How to animate simple 3D models in After Effects?

[derekl1988]

How to make 3D models extrude? - YouTube

I posted that unlisted video to try and get my point across.  I have the basics of the animation part down.  I'm doing a fantasy football league and I want to do animations where the 3D logos sort of crash into each other in the middle.   I've gotten the 3D layer to open in after effects and I understand how to animate it, I just need the image to extrude out like the snapshot I added below.  It's just simple animation, is this something that I am capable of doing with photoshop and AE?  As you can see in the video I'm having issues making the image thicker on the Z axis.

[davidarbor · Accepted solution]

You can't extrude a PNG and scaling the Z dimension won't do what you think it will.

I see you've already switched to the Cinema 4D renderer, but you need to use Shape Layers in order to extrude. You can accomplish this by rebuilding the logo in Illustrator, bringing it into After Effects, converting it to Shape Layers, exploding those Shape Layers and reorganizing everything so it's easy to work with and not living in a single layer, and then extrude.

Here's some info to help you get started.

http://lesterbanks.com/2016/11/new-cinema-4d-renderer-ae/

Create 3D text and logos with CINEMA 4D Composition Renderer

Alternatively, you could bring this PNG into your included copy of Cinema 4D lite and texture a model with the image.