobe Creative Cloud. To fire this up, we'll right-click in the project window or in the timeline space and select New, Maxon Cinema 4D File, or you can access that from the Layer menu above. This will ask you to first save and then launch Cinema 4D Light, and if you're using an older version of After Effects that does not include a Cinema 4D Light install, you may want to skip ahead to the other sections of this video that will cover the alternative methods for getting scans into After Effects.
Importing the OBJ File Into Cinema 4D Lite
But within Cinema 4D Light, to bring our scan into this space, we will first navigate up to File and then select Merge Project. From this dialog box, we can select the size we want that .obj to be. I'm going to increase the size to two hundred so we can work with this object a little bit more easily, see a bit more detail, but I'll leave everything else as default, especially the UVs. That will make sure that the textures appear mapped as we expect.
Fixing Missing Textures
Speaking of textures, we may need to point Cinema 4D to where the correct texture file is in relation to this new Cinema 4D Light file. If your object comes in totally dark like this, select the Material tag and then go to the Color tab of the Attributes panel, and then just make sure that the texture is referencing the file that was extracted from that archive that we downloaded. The app may ask you if you want to copy the texture to be in the same folder as the Cinema 4D file. That's a matter of preference. If you wanna do that, I would recommend keeping things nice and organized. But from here, we can hit Save and return to After Effects.
Setting Up the Scene in After Effects
So far, things look okay. There's still a bit more work to be done to make effective use of this scan here in After Effects. We'll want to create a camera in our composition by going Layer, New, Camera. This will let us observe the 3D file through an object that we can manipulate inside of the After Effects interface.
Using the Cineware Plugin
Then, in the Cinema 4D layer, we can access that Cineware plugin, come down to the Project Settings, and ask it to make use of the composition's camera. That will view our Cinema 4D scene through the camera we just created. Alternatively, you might select the Centered Comp Camera, which will nudge the assumed coordinate system so the Cinema 4D scene will appear in the middle center of our frame. Now we can use the camera tool to effectively navigate around the space.
Navigating the 3D Scene
Tap C to cycle through all the camera movement methods as we dolly, truck, pan, and orbit around. Another key setting to know about in here is the Renderer setting. This will affect the quality of the output in a very big way. Current will use the standard renderer out of Cinema 4D as defined in the render settings of that file. Current Draft will turn off intensive settings like anti-aliasing for a faster playback. Viewport Draft is best for previewing and working out motion, as it's the most stripped down of the options. And finally, Viewport will give you decent playback speed with a little bit more fidelity as compared to the Draft option. Generally, for final renders, you'll be using the Current setting, and for working out motion and composition, you'll be using the other less hardware-intensive options. After that, most of the options will relate to removing layers of detail and paring down to simpler forms for referencing when we're working out movement and composition.
Editing and Managing 3D Assets
However, in After Effects, we can't manipulate the asset directly. This is much more like having a window through which we can see what's happening in that Cinema 4D file in a live and dynamic way.
Editing the Original Cinema 4D File
We can always modify that file at any time by selecting the layer and pressing Command + E on a Mac or Control + E on the PC to edit the original, and we'll likely want to do that if we want to make interesting modifications or animations with our object.
Adjusting Project Duration and Frame Rate
A more utilitarian change you might need to make is to increase the duration of this file. Here in After Effects, you can see that this layer does not extend for a very long time. So inside of Cinema 4D, we can modify the project settings by pressing Control or Command + D or selecting Project Settings from the Edit menu. From here, we can change the values for frame rate and max time to make the project match with the composition it will be used in inside of After Effects. You'll also want to enter the render settings and change the frame rate there to match. Now, the Cinema 4D file will be more in line with your After Effects settings, as you can see up here in the Project panel.
Understanding Layer Order in After Effects
There's another critical thing to remember about how After Effects will treat 3D sources like this. While we can see it in 3D, we can move around a 3D camera to observe it, there is still a layer order to how things are going to be rendered. So if I create text in After Effects, make it 3D, it will respond to the camera, but it will still respect the layer order first. So you can see at this angle, while the text should be behind the little owl, the layer order forces it to be in front. This is a matter of how After Effects interacts with layer order priority. But with all of that known, from here, we can use our camera to zoom in, zoom out, place other elements around, and make use of it in this context.
Alternative Plugins for Polycam Scans
This is certainly not the only way to make use of .obj scans in After Effects. There are many effects and systems, and particularly particle systems, that make use of .obj inputs. Let's have a look at a few.
Using Element 3D
First up is Element 3D from Video Copilot. This plugin can render all kinds of geometry and materials as a particle. To start with, we'll apply the Element 3D effect to a solid, and then launch the scene setup. Then, inside the Element 3D UI, we'll import the OBJ and make sure the various channels we want to bring in are turned on. At first, we're gonna see not much, until we really start to scale up the model or click Normalize Size. That object just starts off too small. This is really common when importing scans into these kinds of plug-ins. But now that we have the geometry in the space, we hit Apply, and we can add a camera and enjoy looking at this element in the view port. Element is creating a particle that is the model, so in this plug-in, we could make many, many of the asset with the particle replicator. Perhaps we wanna make a whole grid of these little guys, move them, randomize them. The Element 3D system is a great alternative to work with 3D assets, especially if you want to make many of them.
Using Boris FX Title Studio
Next, let's have a look at Title Studio. This is part of Continuum by Boris FX. It's another great way to get textured OBJ files into the view port. By default, when you load up the UI, you can see some default text. Then we can click on the little track shape icon to choose a different shape and pick Imported Model. And here it is, textured and all. We just hit Apply, and we'll see that change in the view port. And you can see that this behaves very similarly to how the Cineware plug-in was operating in our original example. We can ask it to use the comp camera, use comp lights, use motion blur. But inside the UI is where we might apply different materials, we might apply deformers, we might mix in other geometry. Title Studio is very similar to Cinema 4D Lite or Element 3D, we need to open up this kind of sub-system so that we can manipulate our objects. Next up, let's look at some particle systems that all treat the scan similarly as a scaffolding to generate particles. There are quite a few third-party particle systems to choose from, so we'll just look at a few here.
Using Plexus Particle Systems
One of those is Plexus, a third-party persistent particle system that can load in .OBJ files as an emitter. To make this happen, we first apply the Plexus effect to a solid, and then add an OBJ object to the system. Then we need to place the .OBJ file as a layer into the composition and point the Plexus effect to that layer. Then we'll most likely really need to increase the size of that object, perhaps invert some of the various axes, to get the object to look as we expected. Different plug-ins have different assumptions about 3D space, size, and direction. But with the geometry being rendered, we can now manipulate it through the Plexus system like any other array of points, adding effectors, animating changes to the mesh, creating connected clouds of points. This is really good for futuristic UI visualizers, for example, since we can really quickly grab some scans of an actual prop on set, and then turn that into a nice-looking interface element.
Using Stardust for Particle Effects
In a similar vein, we have Stardust. Here we can load in the OBJ as an emitter by pointing to an external file. Initially, we have the same problem as before. The scan is being interpreted as very, very small. To make it workable, we should check on the Normalize Scale button. And from here, we can treat the particles just as we would with any other emitter, but with the precision of having them emit from vertices, edges, or faces of an object. This can be really great for kind of ethereal-type looks and behaviors to particles, 'cause they're coming off of this interesting mesh.
Final Thoughts
I hope this has been useful for you and you're now able to use your Polycam scans in Adobe After Effects. For more tutorials on how to get the most out of Polycam and integrate your scans with other apps, please check out our library at learn.poly.cam. For Polycam, I'm Evan Abrams. Thanks for watching, and happy scanning