[music] [Ian Robinson] Clearly, we're going to have some competition. So here we go.

This session is...

Honestly, when I'm up here, all I just hear is waves of sound. I can't... I can't quite tell what they're saying. So, 2D to 3D, we're going to move into the next dimension with After Effects. My name is Ian Robinson. I've been teaching After Effects for about 20 years. Some of you may have seen some of my stuff on Lynda.com or LinkedIn Learning, or in the actual Adobe Learn panel inside of After Effects, I'm that guy too. So yeah, enough about me. What are we going to get into today? So this is a beginner to intermediate session. So if you are a 3D designer with 10 years of experience, if you want to go check out something else, I will not be offended, okay? If you are new to 3D... How many of you are new to 3D? All right. Awesome. How many of you have used After Effects, but every time you get into 3D, your eyes kind of cross a little bit. Any of you? Yeah. Okay. Awesome. You are in the right place, okay? I'm going to go through everything step by step. And as I go through, I'm going to try and throw out some keyboard shortcuts, some tips I've learned along the way about different ways to approach things, different ways to remember things. So as you start to dive deeper into 3D, you'll actually start to understand a little bit more about what's actually possible. Does that sound like a good thing? All right.

So we're going to do an intro to 3D and After Effects. 3D and After Effects is not as simple as just enabling 3D on a layer. I mean, to a degree it is, but there's a whole lot more going on in the background, and we'll dive into that. Specifically, what is a renderer? A renderer is how the software parses the 3D data so that you can actually see the 3D data, but different renders have different levels and different capabilities. So each different renderer will have different material options. So we'll talk about some of those different things. We'll talk about postcards in space. Any of you ever heard that term, postcards in space? No? Some of you? Okay. It's basically when you have a flat 2D layer, but you're flying it through space like it's 3D, but there's really no depth to it. So the way I like to visualize that is postcards in space. It's like a postcard. If I turn it directly at you, the chances of you actually seeing it are very slim because it's going to be very, very thin, okay? But if I turn it, you're going to see that dimension. So we'll start with importing a layered Illustrator file and will extrude... Or will extrude some elements, but we'll also reposition elements in 3D space.

That's going to lead us into lights, cameras, and material options. So when you actually start positioning things in 3D space, there is a thing called a default light setup. So it's kind of like, if you walked into a room and there was no light switch, but there actually was light in the room. It's like the default lighting. So if you then go and grab a bunch of really cool stage lights and start actually lighting the room, you can make where things are look that much nicer. But when you do that, you also have additional control over how those elements react to the light. So think of it like an actor who is going out on stage. If they're really nervous and they're sweating bullets, the makeup artists might want to put some softening powder and stuff on them to deshine what's going on, right? Well, you can kind of do that with material options. You can control how shiny things are, how soft things are, and really kind of fine tune that area. Now a big one that a lot of people have a tendency to gloss over when they're teaching 3D is navigating in 3D space. When you start sliding things in 3D space, it's really hard looking on a flat screen to have a perspective as to where things actually live in that 3D world. So I have some rules about interacting with things inside of After Effects, specifically when you get into 3D space. One of my big rules is as you're repositioning layers in 3D space, don't grab the Selection tool and try and literally click on a layer in the Composition panel. Just use the properties in the Timeline panel. And that way, you know exactly what property you're changing at any given time, so as it's moving, you know exactly where you're moving it. If you just free form start moving things in 3D space, it's really hard to keep track of where things are. Has anyone ever had that problem? Some of you? Yeah, it's a challenge, okay? Then we're going to talk about integrating Substance 3D files into projects. Now I'm very aware this isn't a Substance 3D class, and there are a bunch of different Substance 3D applications. But I do want to show you that if you are getting into 3D and you really want to make a go of it, you probably do want to check out Substance 3D as an option to add to your toolkit. So in this, we're going to take a model that was in Substance 3D and a custom material and apply it to that model. And then we're going to export that model into After Effects in 3D space, and knowing what we've learned with working with the Illustrator files, you'll see how to then work with an actual three-dimensional...

An actual three-dimensional model inside your After Effects composition.

Then we'll do an intro to environment lights. And this is really kind of a cool thing. Environment layers have been in After Effects for a very long time. A lot of people would miss those and not necessarily use those. And if you don't know what an environment layer is, don't worry, I'm going to show you, okay? But the most exciting thing I'm going to show you today is environment lights as far as I'm concerned.

And so I'll show you exactly why that's there. All right, so that ends the PowerPoint section of this class. Whoo-hoo. All right. This is a sneak preview of the kind of space can that we'll be creating a little bit later. And let me go ahead and start...

You're not seeing the screen? Oh, well, that's special.

All right. Give me one second here. I'll see what's going on.

Yes, let me give you those sneak previews again, all right? This is a sneak preview of the futuristic space can we'll be creating a little bit later, all right? Don't worry. No modeling. I'm just going to work with the preset objects.

Are you serious? Man, I couldn't... I couldn't plan this anymore. All right.

