Transcripts
1. Introduction: Having a basic understanding
of animating in three D space is an essential skill even for
two D motion designers. If you've been animating
using Adobe After Effects, the day will come
when you will need to animate something using
the third dimension. That's why I've created
this easy class that we have you animating
in three D in no time. We'll jump right into
animating our class projects, and I can't wait to
see your creation.
2. Getting Started & Class Project: Getting started with this class, the only requirement is
Adobe After Effects. This class was created for intermediate motion
designers looking to level up their Adobe
After Effects skills. Students that already have a basic understanding of
animating with key frames, what this class is not for students that are serious
about three D animation, three D modeling or three
D character animation. I would recommend exploring alternative software
such as blender, Cinema four D, Houdini, and a plethora of other software that is way more dedicated
to three D work. The class project is to
follow along and create your own animation using three
D and Adobe After Effects. You can download a
completed version of the project file on the
project and resources page. It might help if you get
stuck on one of the lessons. Feel free to post your projects
to the project gallery, as I always love to
see what you create.
3. Things to Know & Creating 3D Text: The first half of this lesson, I'll be showing you a few
things you need to know about animating in three D space
inside Adobe After Effects. The second part of the lesson, I'll teach you how to
create three D text, which is actually an
incredibly simple process. Just a few things to know
before we get started. I'm going to be working
in a composition size of 1920 by 1080 at 30
frames a second. When you go to create
your compositions, if you don't feel like
typing all this out, you can choose a
preset from the menu, social media landscape HD. For the duration, you can really make the composition as
long as you would like. This is just a
random number I had in from a past
composition I created. The animation we're
creating is only going to be about
2.5 seconds long. Something else you're
going to have to make sure of is on the
composition menu, head over to the
three D renderer tab. And on the renderer list, make sure that you have
advanced three D selected. This is very important,
as this is what I'm going to be working in
throughout the tutorial. You can also make sure you're on the advanced three D by
using this menu over here. So when you're working
in three D space inside Adobe After Effects, there's a couple tabs over here that you
need to be aware of. The first one is the view tab. We could change views by selecting two views
or four views. The views give you a look at the sides and top
of our composition. Under this other tab over here, you can manually select which
view you're looking at. I'll switch back to one view
and you can go through. You can choose front,
left, back, bottom, right. You can choose default, which is the default
After Effects camera. And what you're also going to notice is that in this menu, we also have a Camera one. During this tutorial,
we're going to be creating a camera and
animating the camera. So if you want to see what the camera is actually viewing, you would select Camera one. And one final thing you're
going to need to know for this tutorial is if you're not using a current version
of After Effects, you might not have access to this menu for three D objects. I'm going to have
to double check which version they
introduce these objects, and I'll put it on the screen. So now we're going to
create some three D text. This lesson will double
as an introduction to turning layers three
D and After Effects, and it can also be used as
a substitute if you don't want to create the three D phone model later in this class. So I'll start by
getting the type tool. And I'll just type out
three D. It doesn't matter what font you use as
it'll all work the same. I'll use the align panel to align it to the center
of the composition. It's important to do
this now because you can't use the align panel
with three D layers. Now to turn the text three D, we have to go over
to this icon here, and this is the three D icon. We'll click that, and now we have access to the
third dimension. If you bring up the
properties for the layer, you'll now notice the third
dimension is accessible. But as you can see when
we turn to four views, our text is still too deep. That's because we
haven't actually done anything to our text yet. We're going to have
to open up our layer and head to geometry options. Extrusion depth is what
we're looking for. We'll turn up the
depth to 100 for now. And as you see in
the right view, our text is now extruded. We also need to
add a Bevel style. From this list, I'll
choose angular, and I'll turn up
bevel depth to ten. And while you can't really
see anything at the moment, this is because we have to
add some color to add color, we'll head back up to animate, and we'll head to
the front menu. Then we'll head to color,
and we'll choose RGB. In the color picker,
this is where we can choose the color for
the front of our text. I'm going to go with a
yellowish orange color. So now that we've
done the front color, we'll have to go
to add property. Now let's choose a back color. Well, once again,
head to color RGB. We could just use
the color picker eyedropper and choose the same
color as our front color. Now we'll head to
add again, property, side, color, and once
again, choose the RGB. I'm just going to
go with pure black. And once again, we'll
head to add property. This time, we're going
to add a bevel color. Color, RGB, and I'll go with pure white
for the bevel color. And that is essentially
how you create three D text inside
Adobe After Effects. From here, you have
a few options. You can continue this
class and learn how we create this animation
using a camera. If you would like
to learn how to create the three D spinny text, I actually have a class
dedicated to that, so I recommend checking
it out as there's no real reason for me to essentially create
the same class twice. You could also use this
three D text as a substitute for the rest of
this class if you don't feel like creating
the three D foam. I'll bring up the
rotation I will quickly give you a demonstration
of how to animate. You would bring
up the properties like you would any other layer, except now you have access
to the third dimension. And there you go.
