Transcripts
1. Intro: Hey guys do with backwards animation. And through my years within the animation industry, I've had my fair share of creating different kind of sets. You can have two D sets that are flat Judy sets that even mimic three D perspectives. Or you could do the real thing and actually create a three D set within after effects on Lee using after effects. And that's exactly what we're gonna do. I'm gonna show you step by step, how to create a three D environment using textures, lighting and camera moves so that by the end of it, you're gonna have a immersive three D set that looks beautiful. You can rotate a camera around and position it into any, any perspective that you'd like. So it's gonna be a really fun course, and I'm excited to share with you my process. So let's get into it
2. Design Pt 1: So Step one, we have to design a set. So we're gonna look through some inspirational photos. Hopefully, you're gonna pick something or have something in mind that you can build. And so I'm gonna show you how I design a set. This is the is the foundation of our three D environment. So it's not gonna have any lighting yet. Barely any camera moves, it's just gonna look pretty flat in basic. But this is the start, so it's a long process. So let's get into it. Using my original set design as a template for what I'm trying to recreate, I'm gonna walk you through my process on how I created this three D set. All in all, I'm extremely happy with how it turned out. I well, it's moving kind of slow. I think it's just so cool what you can do with aftereffects. And I really want to broaden your horizon on what is possible with the after effects. So I'm gonna show you a few different things. You can dio to create some pretty cool three D elements. So getting started, we're going to create a new composition. You can come down to this button here to create new composition. Or you can go composition, new composition. I'm gonna rename mind set to and my parameters because I'm dealing with standard aspect ratios I'm gonna do 1920 by 10. 80 and it will do a frame rate of 29.97 and I don't need 15 minutes. I probably barely even need 10 seconds, so I'm just gonna 10 seconds. All right, then hit. Okay. And we're now left with the blank slate. What we do? Well, what we have to do is we have to start envisioning what are set is gonna look like. So the first thing that I do because I find some inspiration. So I found these inspirational images to get a feel of the warmth that I was going for. This is the image that I landed on that had kind of the layout I liked, and the other ones were just kind of like the warmth of the feel that I was going for dramatic lighting, that warm mood. So using this is my template. I'm going to start creating things like brick walls, floors and some rafters on the ceiling because I've already spent time finding my textures and exploring what it's gonna look like. I'm not gonna waste your time by looking for that stuff. I'm just gonna use things that I've already found. Um, so here in my walls section, I'll bring in the back wall. So mines called Waltz you. So when we bring in wall to, it's a composition. So if I go inside my composition, I have all my design elements within that composition. The composition itself is set up the same way is our 1st 1 It's 1920 1919 20 by 10 80 29.97 seconds and the durations a little longer. But that's OK. So coming back into my set to which is the composition, I'm going to create all of my three D elements in. I'm gonna go ahead and check this box right here. This turns it into three D. The next thing I'm gonna do because I'm gonna push it backwards in Z space. So by grabbing the blue Arrow where it says z pull it, um, downward and it's gonna push it back in the space. Next, I'm gonna bring in my other wall. I'm gonna turn the three d on for this. I'm gonna hit W on the keyboard, and this is I'm gonna grab the why. And this is gonna allow me to rotate my composition. So if I start to rotate the why, you'll see it's turning. And if I hold shift, I can lock it in at a perfect 90 degrees. So that's what I'm gonna dio next. I'm gonna hit V on the keyboard, and I'm gonna move this over like so you can already see I pushed the wall to back too far and we'll be able to kind of realign things once we're done. But you want to make sure that things are close to touching as possible. So as I pulled this for what, you'll see that it it breaks the plane of the brick wall, the brown red brick wall. That means they're intersecting. So I'm gonna pull it back toward they don't cross paths. Which means that they're just about touching. Next, I'm gonna push this one all the way to the edge. So where the corners meet up, All right, some finally, Aiken, bring wall three, which is just a blank brick wall. Turn the three D on that all rotated in the opposite direction, and I can push it forward. We're not afford to the right. Okay, you can see a little. There's a little space happening right here. And Aiken, pull it forward to close that gap in. All right? Now that we're working in three D, I'm also gonna go over. I'm gonna go over a little bit on how I get this effect, cause it already looks like it has lighting in it, but there's no lighting whatsoever. The way that I achieved this lighting is that when light bounces off of a wall, it typically bounces past the corners. So in order to give it that, um, more depth to your scene, I added a few things. I'll go to a different wall, let me do this one. So this is the brick wall that we start with in order to give it, um, some more depth to it. I added a little little trim on the border, so it's a border trim on the floor. You would find that in most interior spaces, like a home, or are in this case, a cafe or a bakery. Next thing that I added was this this radial Grady int on top. And so this just gives you that nice faded look to the corners of your walls. So it's simply just a radio grade int which has one side of the opacity turned off, which is the center. And then the far side of the capacities turned to 70. Um, I don't I don't need three in there. It could just be too like that. Um, hit, OK? And you can see how it it functions. So this is the center of my Grady int, and then I just pulled it to the edge, and we're good. And the cool thing about this is now that Aiken, copy this by during control, See? And I can pace this onto other areas of the, uh I can paste it on the other compositions so would be controlled. V and I could get the same effect throughout to keep the consistency. Okay, so now that I've got my wall set up, I'm gonna go and pull the floor in. We'll turn the floor to three d, and I will rotate it 90 degrees that way. Hit V on the keyboard and I'm gonna pull it down in in this location. Okay? It's looking good now. The ground planes a little different. So I couldn't do a 1920 by 10 80 ground plane or floor. Because if you look at all three walls, they're all 1920 Bag 10. 