Let me quit PowerPoint. Maybe that's just taking over.

Come on, PowerPoint. Stop being such a jerk.

There we go. Is everybody seeing a can now? Okay. There we go. That's the space game. Whoo-hoo. All right.

Thank you. Sorry. Sometimes the computer gets temperamental with what's actually going out to the HDMI source. My bad. So, yeah, this is the space can that we'll be creating here in a little bit.

And inside of Illustrator, this is the Illustrator file we're going to work with, and then we'll import this into After Effects to reposition things in 3D space. So who can tell me why I'm starting with Illustrator when I'm working with things in 3D space? Vectors. Yes. Whoever said vectors, all of you are correct, okay? When you're working in 3D space, as you're repositioning layers, it's really important to understand that resolution matters. So if I have a really low-resolution image, and I take a 3D camera and I fly right up to it, what do you think is going to happen to that image? It's going to pixelate. It's going to get degraded, etcetera. So if you are working with bitmapped images, you want to work with really nice large images based on whatever your final output is. So if you're doing 4K, then you might want to have an image that's like 8,000 pixels across on each side so that you can actually zoom into it and not lose any degradation. But since I'm presenting this on my laptop and I like to be as efficient as possible, reusing vector-based files. So 3D applications love vector-based files, After Effects is no different. Those of you who don't know what vector-based files are, which I can't believe any of you may not necessarily know. But basically, what it means is I can scale this up as large as possible without any image degradation, okay? Trying to cover all the bases here for everyone. All right. So in the Illustrator file, everybody's seeing the Illustrator file, right? Yes. Okay. Cool. So in the Illustrator file, I have multiple layers. I have three layers all labeled one after the other. And it's really important that I draw your attention to the fact that each of these layers are on their own layer in Illustrator, okay? So when I go to import this into After Effects, it's going to make sure all of those layers are imported as individual elements. Does that make sense to everyone? Okay. Awesome. So inside of After Effects, I can simply double-click in the Project panel and navigate to my Illustrator folder and select my Illustrator file, and down here under Import As, I'll choose composition, retain layer sizes. The reason I'm doing this is I want each layer size to be the size of the actual graphic, not the size of the document. Does that make sense to everyone? Okay. Awesome. I'll go ahead and cancel this because I've already done that, and that's what this composition is. So notice I have five layers here. If I go back to my Illustrator file, you can see I have five layers here. It's exactly the same between each one of the projects. Okay. Now this probably looks pretty straightforward to any of you. This is the default layout inside of After Effects. And with each of these layers, if I select, say, one of these layers and press P in open position, you notice I have x and y data. So that means I can position this along the x and y plane, but I can't do postcards in space. I can't move things in z space. So in order to actually move things in z space, I want to enable 3D on this layer. And to do that, I'll go ahead and just click once in this column here, underneath the box. Can everybody see that okay? Those of you in the back? I'm going to try and not zoom in and zoom out too much 'cause I don't like making people seasick, but if anybody can't see something, let me know, and I'll start messing with that. But everybody can see that? Okay. Awesome. Now when you enable 3D, notice even though I only had position open, it automatically opened orientation x rotation, y rotation, geometry options, and material options. When you see something like geometry options, that means you are in a specific renderer. So let's dive into what a renderer is. In the lower right-hand corner of the Composition panel, there is a dropdown here, and this allows me to choose what kind of renderer I'm going to use. Now the default renderer inside of After Effects is Classic 3D. And what that means is notice geometry options are grayed out. So I can position things in 3D space by moving things along the z axis, but I cannot give depth to any of those layers. Does that make sense to everyone? Kind of? Yeah. So if I hover over the z property here for this first layer and I just start scrubbing, I can reposition that layer, okay? Now notice as I'm moving this back, it's not interacting with any of the other layers, and that's because I've only enabled 3D on one layer. One of the beautiful things about After Effects is the fact that, in a composition, you can have 2D layers and 3D layers. So if I wanted to have a background that doesn't move around as the camera moves around, I leave it a 2D layer and I put it at the bottom of the layer stack. Does that make sense to everyone? If you've ever worked in a full 3D application, when you're moving the camera around, if you don't have like a solid background or like a giant plane, sometimes you can see the edges of whatever it is you're working with. So it's really nice to just have this 2D option. You just drop it in there, and you're good to go, okay? All right. So now I'm going to enable 3D for all the layers. And to do that, I'll just click and drag down. Just like any other switches in the After Effects interface. If you click and drag, it'll select all of them. So now with them all selected, I'll go ahead and draw a lasso around all the layers, and I'll press P to open the position. And you'll notice, if I make the layers panel a little larger here, I only have one that's actually in z space. So if you're not sure what something does in After Effects, scrub on it, okay? So if I scrub on this layer, now you'll notice it'll disappear when it pops behind the other layer, okay? Do you see how that's happening? If I open the rotation properties or the orientation properties, I can go ahead and rotate this on the y axis and notice as I'm rotating it, it's controlling how those layers are intersecting. So now if I move along the z axis, you can see how that is slowly slicing through the