Blender to AE - your thoughts

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

Hi there! I’m doing some “market research”, as it were, so I’d like to get people’s thoughts about this.

Having been doing quite a bit of animating rigs in 2.5D in After Effects lately, I’ve become acutely aware of how much more terrible my animation is because of AE’s slow single-threaded playback. (Please, let’s not derail the thread with tips about how to speed up rendering. I know them all. Let’s move on…)

For a while now, I’ve mused about a Blender to AE pipeline that would allow me to do my puppet animation entirely in Blender, since Blender’s viewport playback is usually awesome. I know there’s an After Effects “exporter” for Blender. It’s all well and good. But I’m looking to do something more comprehensive:

  • Exporting of parent comp layers and character rig subcomp information (layers, parenting, null controls) from After Effects to Blender,
  • exporting of character rig subcomp layers animation data from Blender to After Effects, as well as
  • exporting animation data of the subcomp layer within its parent comp from Blender to After Effects.
  • Additionally, at some point, possibly even controls for sprites or time-remapped nested comps created for things like blinks, mouth shapes, etc.

Is this making sense yet? Are people interested in such a pipeline, or am I the only (crazy) one?

2

I’m totally interested in something like this.

3

Why not to do everything in Blender?
if u need after effects for some things, why not to export rendered layers from blender and work with those?

Not sure about what advantages such pipeline can bring regarding the complexity.

We used the AE exporter in production several times, and it did everything I could imagine I would need in such worflow allready.

But I guess you are talking about 2d character animation, possibly you get better compo/rendering results this way?

4

I am also using the same workflow as pildanovak mentioned. I do all my 2D character animation in blender and then export the png sequence which I then use in after effects.
I have created a fairly powerfull addon for 2D Cutout Animation in blender.

I do not see the benefit of exporting it to after effects either. I think the rig you can create in blender can be much more powerfull. But maybe I have not seen after effects full potential yet. Honestly, imho I find after effects very confusing if you need to create something more complex with its subcomp system. Not able to create group layers and such.

5

There are a few reasons for exporting the animation to / doing the rendering in After Effects. The most compelling is AE’s ability to import and use .ai files to their full potential. Vector graphics won’t suffer from aliasing if you zoom to close, which I’ve had to do in several projects. And simply making the graphics huge and treating them as raster images doesn’t really solve the speed issue…

The second reason is that sometimes you’ll need to share your AE files, and being able to have the character rig contained in the AE file for further tweaking by other people, if necessary, can be important.

@ndee, I may just need to check out your addon. I’ve seen it before but haven’t tried it yet; maybe I should.

6

There was once a script created and posted here in the forums. However, there are certain things need to match up the camera angles.

7

If you get really ambitious you could look into also exporting camera animation and blender geometry for the Videocopilot AE plugin Element3D. An addon that made that workflow quick and easy would be worth paying for to a few of us at least.