80. So I need to extend the floor. And the way that I did that, Is it a square? So it's in 1920 by 1920 aspect reissue. So that's the size that you need next. What I did was I created just some basic shapes, not basic shapes, triangles, and I unless you're how many there are. There's, like 48 12 16 So 16 16 rectangles and then I used was called the Repeater. So if you select your contents, go ad you select repeater. And what repeater does is it takes the image that you have or the shape players that you have. It allows you to re create that image over and over again so that you don't have to duplicate hundreds of versions of this tile. So you you adjust things like one. The number of copies I have 15. I don't think I need 15 and ProLogis need I know maybe five, maybe even four. Yeah, for sure. Uh, and then you can adjust the position. So adjusting the position, you can see it pushes the copies either away from each other or towards each other. And so I was just using the spacing that I had between my originals to get the spacing between the copies. Once you have one repeat er done and it's going in the exposition, you could duplicate that repeater and switch it around. So we'll do. Five clips. Five copies. I don't need more. How do you need 10? Believe it. A 10. All right, So next I changed the position on the why access. So now goes down into this basing that I need any farther and it gets too wide. Um, and so that is how you set that up. So that's just a simple way of tiling or repeating certain things. So I went into a very long explanation, but here is also another tip. I added that same effect to the edges of this. All right, so now we're starting to get somewhere. It's looking pretty good, but now I have a stealing to drop in. My ceiling is just a very basic shape. It's also 1920 by 1920 to keep in that square ratio, and then I'm just gonna move it up.
3. Design Pt 2: So now that I have four walls or three walls and a ceiling and floor, we're going to create a camera so we can look around and this this three d dimension. So come up here to layer new, and we're gonna create a new camera. I'm not gonna go into detail just yet. On what? The camera, Um, focal lengths do, but just do 35 millimeter for now, and when you create, it is going to throw it off just a little bit. So your camera, if you turn it off, it goes back to your basic, your neutral built in camera that you can see. But we turned it on. It gives you a little bit of a different focal length. So if you hit C on your keyboard, it's going to give you a whole bunch of different things that you can use if you click until you see a dot with a circle, a circling harrow around it. That's your rotation. So click anywhere on your composition and you can rotate. You're seeing maybe go down to like third so you can move it a little bit better. But you can see we're starting to get some cool stuff. And if you hit, see again and find, um, the ball with two arrows up and down, you can zoom in or zoom out. So just play around with these different ways that you can manipulate the camera just by hitting. See, on the keyboard, you have one that can move the whole camera you can rotate, which is cool. And so now we're starting to use the camera a little bit. And if you ever want to go back to your neutral pose, all you have to do is turn your camera off and there you go. So we're going to use the camera to start adding some of the cool three D elements into our set. So now that all my walls air done, I'm gonna move into things like the design elements. So I have wooden beams that go across the top of of the ceiling. So I'm gonna drop in a wooden beam, hit the three D that I'm gonna move this into position. It goes right up here at the top to the ceiling. I don't move it back towards the wall, going into the wooden beam. Let's look at what I have. This is actually a very large wooden texture, but I only needed a small portion for the that wouldn't being. So. If you come into my composition settings, you can see the witness. 1920. Um, most everything that you're creating is gonna be 1920. My height is only 80 though, and then to give it a little bit more depth to it, I added this nice shading from where the top of the ceiling will be down to the exposed edge of the beam. That just gives it a much nicer shadow. So you're not depending so much upon your lighting to give you shadows, but you're actually creating the shadows yourself. Um, because the lighting that we're gonna create is not perfect. It doesn't really, really great job, but it doesn't take you all the way. So little tricks here and there to really make your seen pop are going to go a long way. Okay, so next I'm going to duplicate these wooden beams. I have another one, which is the same wooden beam. But I moved the texture around to give more, um, variety variety to my seen. So I'm gonna move this back. Maybe. Like so. And I'm gonna duplicate the other wooden beam and pull that one forward. Everyone will duplicate this one. Pull it forward. All right, so now we're starting to get some cool stuff happening in here. Oh, and I should mention you can see that I'm using rial textures. Um, if you want to recreate your textures in here to give it more of a cartoony look, you can do that. I might even go back and do that at some point, But just for time sake, I just grab some images from Google or being, And I dropped him in just to get an idea of what's actually happening. Is this gonna work? You know? So I'm using these cool textures. So next. What do we have? We have some lights now the lights are kind of tricky. The lights, they don't actually, um, they will actually have three d inside of them. You can see is around it. And maybe you're thinking, Oh, cool. It's like a cone shape. Well, unfortunately, no, it's not. Um, let me just move these into place. Then I'll show you what's happening. We'll pull this down, pull it out from the center. We'll do. Okay, pull this one over. We're gonna do four lights, and I want to make sure that there kind of position pretty equally within the space, just like so and just like so. All right, so that's looking pretty good. So I'll turn my camera back on. So these lights work really well, a distance and relatively close up. You know, they probably do their best work, like right around here. The reason that they're not actually three D is because you come inside. You can see that I designed it as a flat image just like this. Knowing that most of my camera work was going to be shot from a low angle, I decided to do this shape and design it with a three d perspective. From the start. From the get go, I knew you're not able to create these kind of shapes within after effects. Unfortunately, aftereffects just isn't designed to be creating these kind of things. You can get by with really basic three D objects. But when you get into actually trying to create complex shapes, it just doesn't work. So I just create a very simple going with any