other layers because it's off angle. Does that make sense to everyone? Okay. Now I glossed over a very important thing right here. This is the 3D Gizmo, okay? When you're positioning layers in 3D space, the 3D Gizmo comes in extraordinarily handy. I recommend not working with the Gizmo straight out of the box if you are disoriented in your scene or if you're having a hard time knowing where you're positioning your layers, I recommend just positioning the layers using the properties here. So if I say, like, mine is 500, I know that's going to come closer to me, and I know it's 500 pixels on the z axis, and I don't have to worry about where it's actually positioned in the project. Does that make sense to everyone? Okay. But if you've only got, like, one or two layers, go ahead and use a 3D Gizmo. It's a lot of fun. If I hover over the arrow heads on the Gizmo, I can reposition the layer in 3D space just by dragging, and it will constrain to whatever axis I'm choosing on that individual layer, okay? So if I hover over the spheres here, what do you think it's going to do? Rotate. Exactly. So if I hover over the x or the y, I can rotate it, and it's going to rotate on the y axis, all right? Now if I click right here in the middle, this is where I can just go totally insane and reposition something in 3D space, and I'll get this little pop-up menu that's telling me where I'm positioning it, but can anybody really tell me where this is in relation to the other layers just by looking at that? Not very well, right? So when we get into positioning layers, I'm just going to undo a fair amount of what I've done. What I recommend doing is coming over here to the lower right corner of the Composition panel and changing the view to at least two views, okay? So it's really helpful like this when it's default and the active camera default. It's the same exact view, not helpful at all, okay? But what I can do is choose one or the other by clicking inside of each one, and it's really hard to see, but if you look in the upper right corner of each one of these panels, you can see there's a little blue triangle that pops up. That's letting me know which side I've actually selected. So here on the left, I'm going to leave it set as the active camera. And what that means is if I have cameras in the scene, that is the camera that is going to render out the active camera. Now I haven't added a camera into the scene yet, so the active camera is just the default view. Does that make sense to everyone? All right. Over here on the right, if I click on this panel on the right where it says default and I click on the dropdown, I have options, front, left, top, back, and right. So here, if I say left, you can see where the layers are in 3D space just by the lines that are represented, but you notice there's no depth. Does that make sense? No depth? This is called an orthogonal view. They've literally taken all the depth out of the view. So if you're having a hard time positioning layers in 3D space, switch to an orthogonal view, and that way you can see exactly where those layers are in relation to other layers. Does that make sense? Okay. Now I'm a little more artsy in terms of things I like to see. How many of you are visual learners. A lot of you? Yes? Okay. If I click on this, I can come here to custom view one, and this is kind of my favorite thing. If you've ever been to stagehand and you've been up in the rafters working with lights and stuff like that, you get a really interesting perspective of the stage. You can see exactly where everything is set up, and you can see where everyone is operating on the stage. So even though I position this 500 pixels forward, I can see where it is in relation to the other layers. So if I select trees 2 and I go ahead and say minus 250, it's going to move that layer closer, but not far enough... not so far that it's right next to the other layer. I can leave trees three at zero. And then for hills one, I'll go ahead and say 250. And notice I'm using round numbers. The reason I'm using round numbers, it's just easier for me to do math that way, okay? So now I've positioned all these elements in the scene. When I'm in my custom view, I can go ahead and change that view and orbit around by using these tools up here. These tools are really helpful. The way you can activate these tools is Shift 1, Shift 2, or Shift 3. And so if I press Shift 1, that gives me the orbit tool like this. I'm not using a three-button mouse. I could do Shift 2, and then I could position things up or down. And if I press Shift 3, I can dolly in or dolly out in the scene. Now notice as I'm making changes to custom view one here, nothing is changing in the active camera, okay? So this is literally just a reference, so as we make changes, I can see where things are in relation to each other, but I'm not necessarily affecting the final output by adjusting things in the active camera area. Does that make sense to everyone? Okay? So multiple views are very helpful. If I click on this, I could even go to four views. Now in my studio, I've got displays everywhere and giant displays, and so I'll use four up view quite often. And it works the exact same way as two up view. You can just specify in the upper left corner what you're actually looking at. So this is a front flat view, active cameras in the upper left, top and right, so I can see exactly where everything is positioned in 3D space. So I'm going to go back to two views just so we have a little bit bigger view in terms of everything. And then I'll grab my Selection tool because I want to make sure I don't accidentally start moving things around, okay? So how am I doing so far? We good? Okay. Awesome. Thank you. I love positive reinforcement. It brings the vibe up in the room for absolutely everyone, including me. So thank you.

Let's talk a little bit about what happened here when I positioned things in 3D space. Notice the edges of the mountains are appearing now, right? So if I were to render this out for my client, they would look at that and they would go, "I don't want it to look like, you know, my kid's grade school play. I want to actually have those go off the edge of the scene." So I want to make some adjustments to this, and a simple way to make an adjustment to a vector layer is to adjust the scale. So layer two appears to be relatively okay. So here, I'll go to layer three.