You already have some three D spinny text just by animating
the Y rotation. And of course, you
can do this for any other property,
not just the rotation. So that's essentially
it for this lesson. Hope you learned something, and hopefully I'll see you in
the rest of the class.
4. Create the Model: Let's go ahead and create
a very basic model that we can use for
our class projects. I'm going to be using
the three D shape tools that we find up here
on the toolbar. To start off, we can
grab our cube tool, and I'll drag that out
in the project window. And size doesn't
matter at the moment, because I'm going
to be plugging in numbers over in the
property panel. I won't go into great detail about every single
property in this menu, but I will give you a quick
overview of the panels. The layer Transform panel is where you will find
your basic animation, such as your position, scale,
rotation, and opacity. Under mesh options is where
you will actually build the shape of your object with
a height, width and depth. Under the menu, you could even change your mesh
type if you wish. Bevel options is kind of self explanatory if you
know what a bevel is. Essentially the
sides of an object. Compositing options, you can
turn on and off shadows, lights or whether your
object emits lights, you can also change
your shadow color. And the material menu is a
little bit more complex. It's not only where you'll create the color of your object, but you also change
the overall look of your object with properties
such as roughness, metallic, and other properties. Later in this class,
I will show you an easy way to create
professional looking materials. For the width, I'll type in 285. For height, I'll type in 575. For depth, I'll type in 50. Under Bevel options, beside
radius, I'll type in ten. Everything else can remain
the same for the moment. Under the view menu, I'm going to change my view to four views. And as you can see, our object already exists in three D space. To move our new object, we can drag the X,
Y, and Z handles. But for the purposes of
creating this model, I already have
dimensions chosen out, so I'm just going to plug those numbers into the position. It's also worth noting
that for three D objects, you cannot use the align panel. I'll bring up the
position with the P key. For the X position,
I'll type in 960. For the Y position,
I'll type in 540. And for Z, I'll type in zero. The reason I went with these
dimensions is because we know that that is the exact
center of the composition. There's one more thing I
want to do for this object is under the material
menu beside base color, I'm going to turn it to black. Now we can go ahead
and name this layer. Remember the enter
key to name a layer. I'm going to name it base. Now we can go ahead and
create our second object. I'm going to go up to the menu, and I'll select
the cylinder tool. And we'll drag that
out in the window. Again, dimensions
don't matter yet, as I'm going to
plug them in over here in the property panel. For radius, going
to change it to 26. Height, I'll change to 14. Under the bevel options, radius, I'm going to turn up to 50, and sides I'm going
to turn down to one. Up here in the transform menu, beside the X rotation, we'll type in 90 degrees. Now we can bring up the layers
position with the PKey. Once again, I'm going
to plug in numbers here because I already
have the coordinates. I'll type in 960
for the X position. For the Y position,
I'll type in 781, and the Z position, I'll turn to negative 25. Now I'm going to
rename the layer and I'll name it button. Let's head back up
to our tool menu. This time we'll select
the plane tool. We'll drag that out
into our window. For width, I'll type in 250. For length, I'll type in 400. I'll bring up that position
for the layer with the P key, and again, I'll plug
in these numbers. 960 for the X position, 540 for the Y position. For the Z position, we'll
type in negative 25. Then we'll go ahead
and rename our layer. This layer, I'm going
to name it screen. We'll head back up
to our tool list. For this one, I'm going
to select a cylinder. Beside X rotation, I'll
flip it to 90 degrees. So now it's facing our front. Radius, I'll turn down to five, height I'll turn to 13. I'll bring up the
position for the layer. For the X position,
I'll type in 895. For the Y position, I'll type in 290 and the Z position
to negative 25. And I'll rename this
layer front camera. Now we'll head back
up to our menu, and we'll go with
another cube tool. We'll drag that
out in our window. For the width, I'm
going to go with 75. For height, I'll type in 13. For depth, I'll
type in 13 again. Under the bevel options, I'll go with a radius of five. Once again, we'll bring
up the layers position. X position to 960. Y position to 290, and the Z position
to negative 25. And we'll name this
layer speaker. First, I'm going to switch
the view to back because the next two objects we're going to create for the
back of the model. Let's go back up
to our tool menu, and we'll select the cylinder
tool. We'll drag that out. The X rotation, I'll