lips? Um, you can see it. It all just moves around like so. So I squashed these circles into these ellipses to give the effect of a perspective. So with that in mind, just be very careful and weary of the camera angles that you do use if you choose to use a lighting source like this. All right. Next, I'm gonna start adding some really cool stuff. I'm gonna have a plant. I'm gonna use the plan later. Actually, I'll do it now because I don't want forget about it. So the plant is very simple. Let me move into place. I created these plants to be kind of like rear be things. The objects that were placed in the back, maybe a little bit in a dark corner so that they weren't noticed. Very well. I'll rotate it out just a little bit and then I'll do another plant here. Turned three d on. We'll drop it down and I'll push you back and I'll rotate it this way. Okay, so now my plants are are in position. Let me show you how I created the plant. So the plant is just a Judy plant. Okay, there's no depth to it. But when you get into the three D, when you get into building out your three D sets, this is still going to cast shadows just like a three D plant or object would. So it does a pretty good job of giving that sense of depth when you have lighting on it, and it's projecting a shadow. Um, the composition settings for this one are a width of 300 pixels by 600 pixels, so it's not very big, and you can do a composition size however large you want. But I like to keep my compositions relatively set around the size of the object they are.
4. Design Pt 3: So now we're starting to get a set that's coming together. But let's add some stuff like furniture. I'm going to start off with my countertop, gonna drop it in turn on three D And this is where it's going to get a little tricky and maybe a little complicated to stick with me. So right now I turn my three d on for the composition. If I rotate, it looks flat, doesn't it? It's not quite what you want for a fully three D set, but if I come here to this rest continual raster ization button and click it, uh, something happens. Okay, so now we're starting to get a three d object. Unfortunately, no, it doesn't just extrude your objects for you. You actually have to create your own three d object. So let me go inside the composition and show you what I have done. First, I'm gonna place this into position. Um, while I'm doing this, I'm going to talk about the strokes. I wanted there to be strokes around things. So this black line around the object, the plants and this countertop I wanted the stroke to be there because I'm Onley mimicking three D I'm not trying to create a fully believable three D set. Okay, so it it brings that level of cartoony, um, non realistic to a rather, uh, nicely lit realistic set. So it kind of melts the two worlds together. And so that's the look that I was trying to achieve is something that I'm not trying to pass off as hyper realistic. But I'm trying to pass off as a hyper realized set that a character with line stroke could be inhabiting. And so that's why I created the line stroke. Next, I'm gonna go inside and show you what's going on here. All right, So looking at it from the front, it looks and normal, but it is going to be a little complicated. So let me talk about some things here. Let's talk about just the countertop for now. So I'm gonna go into four views. So these are my four views. I have a top view up here. I have a What is this active camera view? Front view in the right of you. I think I might just need to build it out to show you how I did it. All right, so let's do this. Let's say that this is my countertop. Do a stroke up to and we'll do a solid Phil that is blue. So they in order to get this countertop to be three d, you need to turn it on as three d. Before I do that, I'm going to design on a separate layer. But I can turn the three d on, but I'm going to design on a separate layer the front, the front of my countertop and on another layer ill designed these side of my countertop. And these air functioning just like a cardboard box would function. Okay, so we're creating the flaps that we're gonna fold around. So I'm gonna turn three D on for these two guys and I'm gonna rename, So this will be my counter top. This will be my front, And this will be my side. So now with my my side selected, I'm gonna hit. Why on the keyboard gonna lower down my anchor point and then I'm gonna put it right here on the edge. Then I'm gonna do the same thing to the front hit. Why? On the keyboard? Lower your anchor point right here on the edge where the two meet. Next. I'm going to select both of them, and I'm gonna parent them to the countertop. And I'm going to move my anchor point to the center of my countertop. All right, so now, with that set up, I'm gonna rotate my countertop 90 degrees, you know, moving into position, and then I can start to rotate, rotate the front down 90 and I'll rotate the side down 90 degrees. And if it doesn't line up, Um, hopefully you got pretty close. But if it doesn't, you could just scale it upward until they meet. All right? And so now that that set up, what we can do is we're going to duplicate the side control D, and I'm gonna grab this the space and move it over to the other side of the counter top, and I'll do the same thing with the front. And this is where your multiple views come in. So if you click on this and go for views, you can see Here, let me turn this off. You can see here that my front portion needs now come to the back and there you go. And if things aren't lined up perfectly. Like, if it's like this outside of it, you're going to start to see cracks within your three D objects that you've designed. So try to keep it as close as possible, and you will be doing yourself a big favor. All right, so that's how we create these three D objects. And essentially, this is what I do for everything that I'm gonna make and I'll show you how it how it looks . So I can I guess I could have created a a camera anyway. So now we have this countertop, and that's that's basically how it works. Hopefully, it's not too confusing, and hopefully you can understand it. Next, I have this character base. The base is a small composition kind of set up around the size of this artwork that I have . And again, I've created Cem some design elements to mimic the lighting of the three D effect. Okay, so if we come back into the countertop, you can see let me just create a camera so we can look at this layer. New camera click. OK, so you can see it. I have a countertop base, which is the front that I have one on the side. So the way that I got the one on the side was I duplicated the front plain, rotated it and moved it forward. Once I had a move forward, I lined up the corners and then I simply came up to the square, which is your rectangle tool, and I created a mask. So you see, I'm asked out. Masked out toward the back of the counter is if I keep going, it extends it. Or if I do it further, it