And if I move that, I can see, okay, yeah, that one's hidden enough. That's fine. Let's go to hills one. This is the one where I can see the edges. So I'll go to scale, and I'll just go ahead and increase the scale. And as I increase the scale, notice it's going to pop up a little bit, so I can just click on the y axis and drag it back down so we get the same general idea, and I'll do the same thing here for hills two. I'll press s for scale, and I'll increase that scale so we can see exactly what's going on in that scene, and I can go ahead and move that. And now we're no longer seeing the edges on the background of my project, okay? Now I'm going to go back to the active view, one up view, and I want to draw your attention to something. Notice in the active view, you can see the edges of the composition. But if I go here and I enable draft 3D, I can see the edges of the composition, and I could see exactly how much additional layer I have on the outside of that composition. So if you're kind of worried about running out of space, you can switch it to draft 3D, and then as you position your layers around, you'll see what's going to render in the dark area here, but you'll also see beyond the edges of the canvas so you know exactly where that layer completely exists in 3D space. Is that cool? Yeah, it's really helpful, okay? So draft 3D is kind of special in the sense that it will turn off lights and shadows. So let's add some lights and let's add some shadows. First thing I want to do is add a light into the scene. So I'm going to go up under Layer, and I'll choose New Light. And when I add a light, I get four different options when I'm in Classic 3D, okay? Each different renderer will give you different options, okay? So in Classic 3D, I have an ambient light, I have a spot light, I have a point light, and I have a parallel light, okay? So let me give you a quick breakdown. An ambient light will increase or decrease the overall brightness of the scene by whatever the ambient setting is. So if I said 100%, it would increase the intensity 100%. Does that make sense to everyone? It just... It's like a big giant soft box that fades up absolutely everything the same amount, okay? It's a great way to cheat a scene, all right? A spotlight is just like what you would imagine back in the day with stage lights. If you shine a spotlight on somebody, you can control the size of that spotlight, you can also control the feather or the edge of that spotlight, but that light is only focused on a very specific area, okay? If I go to point light, a point light is like taking a light bulb in a lamp without a lamp shade. So it's throwing light in all 360 degrees. Does that make sense to everyone? Okay. So I'm going to start with a point light. Oh, yep. Let me tell you about a parallel light. Parallel lights define physics and everything else because a parallel light will allow you to create a directional light, but it's not like a spotlight, it has no beginning, and it has no end. It just goes on forever in parallel. So if you want to create like a sun shadow that's going in a specific direction and you don't want to mess with all the settings of the spotlight, just create a parallel light and adjust the rotation and it will adjust the shadow accordingly. Does anybody think that's cool? It's a great hack if you, whatever, just want to create shadows. So parallel lights can have shadows, spotlights can have shadows, point lights can have shadows, ambient lights cannot have shadows, okay? So I'm going to add a point light because I think it's kind of simple.

Intensity, I'll leave it set up at 100. If you tint the light, it's the same thing as adding a gel on a light on the stage. So it's going to tint the entire scene. I've already got everything tinted these nice kind of blue hues, so I'm going to leave that alone, all right? Now fall off. This is fun. There are two kinds of fall off, okay? Smooth and inverse square clamps. If I choose smooth, I have two settings. I have the radius and I have the fall off distance. So the way this works is the radius would be 500 pixels from wherever my light is, okay? So if I position a light at 000 in the world, and I have a layer at 499 pixels, that layer is still going to get 100% bright intensity.

But if I move that layer to pixel 502, it's going to have 2 pixels less brightness because at radius 500, when it goes to 501, it starts falling off based on the fall off distance. So if I set the fall off distance to 500, it's going to be 1,000 pixels away from the light, the light's not going to affect anything. Does that make sense to everyone? Is this too basic or is this really good? Good? Okay. All right. So here, if I go here, inverse square clamps just allows you to set an overall radius because inverse square clamped is the mathematical equation for the natural falloff of light. So whenever you want to create realistic lighting and realistic shadows, you want to choose inverse square clamped. Does that make sense to everyone? Yeah? Okay. So the big question, why would I ever not use inverse square clamped? Can anyone guess? What's the big... the... What was that power? Horsepower. That's it exactly. When you're working with 3D, the biggest challenge is horsepower. Whenever you're rendering something or it's creating the scene for you, the computer has to process all that data. Well, when you use inverse square clamped, it has to do a mathematical equation for the Light Falloff for every single pixel. So if you just want to create a general look in a scene, you can just choose, like, a smooth falloff. And if you don't need realistic shadows, which most of the time we don't, it's perfectly fine. But if you're trying to create something photoreal, go ahead and boost it up and choose inverse square clamped, okay? In this instance, I'm going to choose none because I want to focus on casting shadows, okay? So shadow darkness 100, shadow diffusion 0, the diffusion is the softness of that shadow. I'm going to leave them nice and not diffuse, so they'll be nice and sharp. And when I click okay, it's going to add that light into the scene. And so now I don't know exactly where I'm positioning that light. But as I move the light in the scene, you can see I'm getting all kinds of shadows and other things that are actually happening. So in this instance, I would immediately go to two views so I can see exactly where my light is. And you can see that my light is in front of the scene. So as I move it down, what it's doing is it's taking the shadows from those foreground layers and blasting them all through the other layers, which is why it's creating this kind of muddy mess, okay? Now when I add lights, I like to keep them towards the top of my layer stack, same with cameras because it's just easier to keep things organized that way. You know exactly how they're stacked, okay? So with this ambient light, if I open it up and I go to my light options, I can adjust the shadow darkness... Whoops. Sorry about that. Let me go back over here.