switch to 90 degrees, radius to 20, height to 15. I'll bring up the position. For the position,
I'll type in 1048. And for the Y position, I'll type in 298. And for the Z position,
I'll type in 25. I'll rename the
layer back camera. Just one more object that
I'm going to create. For this one, we'll just
create another cylinder. We'll rotate it to 90 degrees. Radius to ten, height to 15. I'll bring up the position. Type in 997 for the X
position for the Y position, I'll type in 298. And for the Z position,
I'll type in 25. I'll rename this layer Light. I'm gonna switch the view
back at active camera.
5. Set Up for Animating: Now we're going to
do a little bit of preparing for animation. First thing we have to do is connect all our layers
to our base layer. We can do that by
selecting them with the shift key and then using one of the pick whips to
connect it to the base. Now, all these layers are
parented to the base layer, and this creates a basic rig
that we can animate later. Now we need to
create a new camera. We can do that by right
clicking going to new camera. Under the type menu, we're going to go with two
node camera because this creates a point of
interest option that we can point our camera at. It'll make more sense when
we go to animate later. In the preset menu, I'm going
to go with 50 millimeter. You can take a quick look at all these other settings and
make sure they match mine just to avoid any confusion that can happen when we
go to animate later. We'll click Okay. And now one final thing we need to do is create a new null object. We can right click, go
to New Null Object. I'm going to rename it cameras
point of interest null, and this is what we're going
to point our camera at. You can rename a layer by
pressing the enter key. When we switch our
view to four views, you can see that our null layer automatically is in the center of the composition
with our phone, which is exactly where
we want it to be. I
6. Animating the Camera: Before we start
animating our camera, we're going to want to
set up our camera's point of interest to be pointed
at our null layer. First thing we'll do is click this icon to
turn our null layer three D. Now we'll toggle
open our camera settings. Under the transform menu, this is where we will find
our point of interest. We want this point
of interest to be pointed at the position
of the null layer. We're going to connect them by using a very simple expression. See what our goal is is that no matter where
we move our camera, it'll always be pointing
at this null layer. To accomplish this, I'm going to bring up the
null layer's position by pressing P. And on the
camera's point of interest, I'm going to hold the
Alt button and click the stopwatch and we'll gain
access to this pick whip. We'll drag it over to the
null layer's position. This will fill out the point of interest field with
the expression. So now the point of interest is always connected to the
null layer's position. Now we can actually begin to animate the
camera's position. I'll zoom out a
little bit so that we can see what is happening
as we're animating. I'll bring up the camera's
position with the PE key, and we already know that this is where we want the camera's
final resting place to be. So we're going to place
a keyframe by pressing the stopwatch and we'll move that keyframe
over on the timeline, maybe to around frame 23. I'll head back to the
beginning of the timeline. It should be noted that you can animate your camera
using these handles, if that's how you
would like to animate. But I already know that I want my camera to begin
behind the phone. So what I'm going to
do is I'm going to plug in a number
into the Z position. I'm going to type in
the number 3,067. And as you can see, now our camera is pointed
behind our phone. Around halfway through
this animation, I want the camera to be
on the side of the phone. So we'll head to frame 11, and now we can drag
the camera's position. We can continue to
drag these handles until our camera is pointed
on the side of our phone. But I actually already
have coordinates written down from the
animation I created earlier. So I'm going to plug those
numbers into the position. In the X position, I'm going to type out 5,144.8. The Y position we can actually
leave the same at 5:40. And in the Z position, I'll type in 1,144.7. These are the exact
coordinates I had in the animation
I created earlier. So now our camera is
orbiting around our phone, and the point of interest is
locked onto that null layer. As we scrub through
the timeline, this is what it
looks like so far. Now we're going to
edit the motion path to give our camera a
smoother animation. Make sure the camera
layer is selected, and under the Pen tool menu, you'll find the
convert Vortex tool. Click on the second point
in the motion path, and this will give us
handles that we can edit. I'm going to quickly switch to one view and to the top view, and then I'll zoom out, and this will give us a
better view of our path. I'll switch back to the
regular selection tool, and now I'll start