makes it shorter. So that's how I created the sides. Turn off my camera. Next we have the showcase. Now the show's case is a little more complex, and again you can see I have my rast arised layer turned on. So that is not a flat three D object, but it's actually extruded. So if I come inside of this one, I'll do one view and I'm gonna create a camera so we can waken Look, um, so if I created camera, you can see that I have designed a lot of stuff in three D in here. So, using the countertop method, I created this case. There's not a lot of special things happening to make this case. Look how it is. I basically just created square shapes and then rotated them to be the angles of of the cutouts. In my case, Um, instead of doing like instead of changing the opacity of this shape layer, which would have changed the capacity of the stroke, I changed just the A passage e of the glass within my shape layer so you can see my capacity. I turned down to 20. And so that's how I got that glass effect and then everything else, which is the um, which is like the muffins in the the cinnamon rolls and all these baked goods. They're just two D layers that I turn three D on. So, essentially, it's just something that I designed using the pen tool. Um, you know, make it a simpler is complexes you want. It's flat. There's nothing three dimensional about it. But I turned on the three D and pushed it back and Z space to give that depth. So that's why I created this showcase. And then I imported that showcase into my countertop composition. Turn the rast arised on turn the three D on And then I just moved this around until it fit exactly where I wanted it. Just like so. And the reason I did that is so that when I come into my set to I only have one layer countertop.
5. Design Pt 4: I'm trying to minimize the amount of layers within my set composition, so it makes it easy to manage all my files. So with that in mind, I duplicated this countertop and made it to a countertop, too. And then within this one, I adjusted the sizing of it so that it it looks like the original, but it's a little bit shorter. So I'm gonna pull this one in turning these guys on and put it into position. So working in three D with after effects is pretty straightforward. Um, you know, they thankfully, it's not super complicated. As far as you know, designing three D objects, this is a relatively simple way of doing three D. And because they limit you, you don't have to worry about the headache of certain things that you do when you're designing in a three d package. They give you very basic tools, which I guess makes it easier on you. All right, then, finally, we have some furniture, so we have chairs and a table top. So I'm gonna import my chair first. Turn three d on and my rast arise. And so just like the countertop I designed these these three D objects. So we have aside which is using just the pencil, like still, you know, I I drew it out. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then I moved it in three D space. And once I got one side done, all I had to do was duplicated and then move it over. Okay, so that's how that works. Next. I created the seat. I did the seat the exact same way that I did the countertop. Um, so it's basically just a countertop with legs, and then there's a backing to it. Okay, so the chair is very simple. And make sure all your three D layers it turned on coming back to set. All right, let's turn in three d on that. I'm gonna move this guy around. I'll drop it, Teoh the floor, and you can see I made the chair too small. If you've created an object and you find out is to small, hopefully you can get away with just scaling it, and hopefully that works. If it doesn't, you might need to go back inside your composition and, uh, recreate it. But that looks pretty good for me. No, what? I'm gonna do is I'm gonna duplicate that chair. It w I'm gonna rotate it 180 degrees. Then I'm gonna pull it forward away from the other chair. Okay? Pull it out. Next. I'm gonna grab this tabletop. I'm gonna put it right there and turn everything on. I'm gonna lower the tabletop to hit the ground. Okay? I can see I wanted to be a little bigger, so scale it up. I'll move it a little higher. That looks pretty good. I'll move the tabletop in between the chairs. It looks like Pull it out just a little bit. All right. Next, I'm gonna attach the chairs to the tabletop. And this way I can now rotate the table and the chairs to give a better perspective on what's happening. So this chair looks pretty good. Words at this chair is definitely not in the right spot. All right, that'll work. Now, if you're looking at the table, you can see that it breaks through the air like the three d breaks right here. It doesn't look good. Uh, like I said, we're just mimicking three d. Okay, So most these shots aren't gonna be, like, full on trying to see the table. If they are, you're gonna need Teoh. You're gonna need to fix that. Let's make sure we're pretty close to the ground. There we go. And then I'm going to you rotate this back to 90 or you know, whatever. I'm gonna move this over to the corner. Now, I'm gonna set these up to kind of be like they're in a cafe or a bakery. So trough this camera, move this a little closer, the wall, I'm gonna select them all duplicate, and then I'll move this table across the way. Let me turn that camera back on. Zoom in a little bit. All right. So this big blank spot in the wall, this is where my door is gonna be. And these white spots are where my windows air gonna be. So let me make sure I move this out of the way of the door, put it in front of the window. Don't move it off a little bit or take this. All right? Now that we have that up, I'm gonna do one more table in share combo and this one I'm gonna move to the center. I'm gonna rotate it a little bit, Just like so. All right, so now we got a pretty cool set up, but now we have to create some windows for our like to come through. So how are we gonna do that? So let's rotate over to our windows, zoom in a little bit. All right? This is OK. There we go. So now that I have my window selected, let me go back into this wall and show you how I did it. So basically, I just put these white shapes where one of my windows to go. So, using these as my reference for my template, I'm going to select the wall that has the window outlets, Select your rake rectangle tool, and within the frame of this white spot, we'll go ahead and will expand it out. Now, these air going to add And we wanted to subtract. Okay. Hey, And there you go. That worked out pretty good, actually. Uh, next what? Weaken dio? Because Because my windows are the same size. I'm pretty sure the same size. I'm going to select that mask and duplicated so hit V on the keyboard. Once you've duplicated it and it selected and just move it over by holding shift. I'm sorry. Ignore that. Ignore that advice. We're gonna do it again. So select your rectangle tool and we're going to mask