I can adjust the shadow darkness just by scrubbing like so, and they won't be quite as distracting. But I can go ahead and move this up because I don't want those shadows to be like that. I just want to kind of create soft shadows that just add a little bit of depth. And I don't necessarily want shadows off the foreground elements. So what I'm going to do is move my... Move my light in the scene, and I'll move it down so I have some shadows in the background here. But now this is when I would go ahead and use an ambient light because an ambient light is going to allow me to cheat and reposition that light or just re-brighten the scene. So now if I go ahead and say T and adjust the intensity, I can set this to, like, 15, or maybe bump it up to, like, 35. And I can see the foreground layers, and I'm still getting the shadow from the other light that's actually in the scene. Does this make sense to everyone? So it doesn't have to be anywhere in particular in the scene. And as I'm looking at layer one, it's a little too high in the scene, so I'm going to go ahead and position it down like so, all right? So now we've covered the basics of light, positioning light, casting shadows. Let me talk about material options, okay? So these hills, I was seeing shadows already, but if I select layer six and press AA, it opens up the material options here, and I can see that cast shadows is on, but I can also see that except shadows is on. So if you've ever created a light and you've cast shadows, but you're not seeing shadows in the scene, you need to understand that the material options for all the layers in the scene will be really important because if they don't accept shadows, you won't ever see the shadows being cast by those layers. Does that make sense to everyone? So the relationship between a light and a layer is only strong as the material options inside of After Effects. Does that make sense to everyone? Okay. Awesome. If it ever doesn't make sense, just shake your head no and we'll go from there, okay? So now I want to go ahead and add a camera to the scene, okay? So let's go up under Layer, and I'll choose New, and I'm going to go ahead and choose Camera. So when I go to New, I'll choose Camera. And if I click on the Type, there are two types of cameras. We have a one-node camera, and we have a two-node camera, okay? A one-node camera will function just like holding a camera in your hand, okay? So what I mean by that is if I rotate this camera and I go like this, the view is going to go really strong this direction with a one-node camera, okay? But a two-node camera will function like this. Here's your camera. Imagine a string coming off the lens, and there's this thing called the point of interest. And as I move that point of interest, the angle of the camera will change based on where that point of interest moves. Does that make sense to everyone? Most people get frustrated because the first time they create a camera, two-node camera is the first one, and they try to rotate the camera, and the view isn't changing because you need to actually move the point of interest as opposed to moving the camera. Now why would you want a one-node camera? How many of you have ever seen those commercials where they have, like, a webpage and the mouse is flying around in 3D space? But you're seeing a really close-up view of the web page, and the camera's just moving around the web page. That's when a one-node camera is perfect because if I want to move around my notes here, I could take a one-node camera and literally just move it like this, never change the view. I just move it up and down on the x and y axis, and it's going to move perfectly parallel to whatever it's looking at, and we don't have to worry about anything with the two-node camera. So that's the power of the one node camera. Does that make sense to everyone? Okay, let's talk a little bit about actual camera settings. Notice we have presets, okay? Presets are based on typical DSLR lenses. How many of you have shot DSLR cameras before? Some of you? Okay. Awesome. If you're used to 50mm, what do they say about that in photography school? That is equivalent to the human eye, okay? So that's why it's the default for many different things. But I don't know if you remember years ago, years ago, I'm going to date myself here when the Simpsons were really popular and Fox was promoting the Simpsons and Family Guy and, like, all these things, and they created a series called Animation Domination. Does anybody remember that commercial? Yeah. It was awesome. I loved it. I still reference it to this day, obviously, okay? But what's cool about it is they went ahead and they created cameras and they chose really wide-angle cameras. So they didn't have to create these really drastic models. They created a wide-angle camera that gives you the distortion that you would get from being right next to something that's absolutely massive. So all they had to do was just animate the words falling down by adjusting the rotation on that axis and put a wide-angle lens right up next to it and you get that amazing distortion. Does that make sense to everyone? This is why we have all the different lenses inside of After Effects so you can create all these different kinds of views, okay? If you choose a longer lens, who can tell me what longer lenses do? Compression. Exactly. So if you're shooting a portrait of somebody and the moon is in the distance and you want to make the moon look bigger, go run way far back, put a 500mm lens on, and take a portrait of them. And that moon is going to be, like, right up next to them, right? So the same thing works inside of After Effects.

