I understood the infinite distance part, but once I saw that when turning on continuous rasterization put actual depth and parallax into the field I thought there was some sort of work around.

The reason I wont try a 3D program is because this is basically 2.5D. There’s no 3D models here, all 2D images in a 3D field and After Effects does a good part at handling that. Plus I’m too familiar with AE and it’s UI.

I really hope you look more into putting 3D elements into AE. It could use things like an infinite plane (ground), or to wrap any image around like a skydome and allow it to have parallax. You’re great at what you do.

Glad you like the script and Skydome is certainly a good partner for 3D Extruder. But Skydome is exactly that… a sky dome. Because the sky is infinitely far away, it doesn’t exhibit any parallax. So it’s perfect as a shorthand for things that are so distant that it doesn’t matter.

To see parallax between a mountain and the sky, you’d need to be very close up to the mountain or travelling very fast!

Basically though to have parallax, you need to have a finite distance. You could make 3D ‘cards’ for the mountains or you could import some 3D geometry via Photoshop 3D layers.
There are various ways of cheating it. If you use “cards” of course, you won’t have the sense of moving around the form of the mountain, whereas if you use Photoshop 3D meshes, you’ll be limited by the various difficulties with that technique.

It sounds like you actually want a 3D program!

I’d give it a go with the cards and see how it pans out.

I may be using the skydome for a little more than what it’s meant for, I’m trying to make a 3D environment, just what goes very far in the back, adding details like clouds and mountains.

I even managed to figure out a good way to make the clouds very slowly pan across while keeping everything else still.
So what’s my problem?

Parallax.

Adding the other stuff in the skydome and giving it depth is futile, as in the other composition where the skydome is in, it’ll all be a flat 2D layer. For this to work you’d have to turn on continuous rasterization, and then the depth from the images in the skydome composition will come into play. But, doing this will do heavy distortion damages, ruining everything. And I for some reason doubt making multiple skydomes instead would help or be a safe idea.

If it’s possible, how would I go about rasterizing the composition so i can have parallax with the mountains?

If not possible, do you think you could ever release a version that does so?

Sorry for my rambling.

There are many ways to unwrap a sphere, but if you’ve created your panorama in a 2:1 standard spherical mapping format, then yes. Why not download the script and give it a go?

Ben.

Q: Will I be able to use this with Skydome and travel around to different locations within that image?

Cheers
Phill

At the moment, Skydome is optimized at a certain size. A little bit of softening is inevitable because of CC Sphere’s anti-aliasing. Using a wider angle lens will tend to make the Skydome background appear sharper (like in real life). You can also manually make the Sky Dome Background composition bigger. This will help somewhat.

I’m going to add some control over this aspect in the interface in the next release.

Ben.

At the moment, you can’t change these in the script, but you can simply go into the Sky Dome Background composition and resize it. At present the Optics Compensation is calibrated for a certain size of background image, so the lens distortion might be a little off. But try this and see how it works for you.

I’m going to work the functionality you’re talking about, plus a couple of other features into the next version…. All a matter of time though!

Best,

Ben.

Ben.

Yes… there will be an update sometime. It’s just a question of time at the moment.

-Ben.