out our window. We're gonna have to change it to a subtract. And now we have two windows. Right now, they have the checkered background looking out into your grid. But don't change that, Okay? I'm just gonna turn this camera off so I can see what I'm doing. And finally, the very last thing that I have to do is I have a door. Where's my door? There it is. Okay, so let me bring my door down. I'm gonna turn on three D And I don't need to check the Rast arise button because there's nothing in there. That's three D. It's all just Judy. So I'm gonna hit w on the keyboard, and I'm gonna rotate it 90 degrees towards flat to me, and I'm gonna move it over towards the wall groups. Uh, and then I'm probably gonna need my camera for this will turn my camera back on, and I'm gonna rotate to where the front door goes. His cameras kind of tight. So whenever we get into the camera portion of this will be able to get maybe a little bit better camera for this tiny, tiny position or tiny location that we're working with. But for now, this will work. So let me push this in to where we have contact with the wall. There we go. So I just passed through it, So I'm gonna pull forward towards just in front of the wall. All right, there we go. I'll move it down to my ground plane. So we have some intersection, and then I'll move it into position right in between these windows. All right? Finally, we now need to cut out the wall for the door. So we'll do the rectangle tool again, and we'll just do the window because I don't plan on opening the door at this point so we'll just do the window. There we go. So now our set is done. We have completed our set, and it looks pretty cool. Uh, not quite. It's looking good, but now we have to add that lighting element that lighting is gonna make it go from a nok three D set to a Whoa, That looks pretty sweet. Three D set. So, um, let's move on to the next section.
6. Camera Options: So hopefully by now your three D sets looking pretty good. Um, you got four walls or three walls, ceiling floor and some cool stuff in between. But now we're going to set up our camera. I'm gonna walk you through the different kind of cameras that I use and how they all work. Um, at least to the best of my ability. So let's get into it. So now that we have our design set up, we're gonna choose a camera that bets best suits our location. I'm gonna talk a little bit about how the cameras work. Um, and we'll find the one that fits best for you. So I'm gonna delete this camera. So in order created camera, you can right click go new camera, or you can go layer layer new camera. So, looking at this camera, I To be honest, I don't have extensive knowledge on the camera settings or how they work. All I know is if you click this, the smaller your millimeter dimensions are, the longer your lens is gonna be. And the bigger it is, the shorter your lens is gonna be. So let me just show you what I mean. by that. So if I click 15 hit. Okay, you're gonna see that I can get some pretty pretty long views out of this thing. Right? So that looks pretty cool, doesn't it? We're starting to get this kind of cool, elongated effect. Um, because my set is relatively small. That might be a good care my choice for me, But I don't know if I want one this small. It definitely makes the room feel bigger, though. If you select a camera and you're maybe you've animated it or you've set up something to it that you really like and you don't want to delete it. All you do is select your camera, come up here to layer and go camera settings, and then we can adjust the millimeter size now fig up to 200. You can see what's happening here. It's like, really flat. Let me. I think my, uh I'm gonna turn this depth of field off for a second, So let's see how far out we consume and see what's happening. Yeah, it's really interesting. Definitely not what I want to dio, because it makes it feel like a very small sad, doesn't it? Alright, this might be good for for, like, a landscape or something of that nature. I honestly have no idea. So I'm going to go for something, probably towards the smaller end, just because my status or small so ago layer camera settings. And I'll do, I'll do 24 millimeters. Actually, I'm gonna so I don't have to zoom in all the time. I'm just gonna create a new one. New camera 24. Another thing to note. I'm gonna turn on my depth of field. And what your depth of field does is it creates a focal point that your camera looks at and it says this is the point of which total focus is gonna be everything else is kind of gonna fade off. Okay, so if I pick an object like, well, you know me, zoom out means him out a bit. So if I pick an object like the back wall, which is wall to so if I go waltz you and then I come up whole control and click my camera when I right click, what I can do is I'll get a camera and I can either set the focus to that distance. Uh, which is kind of like a one time shot. Or I can link the focus to that distance, which means that no matter where I put my camera, it's always going to stay focused on that. And if I come into my camera options and I push this way up, you can see things are starting to blur out. This gives that more kind of like miniature set feel. I guess you could say or more of that artsy feel where there's a very close focal point. This is a really cool thing, Do you? It's not always gonna work. And it's not always gonna be something that you want to do, typically with long shots like this one, where it's across the room. You don't have so much of extreme aperture. Um, but if you get closer to a subject like you're doing just somebody's face, then you and have a really tight focal distance or focal point with a very high aperture, that's usually how that works. Uh, so that is about the extent of my knowledge. I'll get into more about animating cameras later on, but this is just picking camera for your set and for your camera shot. Another thing to note, as you can do placate cameras and you can change them around. So now I'm on camera to you. I can move it over here and say that this is now my shot, okay? And so I'm creating different cameras, and if I turn it off, it goes back to Camera one. And if I duplicate that camera, let's say I do this. So what's happening is we're just creating different cameras, and it only acknowledges the camera on top that's turned on. So if I turn off camera three, it now goes to camera two. And if I turn off camera to you and now goes to Camera one, this is a way of setting up different cameras without having to adjust any attributes, Um, and key frame anything. So you would simply just, you know, do you like this for your different cameras? All right, So as this timeline goes, you'll see that we have cameras that switch when they're turned on Dio. All right, so that's the extent of my camera knowledge. But now what we're gonna jump into is the lighting. So let's talk about lighting and see how we can really make this set come alive.