Down here, I can enable depth of field and when you enable depth of field, you can actually animate the focus of the camera. We're not going to jump deep into that today, but I just want you to understand that is an option, if you want to actually create depth of field. The other thing down here, I like to change units to pixels because I'm on a computer, I don't know what a millimeter looks like on my display versus my other display versus my other display. But I know very well what a pixel looks like. Does that make sense to everyone? Okay. Awesome. So I'm going to go ahead and click okay and I've created my camera in the scene. If you ever don't know what kind of camera you've created, if you double-click on the camera, it'll open up the camera settings. And you can see here, I've got a two-node camera, okay? So if I select this camera, and press the camera layer and press P to open position, if I hold down Shift as I scrub on the x axis, you can see I can get this nice orbit around by scrubbing on the x axis, and I could create depth immediately just by repositioning the camera like so. Does that make sense to everyone? The reason I held Shift is because it will scrub ten times faster than just scrubbing on the property itself. And since I'm trying to cover up a fair amount of space, this is a great way to do it. So I'm going to show you one way to create an orbit around effect and then I'm going to show you a basic camera rig, okay? So rigging is the term used for tying things together to make it actually easier to work with an object, okay? So if I have this position, I'm going to go ahead and scrub, and I'll have this start over here on the left-hand side. I know I can see the edge of that layer. I'm going to let it slide for now. I could adjust the scale of the layer, but you all know how to do that. So let's just roll, okay? I moved my position. I'll add a keyframe, and then I'll move down to maybe four seconds in the timeline, and I'll scrub on the x axis. And I just wanted to orbit around like so. And now if I want to see what this looks like, I'll just go back to the beginning of the timeline, and just to make it faster, I'm going to change back to one view. And now I'll just press the space bar and I can see what this is going to look like. And it's going to go ahead and cash frames. And as it's cashing frames, it's going to take a little minute. So in this instance, I may not necessarily want to leave it in normal 3D. I want to switch it to draft 3D. So now when I press the space bar, check that out. Did anybody notice the difference in speed between draft 3D and the other 3D? It was taking seconds to load each individual frame. But the second I went to draft 3D, I could go ahead and preview that really quickly. Now since I'm only animating four seconds of this, I'm going to go ahead and press N to change the end of the work area. So now when it loops, it's only going to loop in this one section. So my client looks at this and they go, "Okay, that's pretty cool. But I wanted to slowly push in on the camera on the scene as I'm making these adjustments." Okay. That's cool. So let's add a push. I'm going to start here on this one, but for this, I want to actually be further in the scene. So now I'm going to go ahead and just move in on the z axis like so just for this one keyframe. So now when I press the Spacebar here, you can see I've got my orbit around, and I have a zoom in, okay? And, of course, that looks horrendous because I'm using linear keyframes. So I'll click on the word position, and I'll press f9 to create easy ease on both sides of the key frame. And now when I preview this, you can see I have a little bit more smooth movement in the scene. Does this make sense to everyone? Yes? Does anyone think this is cool? Yes? Whoo! All right.

So let's talk a little bit about another way to animate a camera. We can add multiple cameras into a scene just by going up on your layer and adding a new camera. So here, I'm going to add another two-node camera into the scene and notice the scene changed. Whatever camera is on the top of the layer stack is what's actually going to render at that time. So I could actually cut from one camera to another in the scene if I wanted to.

Does that make sense? So you can animate multiple cameras, and you can cut back and forth between those cameras simply by changing the duration of the layer. Now I'm doing this because I want you to understand the basics of camera rigging. So in this instance, if I double-click on camera two, you can see I have a two-node camera. Rather than scrubbing the position data, I just want to do a quick orbit around in the scene. So I'm going to add a thing called a null object. If you go Layer, New, Null Object, this is a layer that does not render, but it exists in space. So I can see its handles here, but it is not going to render when I render it out, so you won't see anything in the scene. Does that make sense to everyone? Okay. So what I'm going to do is I want null two to be the parent of camera two. So I'll select camera two, and I will go to the parent and link pick whip, and I will point it at null two like so. And with null 2 selected, now if I enable 3D on that null, I can press R and I can adjust the orientation. And as I do that, now I'm not having to hold Shift. I can just go ahead and adjust this, and the camera is going to go ahead and move based on where the null is. Does that make sense? So now I can animate the position of the null, and the camera's going to follow the position of the null. If I animate the rotation, I can animate the position of the camera because it's, again, following that null. If we want to see exactly what this looks like, I'm going to go to custom view one, I'll turn off draft 3D so you don't quite see all the extra stuff here. And as I scrub on the orientation, you can see how that camera is actually being affected in the scene. Does this make sense to everyone? So this is a simple camera rig. The thing that I wanted you to notice with this when I set it up, I added the camera to the scene first in the default setting, and then I added the null, and then I did the parent. And that way, you know that the null is always going to be right at the end of the focal plane of where the camera is framed. Does that make sense? So you want to do the rigging very first after you add the camera. Cool? Okay. Awesome. So we've done lights, we've done cameras, we've done material options, let's dive into Substance 3D and talk about actual 3D objects in 3D space. Does that sound exciting? Okay. Whoo-hoo. Okay.

