here's the walkthrough in HTML form with pictures:
(if this looks messy in your emailclient, just click on the link to read the thread online)
- Make a comp with your 3D
layer and a camera.
- Move the anchorpoint away in Z-depth. That's where the projector
will be.
- duplicate layer and camera
- precompose the duplicates
- in the precomp:
- set the layermode to "Add"
- give the scale of the 3D-layer this expression:
(index-1)*[3,3,3];
- give the opacity this expression:
value - (index-2)*(value/33);
- create 33 duplicates of the 3D layer.
thanks to the expressions, each copy gets 3 percent larger, and 3
percent more transparant, creating a sort of sliced beam effect.
- Go back to the main comp, and collapse geometries.
So now we want to smear that out a little bit so we don't see the
discrete steps.
We'll us a radial blur for that.
CC Radial blur is ideal, because you can set a negative amount: it will
blur towards the 'projector' and not towards and beyond the screen.
I don't have CC filters for AE CS3 (yet?), so I'll have to do it with
plain Radial Blur here:
- add a Radial Blur, set it it Zoom
- We want the center of the blur to be at the AnchorPoint, so use
this
expression:
thisComp.layer("screen").toComp(thisComp.layer("screen").transform.anchorPoint);
(I've changed the layer's name to screen)
- Adjust the Blur amount to taste.
You can go back to the precomp, select all layers, and lower the opacity if the rays are too bright.
An extra tip: keep the camera 'behind' the projector, if you move the camera forward, you'll notice the beams get a lot weaker, that's because your looking at the sides of those 33 copies, and they have no depth, so you see almost nothing, no matter how much you blur.