7. Lighting: So now we're gonna talk about lighting. Lighting is what sets the mood for your for your scene without lighting. You have a pretty boring Transkei. So now we're gonna talk about lighting. Lighting is what sets the mood for your scene. Could be dark or warm. Um, without it, you're Sean's gonna be very boring. So I'm gonna talk to you about how I set up my lights to create that warm, um, kind of sunset or golden hour glow. And, um yeah, so lighting is the fun part, So let's get into it in order to get lights. What we're gonna be doing is we're gonna go layer new lips later, new, and we're gonna select light. The kind of light that were gonna get or the kind of light we're going to start with is gonna be a parallel light. Our intensity We could probably go like 1 50 Let's see on make sure cash shadows is selected and shadow darkness is 100 hit, okay? And it's going to do some weird stuff. All right, so now what we can dio is we're gonna move all this around to really get the effect that we want cash. Shadows is on something that I didn't I didn't talk about her. Explain. Um, because we're working, working in three D objects, it creates its own material options. So you want to make sure that everything that cast a shadow is casting a shadow? So this wall, I don't think needs to cast a shadow. Um, but make sure that it can accept shadows and that it accepts lights. All right, and then we'll go. Teoh, The reason we're not getting any lighting in here is because wall to now, why do we have to walls while one what we need to dio. We need to come into our material options, and we need cash shadows turned on. And now you're going to see it's starting to cast those shadows. Next, what we're gonna dio has come to the ceiling. We want our ceiling to cast a shadow as well. Um, and these beams, we want to make sure they cast shadows as well. And another way that we can do this so we don't have to keep going back and forth is just select material options control, see, And then on everything you want to cast a shadow just control V. Okay. And anything that has this rast arise ation check Mark this little star if you go inside as long as as long as that option has been checked on the inside here. So it's casting shadows. It doesn't need to say it here. And in fact, it even turns off any geometry options for that layer. So it's reading on Lee. What you've set up on the inside here, so make sure it's turned on within that composition, and then we'll come here and we'll make sure that that door cast a shadow, too. All right, Is there anything else that we need to cast a shadow? I don't think so. So this lighting is looking pretty good. I I want this. I want this to stretch a little bit more, so we'll come in to the transform options, and we're going to adjust the point of interest. Just play around with this section until the lighting that you want is casting a shadow in the way that you desire. All right, that's looking pretty good. Next, what I'm going to do, right? Click New light. I'm gonna create an ambient light. You're ambient light. Could be maybe 20% click, OK, and it's gonna lighten the entire scene. So now we're able to see everything. Next. What we want to do is we're gonna create a few spotlights for where these, um, these lights might be hitting. So right, click new. We're gonna go light, and we'll do spot the intensity of these. Could be, I don't know, maybe 40. Make sure cast shadows is on, and what we'll do is we'll pick this up to the ceiling. I'm gonna turn on my four views. I'm gonna move this over the over the lights. Which are these four lines here? Okay. Just like so I'm gonna make sure that it's it's raised high enough. Okay, So if this is my ceiling up here, you want to make sure that it goes up to the ceiling, that I'm gonna pull the light direction down, it will make sure that it's going kind of in towards in towards my set. Maybe not quite that far in. We'll go, like right there. All right, now, I'll do one view, and we'll just some of the settings for the spotlight. Strength is down 1/2 cohen angle. Let's turn it up. I want to see it on that wall. So the fact that I can't see it yet is kind of alarming. Let's see what's happening here. So what's going on to make it not show up on that wall? So I don't need it that intense? I don't need the cone angle that intense. Let's try my transform so we'll pull this down, pull it Maybe out. I don't know. Let's go back to four views. Let's see what we're doing here. That's right. This is the front view and this is the top U. There we go. We're getting a light over here now, I think, because it's it's breaking through the ceiling, that's why. So you want to make sure it's not going through the ceiling? All right, so pull it back. They're into the corner. And don't let it go through the ceiling. There we go. All right, so now go. Well, while I got it looks, let's move this inward to hit right there in the back. All right, All that looks pretty good. So go back to one of you. Let's turn the intensity down to 40. Don't want it too intense and change the cone angle inward a little bit. Let's look at the cone feather. We want it to be feathered a little bit. I didn't have that come up the wall a little bit more. Feather it to, like 30 All right. And once that lights looking pretty good, you can duplicate it. I move it to the other side. Let's see how this is. Look and turn the intensity on this one up a little bit. Oops, Wrong. What? All right. We'll go to, like, 65 or something like that. See how it does? All right, that's not too bad. Okay, so let's look at our original set to see some other things. So what? What's going on here with lighting? It looks like I have another light up here, so I have an ambient of parallel and then my two spotlights. Then I have another spotlight, which is shining on that wall to kind of fill in the rest. So this has an intensity of, Ah, 100 cone angle of 85 in a cone feather of 46. So let's go ahead and create that light. So later. New light spot. So this had an intensity of 100 cone angle of 85. And that's fine. 50. All right, so that I'm gonna move this over and up, and I'm gonna pull this one across the room. So let's look at our four views to make sure that everything is kind of heating. Where needs Teoh? Let's move this over a little bit. I will make sure that it is heating whips. We'll make sure that it's hitting this wall. So this is