Thank you. Let's go ahead and jump into actual 3D space, okay? So if I double-click on Mountain 01, the composition we've been working on, I'm in the Classic 3D renderer. The second I switch to advanced 3D or Cinema 4D, I will get additional options for objects. So let's add something into the scene. I'm going to change my view back to camera two so I can see exactly what's happening here, and I'm going to add a shape layer. So I'll grab my Rectangle tool, I'll make sure none of the layers are selected, and I'll draw a shape into the scene like so, okay? Now once I've drawn that shape, I want to actually make this shape inhabit 3D space. To do that, I can go ahead and open up options for 3D once I enable 3D on that layer, okay? Notice when I enabled 3D, it went ahead and rotated because the camera is oriented off center. Does that make sense to everyone? Okay. So with this set up, now I can go to my geometry options, and I get an option called extrusion depth. So if I drag on extrusion depth and then I reposition this layer in space, let me go ahead and turn off this camera so we can kind of go back to a default view, and I can grab my Orbit Around tool. And as I orbit around, you can see now I actually have depth on my shape, okay? So I can extrude the shape in z space. And if I press V to grab my Selection tool, I can simply move it back in z space if I want to. I want to go ahead and have it a higher part of the scene. And it's not very bright. So I want to change the colors. And instead of this just being a box, I want it to be like an extruded outline frame for some text. Does that make sense? All right. So in my rectangle options, here, I can open up my rectangle path, and I can change the roundness so I can round the edges of this. And then since I used the Rectangle tool when I created this, I have a fill and a stroke. So I can simply turn off the fill, and with the stroke, I can make the stroke width wider, okay, and I can change the color so it's now white and it will show up as white as it can based on the lighting in the scene. Does that make sense? So if you ever add something to the scene and you can't see it, it could be because of where it's positioned in relation to the lights. So as I move this around, you'll notice as different lights hit it, it's going to change how it actually appears in 3D space. So inside of After Effects, in the advanced renderer or the Cinema 4D renderer, you can extrude shape layers and you can extrude text layers. Does that make sense to everyone? Okay. For Illustrator layers, if I open up the options here and I go to my geometry options, I get an option called curvature. Which means I can actually bend this layer in 3D space. So if I increase my curvature here, I'm actually bending this layer in 3D space. If I bring it up, you can see how it's just kind of bent, okay? And I can increase the number of segments to make this smoother as opposed to jagged, just understand as you increase the segments, you're going to increase the density of the model, and it's going to slow down the render and you may need to enable draft 3D or something like that. Is everybody good? Okay. Awesome. So when you are working with these shapes, you can change how something appears. I'm going to go ahead and solo this layer, like so, and I'll reposition it, okay? And I want it to actually still see the lights, so I'll make sure that the lights are rocking on there as well. Okay. And on this shape layer, if I press AA, I can open up my geometry options, and here are my material options. And this is where I can adjust the intensity or the shininess or the metallic nature of this. So notice as I adjust the metal here, it's changing how that light is bouncing off the inside here and I can actually get a little bit more shine on this. As I increase the shininess, you can see it's now making this look a little bit more plastic in the scene. Does that make sense? Okay. I can also make an adjustment to the bevel style. I like using convex, and that's just going to add a slight bevel around the edge of where the extrusion's happening. And notice when I did that, it added this little highlight around here, and it's taking a second to render because it's processing a fair amount of information. But once it actually processes, you'll see something not quite as jagged.

Let me change the magnification to, like... Oh, yeah. There we go. Of course. Once I change it... There we go. So now you can see by adjusting the material options, I've polished how this is actually interacting in the scene. Does anybody think that's cool? Yeah. A little bit. All right. Whoo-hoo! All right. So now let's jump into Substance. We've got a few minutes left. And I just want to show you some of the things that are possible. I'm actually in Substance Stager. There are several different Substance applications. Don't worry, this isn't a Substance class. I'm not going to dive deep in here, but I want you to understand some of the cool things that are in here. In Stager, we have assets that are in here, but also if you look for Substance in the Creative Cloud application, you'll find thousands of models of things that you want to work with. So in this instance, I... these are just Starter assets. There's 3D text, there's basic shapes, there's desks, there's lamps. You name it. Of course, I went in here, and I searched for a can. And there was this wet can. And if I went ahead and add it to the scene, I just drag it into the scene, and there it is, and it's showing me the can that's there, okay? Also, within all of the Substance options, there is an application that allows you to create custom materials, okay? So in that app, I could create my own custom materials. And what's cool with these materials is you can actually create geometry in the materials without actually having to create the geometry through the modeling process, okay? So that's what's going on here. This was a custom material, and I simply dragged it and dropped it right onto the can and it wrapped around here, and I can create this thing called UVs, which it creates by default. And I can adjust things like how the pattern is wrapped around the geometry simply by adjusting the different settings here. So I can adjust the pattern distribution, and it's going to change how the pattern is distributed around the can, and it's going to give me a different view here, like so.

