Everything is Measured in Pixels!

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‌Everything is Measured in Pixels!

After Effects uses "pixels" as its unit within the 3-D environment, not inches or feet (ie it does not convert units at all). The default SynthEyes coordinate system setup keeps the world less than 100 units across. As AE interprets that as pixels, your 3-D scene can appear to be quite small in AE, as is the case in the tutorial on the web site, which is why we had to scale down the object we created and inserted in AE. It is much easier to adjust the coordinate system in SynthEyes first, so the 3-D world is bigger, for example by changing the coordinates of the second point used in coordinate system setup from 20,0,0 to be 1000,0,0, say. You can also use the Extra Scaling parameter of the exporter to produce larger scenes, especially if you are exporting to several different packages.

Warning: all 3D X coordinates in SynthEyes are divided by your shot’s pixel aspect ratio by the exporter as it sends them to After Effects. We point this out so that you aren’t surprised when you compare coordinates between SynthEyes and After Effects on non-square shots. That’s just what After Effects requires to work; we can’t even begin to explain why.

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