in my top. You Let's look at a more like a front view to make sure it's looking good. That looks pretty good. All right, now look at it cools. And now we're starting to get some cool lighting happening. Okay, So finally, what you're looking at, you might be saying, Well, how do we How do we hide this this checkered background the way that I the way that I did it. If you have a picture, a picture would work. Just grade. I kind of have an animated background already that goes along with this this set. So that's what I used on. So if I come back in here, it's called Intro, So I'm just gonna copy that and paste it and then I'll move it over. So let me show you what's happening in this intro, um, animation. So it's essentially a 19 by 20 set that have already created. It's got some characters walking in it. It's got some background buildings and trees if you have. If you have footage, video or picture that would work just fine. So all you do is import it into your set and then rotate it and push it past the wall. Okay, so that feels in our lighting just fine. But another. Another thing you have to make sure, because this will block your parallel light from entering the windows, so you have to make sure that it does not cast shadows, does not accept shadows, and it does not accept lights once those air turned off. You're good to go finally, because I didn't want this to be a focal point at any point I did. A camera blurs. So if you select your object, go effect, um, blur and sharpen. I did a camera lens blur, and I did it at 17. So turned the radius up until it looks good. Mine was at 17. The next idea levels, too. Make it brighter. So I added I had and the effect color correction levels. So once you get your levels, what I did was I crunched this inward to give more contrast. And then I pulled out the black. So I grabbed this black angle triangle and pulled it in. So that just kind of whitewashes everything all right? And so that is essentially all the lighting that we need. It looks good, but now where it's going to really shine and take off is when we start to adjust the effects, we're gonna do some color correcting, and we're gonna add some glows to it to make it really pop and give it that warm sunset feel.
8. Color Correction: So hopefully your scenes lit and looking beautiful. So now we're gonna do is put the finishing touches on it To really make it glow and set the tone the color tone We're gonna do things like some glow effects and some color correction to really get it Teoh that maximum level of beauty that you're trying to achieve And it really this, like, last 5% is really what makes your you're seeing shine. So don't ignore And don't skip this step because it's gonna take your scene from looks nice too. Oh, that's what I'm talking about. Let's get into it. So next What we need to do is we need to add something. So we're gonna go layer new. I'm gonna add an adjustment layer. This adjustment layer goes on top of everything. So it's a one stop shop. You add one effect and it manipulates the whole image. The reason that we do that is that so that we don't have to duplicate in effect across multiple assets. You just do it. One place makes it real simple. The first thing we're gonna dio is we're going to add, um, some curbs. So come on down here to color correction, and we're going to go curves. This is where we can start to adjust some of the coloring. So I'm going to select red. We'll start with red. We'll add a little red to it, start to warm it up, then we'll go to green. They will add a little green to it. I'm gonna blue and it will pull blew out. That's looking okay, I don't Maybe maybe the green will stay All right, that's looking better. Okay. And then next, we're going to go rgb. And this is gonna be your lightness in your darkness. So it will have a pool, your highlights way up and put your shadows way down to really give that contrast, or you can just very subtly manipulate it so that it's, um, giving it that nice pop of lighting that you're looking for. Okay, that's looking pretty good. Next, what? We're gonna try to dio and we can come back to this in a minute and will affect it. Next. What we're gonna do is we're gonna come down here to stylized. We're gonna add a glow. So that glow, it might be a little too much so Let's try going down to zero, which blows everything out. It will increase this. And then let's see if we do like 0.1 for the intensity. It adds a nice little glow to it. It's very subtle. Let's turn this down in the twenties and they may well do. 0.2 That's looking better. Okay, um, I like it. I like where this is going. If we turn this up, what happens? I guess it turns it down. All right, So Threshold will put zero Glo radius will put the 25 and your glow intensity will put 2.2 . Another thing that we might want to dio is these lights are getting some shadows on them. You might not want that to be happening. So we'll do. Is we'll go cash shadows on except shadows off. And once you have that set up, just copy your material options and paste it to the rest of the lights, and that looks better. It looks like it's actually giving light to it. Um, all right, now this is looking pretty good. You can see my original set is a little bit brighter, and this one's got more yellow to it a little more warm. So this would just take some playing around with as faras the curves in the glow in order to get it to match the original set. That's not what I want. Another way to brighten it up is if we come to our ambient light. It might be ableto bump this up to make this seem brighter or you might like it exactly how it iss um so, yeah, this is looking pretty good. I'm really pleased with how this set turned out. Uh, yeah, so we can play around with the help I need to have a camera turned on so we can play around with the camera settings to see how everything's actually playing out. Does it look pretty good? Are there some things that we need to adjust? Right now, I'm gonna turn my depth of field off so that everything is clear and we can start to play around with it. We'll zoom out. That's looking really cool. I might really happy with how that one turned out. I did it a heck of a lot quicker than the 1st 1 that's for sure. So I hope that your lighting and effects air coming together really nicely and it's looking good. Just keep playing around with it to get that perfect color tone to exactly what you're doing.
