creating 3d moving patterns

[alexanderl68363281]

Hi I am trying to create a similar effect to this: Hexagons - 3D projection mapping experiment on wall with hexagonal tiles. - YouTube 

Would anyone know how I could potentially go around to making this sort of effects, I'm looking at using brickwork instead and create moving shapes out of the brickwork.

Thanks,

Alex

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

The easiest way to recreate that precise kind of effect would be to use a 3D app. C4D lite that comes with AE would be a bit clunky, but Blender is an open source free 3D app that is plenty capable of such a project. http://blender.org

If you want to do it all in AE then you can simplify the project a bit and use Card Dance. use a 3rd party plug-in. I would suggest Freeform or Freeform Pro from Mettle. There is also Zax Werks and Element 3D. The last, least efficient but cheapest option would be to change the rendering option for the Composition to C4D, extrude some shapes and then animate the Z position of a bunch of extruded 3D layers. The animation can be somewhat automated using a displacement map and an expression for each layer that ties the color value of a point to a Z position (advanced stuff here) but it will be very slow to work on a comp with  C4D Rendering turned on. Do not try and use Ray-traced rendering for this kind of a project. The technology has been deprecated and it never worked very well in the first place.

Any one of those techniques is going to require at least a couple of hours of study and experimentation. The least expensive and fastest all AE would be Card Dance (search your effects and presets panel) and it may be a little too simple (no easy way to extrude). The least expensive and probably easiest to use to create exactly what you showed in your example video would be to use Blender and do it in 3D.