dragging the handles. The goal is to
create an arc shape, which is actually one of
the animation principles for more interesting animations. I'm going to get the
convert Vortex tool again and click on
that third point, and I'll drag its handle. I'll do the same thing
again for the first point. And I'll continue to drag these handles until I get
an arc shape that I like. Now let's scrub through the timeline and see what
that looks like. I'm going to change the
view back to two views, so now we can actually see
what the camera is seeing. I think that actually
looks pretty good. I'm going to change back to one view and change the
active camera to camera one. That way we can see
what our actual camera in the composition
is looking at. Now we'll smooth
out the animation by easy easing the keyframes. First, I'm going to turn
the middle keyframe into a rove across
time keyframe. We can do that by right clicking and going to Rove Across time. And essentially
what that does is our keyframe still exists
as a positional keyframe, but we can no longer manipulate its time in the graph editor. I'm going to head
into the graph editor quickly and show
you what I mean. You can select our keyframes
and press F nine to CEs. So to reiterate, that keyframe still exists as a position, but it just doesn't have
a time assigned to it. Head back into the graph editor, and we'll drag these
handles towards the middle so that our
animation starts off slow, gets fast in the middle, and then slows down again. We can preview what
that looks like. I think it looks pretty good.
7. Slide in Animation: So to create the
slide in animation, we're actually not going
to be animating the phone. We're going to be using the camera's point
of interest null. Because remember, our camera
is pointing at this null, and if we animate its position, it'll give off the illusion that the phone is
animating on screen. It'll make more sense if
I just go to animate. So I'll bring up
the camera point of interest nulls position
by pressing the P key, and we know that this is
the final resting place, so we'll press the stopwatch
to put a keyframe. And we want the animation
to be about 15 frames long. So I'll move it to frame
15 on the timeline. I'll head back to the
beginning of the timeline. And using the position, I can drag it until the
phone is off the screen. I'm going to type in the
coordinate of negative 345. So now as we go
through the timeline, you can see that it's
giving off the illusion that the phone is
animating onto the screen. But really, it's just our camera following the point
of interest null. To make the animation
more dynamic, I'm going to ease it with F nine and head into
the speed graph. And I'm just going to drag
these handles into the middle. Now we can preview and
see what it looks like. I'm actually pretty happy
with that animation.
8. Rotation Animation: This time, we actually will
be animating the foam, and we'll do that by animating
the base's rotation. So we're first going to
need to make sure that all our elements are
connected to the base. We can do that by making sure
that under the parent menu, they all say that they're
connected to the base. Now we can bring up the
rotation with the archy, and we'll be animating
the Y rotation. First, I need to determine at what point on the timeline I
want to begin the animation. I think I want the rotation
to begin around frame 37. I'm going to expand
my work area first. So now at frame 37, I'll press the Y rotation
stopwatch to put a keyframe. Now, before we do a full spin, I want to create
some anticipation. So I'm going to move over
around seven frames, and I'll change the
Y rotation to 25. I'm going to change
my view back to one view and change
it to camera one, and we're going to
fit it to the screen. So we created a little bit of anticipation by changing
the rotation to 25. Now we can move over
on the timeline, maybe around 25 frames, and we'll do one full rotation. In the first field,
we'll have to type in negative one
for one full spin. What we also want to do is create a little
bit of overshoot. So in the second field, we'll have to type in negative 25 to create that overshoot. So make sure that
in both fields, you have negative one
and then negative 25. So now we have a little
bit of anticipation, a full spin, a little
bit of overshoot. Now we can move over
maybe seven frames, and we'll get our phone into
its final resting place. We can do that by typing
zero into this field. So to reiterate, we
created a little bit of anticipation,
did a full spin. Then we get a little
bit of overshoot, and then we end up in
the final resting place. Now we can add some Easy Es by selecting the keyframes
and pressing F nine. I'll head into the speed graph. For these handles, I'm going
to drag them all the way to the left to make the
animation start off fast. For these two
keyframes at the end, I'm going to drag them to
the opposite direction. And the key frames in the middle I'll drag towards the middle. And we can give a preview to
see what that looks like. I'm happy with that animation.