9. Camera Animation: So by this point, your scenes done, it's looking great. Um, now we're gonna talk about the camera animation. Maybe you've played around with it a little bit already, which is find great. I'm glad that you're exploring, but I'm gonna talk to you about how you set up key frames, how you set up focal depths and even how your rig a camera to animate it with no object. So let's get into it. Finally, we're gonna talk about the camera animation. This is gonna be a very brief part, but it is. Um it's something you need to know. So let's jump into that. So talking through the camera options board for moving for the camera moves the way to actually get a camera movement. There's a couple of ways the first way is to select your camera key frame your point of interest in your position. Once you put the camera exactly where you want it, you'll keep frame it and then you'll move forward on the timeline. Teoh, the next position will say three seconds is where my next camera is gonna be and we'll put the camera into a new position. We'll zoom in all right, so it's really that simple. So we now have two camera friends, and we have a very smooth Hlynur linear movement between the two. Way to adjust the timing. Select your key frames, hit F nine and you can manipulate the curve of your time. So I have my speed graft set up. So if I crunch these in, it's going to do a very slow move out. Then it's gonna speed into the next position and slowly settle in. So let's look at this and see exactly what's happening. So I'm gonna hit play on the keyboard, and it's gonna take a ba jillion years toe. Love this up, but now we fast forward. In time, you can watch the whole thing play up. So this is a camera move that we've animated. It's pretty simple. Um, yeah, straightforward. We've got some nice curving in there to give a a smooth transition out to speed up, and then a smooth transition in. So these are just This is just an example of kind of a camera move. You could deal. Now, if you're depth of field has turned on, um, if you don't have your camera linked to an object that you're moving Teoh, such as the back wall, which was not that well, this well, so by right clicking camera link, focused distance layer. If you don't have it linked, you're gonna have to adjust. You're your focal distance to match. Okay, So that means that here a key frame zero, you'll have to key frame it. Oops. And then once you come to three seconds here, you'll have to then again adjust it actually, to go this way to be closer. So smaller pixels are I guess that's too far. Anyway, you get the point. You're gonna have to move this around to find the exact position that you need to be at. All right. So the next way that we're going to do a camera animation, it will turn this off and I'm going to right click camera and I'm gonna create Let's see, Do I wanna orbit No or stereo three D Rig. Let's try stereo three d. What's gonna happen? Oh, I never mind. That's really cool. That Look at that. I have never click this, but now I have and I can't on click what I've seen. I'm very intrigued. Anyway, this is being on the point. Sorry. Do not click Stereo three d rig. Just create a orbit null. So now your camera is attached to this? No. So if I rotate the null, the set moves with it, you can get some crazy movement in here. Okay. I was got kind of like a Dutch ing on there. Wow, that's cool. Like a horror scene on. And then if you move, if you move on the different axes, your camera's gonna move with it. So this is another way to set up here your camera to get some cool facts like that. I like how it's just very subtly on a Dutch angle. This is where the the masked bandit comes in the door. Anyway, that's another way to do it. And you would. Just in order to animate you would keep your orientation or your X, y and Z rotations. And they had also key the position. So that's the way of setting up your camera. So we talked about we talked about the different focal lengths, which is your millimeters from like a 15 millimetre up to a 200 millimeter. We talked about how to animate the camera as well as your your, um, focal depth and your depth of field. Right. So if you turn it on right now, it looks like my my focal distance is set to about the back wall. If I wanted to be on this red share right here, I have to get this vocal point really tight so that it's like, right up on the camera. All right, so now we're at about the door, are coming into the chair, and we made it. And so the closer that you get, the more blurry your backgrounds gonna get. Um, And then finally, we could talk about the zoom here. So the zoom, it doesn't actually move the camera. So if you set up your focal point nicely and you want to just get closer to it, you simply zoom in and it's that simple. So you can animate your zoom, and it will work just fine. Well, guys, that wraps up this tutorial on three D sets. I hope that building this set was fun and engaging, and I know it's very complicated, but I was really just trying to show you that after effects is very powerful, there's so much you can do in this program? Um, it's really left up to your imagination. So have fun with it. Show me what you guys have created. I can't wait to see it. I know you guys are gonna do great stuff, but yeah, thanks for watching guys.
10. Thanks: you did it. I'm so proud of you. You created a set. You made it this far. I just want to thank you guys for watching this tutorial. I hope it was informative. Um, and I really want to see what you guys have created. You know, by the end of it, you should have your own said. That's looking pretty cool. Just show me upload a video or something and let me know what you think. Please feel free to like and comment and ask questions. If you have any questions, ask. That's why I'm here. So thank you guys so much for watching until next time.