Newton's Cannon

DomePath is a tool to assist animation with the E&S Virtual Projector plugin for After Effects. (If you use one of the other fulldome plugins, keep reading because I would like to find out if this will be useful for those as well.)

The short description: Virtual Projector places images on the dome master based on polar coordinates. That’s the natural and obvious way to do it, but if you want to fly an image from, say, northwest to southeast, crossing the zenith, there’s no good way to do that. You can only fly in spirals around the zenith.

DomePath fixes this by converting the x-y coordinates of a null object to the polar coordinates that Virtual Projector expects. Animate your null object wherever you want and Virtual Projector will follow.

This is the product of many years of procrastination careful research and planning. I’ve used the basic technique for a long time, but it’s taken me a while to figure out how to package it for others to use. There are probably some kinks yet to work out, so I’d appreciate any feedback. It’s all free and open and always will be.

Read more and download here.