POST 22: An After Effects Breakthrough of Sorts!

    For years now, I have been struggling with the idea of building round shapes in After Effects. I had built fairly realistic brick columns out of narrow stacks of single bricks, and even a sphere. But the problem was with smooth textures, which would show the angles.
    I was wondering this morning about building an animated Armillary Sphere in AE, and it occurred to me to stack this image of a basic painted wooden Armillary ring 12 times 1 pixel apart:

  It worked. I tried stacking just 7 rings 2 pixels apart, and it actually looked even better:

    I made the 7 layers a pre comp, duplicated it 5 times smaller and smaller, placed them at different angles, and animated them over 20s. This is just a test, so it doesn't look exactly like an Armillary Sphere, but it does prove my point:

    To test things further, I wondered about building a brass tube with two round caps like this:

and a stack or 320 five pixel wide rings cut out of them, plus a darker ring just before the cap to make the edge visible:

    It works, with the texture of the caps visible down the sides of the tube. Not quite realistic, but pretty good for AE!:

    And it moves smoothly in 3D space:

  

   I don't see why the same principle couldn't be used to make coins, cones, round sticks, barrel vaults, curved walls, or a tall cylindrical building with window and door openings.