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Hi there - searched around but couldn't find an answer to this question:

I have a project that I am using Octane within Cinema4D to render a sequence for use in a 360 video project. My camera is moving through my scene and I am going to be adding additional motion graphic elements on top of the rendered video in After Effects on the back end with (or without, maybe I can get by without it) Mettle's Skybox plugin. I would like to be able to add objects to my scene that include a compositing tag so that I can parent some of the motion graphic elements to the render in AE and have the camera's motion be 1:1 with the AE elements.

My problem is this: I can't quite seem to find a sane way to get 3D data from Cinema4D into AE the way you normally would (either by using an AEC file or the Cineware plugin). It's always being exported relative to the regular camera in C4D which doesn't see my scene as 360 since it sees a regular projection.

Has anyone else found a way to solve for this problem?

I'd be curious about this as well. I haven't had any luck finding a clean way to do it. One alternative is to actually render out your graphic elements and bring them onto planes in your 3d scene so that your C4D render contains everything. Not efficient but avoids any tracking/matching issues.

capacitycorp wrote:I'd be curious about this as well. I haven't had any luck finding a clean way to do it. One alternative is to actually render out your graphic elements and bring them onto planes in your 3d scene so that your C4D render contains everything. Not efficient but avoids any tracking/matching issues.

Glad I am not alone, I spent an entire afternoon googling about this without finding any similar information floating around. I've entertained your suggestions of rendering the motion elements as 2D elements, but obviously that would make revisions much more time-intensive. Moreover, as some of the motion assets I want to include feature some 2.5D animation (example, a UI split into layers and splayed out in Z-Space) trying to get that to translate back into 3D space would be quite difficult.

Def feel your pain! Not sure what type of UI you're doing, but Cinema has some decent spline animation/type tools as well, so another option is to just build a lot of your UI directly in Cinema which would be less back and forth. More complex layers could still be out of Ai or Ae. Setup might be longer but actually if you build some of your animations using procedural mograph animations, revisions might be easier than doing manually in Ae anyways. Good luck!

Yea camera exporting from Cinema to AE when its 360 doesnt translate like it usually does when your doing it the traditional flat 2D way. Like the camera understands the movement so I've been able to add like particles in particular and it reconizes the camera move but when your trying to place your objects in the exact 3D space in AE it never worked for me. One work around for now is you can track your footage using Mettle Skybox v2 I actually did a tutorial for them showing how https://vimeo.com/194395438
At the moment tracking is the only way I've been able to do it but more tools will be available as Adobe has become very serious about 360VR lately