9. Screen Walkthrough: I'll walk you through how
I created the screen. You can download
the project file on the project resources page so you can go ahead
and have a look at it. First, I created a composition. I'll head into the
composition settings, and I made it a width of 11
80 and a height of 1920. Then I proceeded to create
a bunch of solid layers. On each solid layer, I put a fill effect
to change the colors. Then I took the pen tool and
I drew a mask on each layer. To create the gradient, you can bring up
the mask feather by pressing F and then
turning up these numbers. Also, each layer has a little
bit of animation on it, driven by a turbulent
displace effect. The animation is being driven by a simple expression
on the evolution, and it's at time times 50. If you don't know how
to add an expression, you hold the Alt key and
press the stopwatch. But I find the animation
is so subtle that you probably won't even notice
it in the final animation. The rest of the composition is fairly simple,
which is some text. Then for the icons, I used very simple shape
layers to draw them. Once again, you can go into the project file and have
a look for yourself. Then I just precomped
those shape layers, make it easier to place in the composition, and
that's just about it. Then it's just a
matter of putting the new screen composition
into the main composition. So once I dropped it
into the composition, I put it above the old screen, then I moved its position to
roughly where the screen is. And then I parented
that new screen layer to the old screen layer, and then turned off the visibility for
the original screen. So now that the new
screen is parented, it'll move with the
rest of our animation.
10. Materials Bonus Lesson: So this is going to be a
very quick bonus lesson about adding materials. So when you're dealing
with these three D objects and After Effects, the ones that you find in
this menu, specifically, when you have one
of them selected, if you head over to
the material menu, hidden in this panel over here, you'll find the G substance
community assets. You can go ahead
and click on that, and it'll bring us to a
page with a whole bunch of materials that you can go
through and use for free. So you want a plastic material. We'll click on the
plastic menu over here. I think plastic Mat Pure will go ahead and
download that one. Then once you have
it downloaded, you just upload it
into After Effects. And once it's inside
After Effects, you'll go back to
the material menu. We'll click on the
drop down list. Now you'll see it
listed in the menu, and all you have to
do is select it. And now the material is
applied to our base, and it really is
as simple as that. I already went with
another material for the animation
I created earlier. So I'm going to delete this one. I'm just going to
go back to default. Anyways, that was a
quick bonus lesson showing you the materials
that you can choose. You can go through it and choose any materials you would like
for your class project. This step is
completely optional, and you're not required to
do it for the class project.
11. Intro to Lights: So there's one thing we never
went over in our tutorial, and it's a big part of
animating in three D, and it's creating lights. I thought about how I was going to give an introduction
to lights, and I thought, What better way than to actually
create something? So I started off by creating a paper stop motion animation. When I turn the light
layer on and off, you can see the drastic
difference it makes. So first, I'm going to
walk you through how I created the animation,
which is very simple. It's just a couple layers
with a few keyframes, and then we'll
talk about lights. It's not necessary to recreate
this animation yourself, as I've provided the
project file for download. So right off the bat, all of these layers are three D layers. Remember, we can turn layers three D by clicking this icon. It's also important to note
that for this animation, I'm animating in
classic three D. This is important because
some things are available in classic three D that aren't
available and advanced, such as casting shadows. So for the animation, I started off by creating
a background layer. The background layer
is just a solid layer. To add a paper texture, I just dropped in
this paper texture that I've had on my
computer for years. It's just a basic
white paper texture, and I turned the
layer to multiply. And then the animation
is just two text layers. The three and the D are
two separate layers, and they're just animating
on with a few keyframes. The keyframes are toggle hold keyframes to give it that
choppy stop motion look, and there's no animation
in between the keyframes. And each layer, I put on
a couple wiggle presets. You can find those in
the effects and presets. We could create that animation using expressions on the layers. Sometimes the easiest
way is to just look for a preset
in the preset menu. Then I duplicated
the paper texture, and I used it as a track mat on both of those text layers, and I also turned
them to multiply. And then I also parented
them to the layer. And one more thing
I did was I rotated the paper texture just to separate it from
the background. I created an adjustment
layer and put a posterize time to
three frames a second. Again, we're going for
the stop motion look, so the lower frame
rate really helps, and that's basically how
I created the animation. This animation looks
okay like this, but it still looks like
it's missing something, and that thing is lights. Though, just to reiterate, this is technically
a three D animation, even though it
doesn't look like it. I'm going to quickly
switch to four views. My two text animations, the Z position is
set to negative 25. And the reason we're doing this is because we need
our text to be in front of our
background in order to cast shadows when we
create our light. I'm going to switch
back to one view. Now let's go ahead
and create a light. To create a new light, we
can right click New Light, or we could head up
to Layer, New light. In the menu, we can
name our light. I'm just going to leave
it at the default. In the light type menu, we have four different types
of light we could choose. For the light that
we're going to create, we're going
to choose point, but we also have the
option of parallel, bot, point, and ambient. Color we can leave at white, and intensity we'll
leave at 100. But we need to make sure that
cast shadows is turned on. We can go ahead and click Okay, and right away, our light
is doing some work. But one important
thing we need to do is in our text layers, we have to toggle it open, go to material options and make sure that
cast shadows is on, as well as accepts lights. Once we make sure that
we have those turned on, now we can start
editing our light. We could head back up
to the new light we created and take a look
at the menu options. We'll toggle open the layer and toggle open light options. We can once again change
the type of light. Parallel can be thought of as just like the default
camera on After Effects. It shines a light over
the whole composition, and you can't really
change its position. Spotlight acts just like a
spotlight would in real life. By the way, if you want to
learn more about lights, I really recommend learning
about lights in real life, because After Effects lights basically are just
emulating real life lights. Point light, this will be the light that we're using
to create our animation. An ambient light can be an entire tutorial of its own
as it's the most complex. You could actually use images to light your scene
in After Effects. You could upload a JPEG or a PNG and use it to light information to
light your scene, but we won't be doing
that in this tutorial. We'll switch the light
back to point light. Now let's go through
the options. Intensity. We're going
to leave it at 100, but what it basically does is just changes the
intensity of the light, how strong the light is. Color, we could actually change the color of our light if that's something
you want to do. Let's say you wanted to
change it to a blue color. I'm going to undo
that. Now, fall off will give us control over
the vignette of our light. We'll turn it on.
And right away, you can see how strong it is. We're going to have
to change the radius and fall off distance. We'll turn up the
radius to 2000. And we'll do the same
for fall off distance. And that creates a
much softer fall off. Now, the shadow darkness
does exactly that. It changes the
shadow's darkness. I'm going to turn
it down to 50%. Shadow diffusion will change
the softness of the shadow. We'll turn it up to around 300. You can see the
difference it makes. It looks way more realistic
like a real shadow. Real life shadows
wouldn't be super solid. They would have a
little bit of fall off and they'd be a
little bit softer. One more thing I want to do is change the light's position. I know I want the light to be in the center of
the composition, so I'm going to change
the X and Y to 96540. That'll bring it to the center. For the Z position, I want to move it back because I think it's a little
bit too close. Show you in the four
view menu again, we could move the light
using these handles, but like most of this tutorial, I'm just going to
plug in a number. In the Z position, I'm going
to plug in negative 1,500, and that will move our
camera back. There we go. We have a much softer light, and I think it looks
much more realistic. You can see the difference it makes just creating
one light layer. That's just about it
for this tutorial. I hope you learned a
little bit about lights, a little bit about three D
animation and After Effects, and hopefully you
enjoyed the class. Thanks again and see
you in the next.
12. Outro: Congratulations. You've made
it to the end of the class. Now you can post your project
to the Project Gallery. I always love seeing
what you create.
Tyler Bennett, Motion Graphics Designer & Photographer