I could change the pattern amount, like, how often it's actually patterned around in the scene, but what's cool is you notice I have a thing here called an environment. And in the environment, there's a light. And in that light, I have this image. And if I click on this, you can see a little preview of the thumbnail. This is called an HDRI image or high dynamic range image, okay? And what's cool about this is, this is how the lights are being created. This is wrapped around like a sphere, and it's projected on this 3D object. So what's cool is in this light, I can go ahead and move the rotation here and check it out, see how the lighting is changing just by moving that environment light. Does anyone think that's cool? Yeah. Okay. So check this out. If in Stager, if I like this, I can go File, Export, and I can export the entire scene. And when I go to the scene, I get options for formats. Now this is the coolest part. I've saved it for last. This is what I'm most excited about, okay? Just going to keep clapping, sorry, audio people, all right? So GLTF and GLB are the two formats that are supported in After Effects natively to import 3D objects in After Effects with materials and lights from Substance, okay? Or whatever other 3D application you might choose, if you can export a GLB or a GLTF, you can then turn around and bring that into After Effects. Does that make sense to everyone? Okay. So once you've done that, the process of importing those models are exactly the same as importing everything else. So I'm going to open up my future can reference here, and I just want to show you exactly what's going on, whoops, in the composition. If I go back to my project settings, here we go.

Oh, my... Okay. Window, Workspace. Sorry. Let's do this. Default. Reset.

There we go. All right. So my future can reference layer is down here, and you notice I have my GLB layer in my After Effects project. So check this out. If I grab one of these tools, if I press Ctrl 1 or not Ctrl 1, sorry.

If I press Shift 1 there we go, it helps to actually remember the keyboard shortcuts. If I press Shift 1, I can orbit around in the scene. Now this is drastically orbiting around in a different space because I actually moved where the can was in the scene, all right? So I'm going to create a new comp. I'm just going to go to Comp, New Comp, and I'll click OK. And in the new comp, I want to go ahead and add a new layer. I'll just go Layer, New, Solid, there we go. And for this solid layer, I'll enable 3D because I want to make sure that I actually have advanced 3D set up here. And I'll just rotate this so it's kind of a flat plane. I'll press R to open the rotation here. And there we go. That's perfectly flat. And now I'll go in and open my GLB model, which is right here, and I can simply drag it and drop it into the composition, and it pops up here. Now if you remember, when we had this in Stager, it was here. So why is this doing this? Well, that's because inside of here, I can control what camera is being used in the scene. So with the GLB layer, I can go to Layer, and I can go down here, and I can say Camera and I can say Create Cameras from 3D Model. And when I do that, it's going to go ahead and reposition the can based on where it was positioned in Stager in the scene.

Does that make sense to everyone? So I've extracted that camera data, noticed I have my render camera and I have a working camera, okay? There are two different ones that were in Stager. I don't need to worry about the working camera, but my render camera here, now this is how the scene is actually going to render. Now it's taking a while to actually render, so I'm just going to turn on draft 3D so you all can see that. And I'll select my layer here, and I can position it in z space. I can move it back in the scene like so, so we have a little bit more floor space, okay? But now I want to go ahead and light this scene. I could add lights the way that we did in Classic 3D, but I could also come up here and I could go to Layer, New, Light, and I could go to light type, and I could choose an environment light, okay? So with the environment light, I'll leave the intensity set at 100. I'll leave cast shadows on and shadow darkness at 100. And when I click OK, it's going to go ahead and add the environment light, and nothing's happened. Isn't that exciting? Yeah. So it's looking for what the environment is going to be. So in here, if I double-click on one of these HDRI images, you see I've got all these 360 unwrapped HDRI images. So I'm going to choose this studio 6 HDRI 1. And I'll drag it and drop it into the scene, like so. And it's going to pop up here, but now when I go to my environment light, under the Source options, I can choose the HDR layer because it is a layer in the After Effects composition. So when I choose that, now I'm going to get a much more dynamically lit scene. And if I open this up and rotate things, along the x, check that out. Look at the highlights that are actually rotating. Look at the shadows that are actually rotating. Well, you're not seeing the shadows because I'm in draft 3D. So I'll go ahead and turn off draft 3D and give it a chance to go ahead and render. And as it renders, you will actually see the shadows. So if I want to have cool highlights animated in the scene, all I have to do is animate the environment layer. Does anyone think that's cool? Yeah. It's really, really good stuff, okay? So if it's taking a long time to render, you can come up under your render options. And here, this is where I can choose the resolution that I want to render at. So I usually set it up to full at 16 megs. I can go ahead and bring the render quality down here a little bit. My computer is probably screaming because I also have Stager open in addition to a bunch of other things. But notice just by changing that, I'm automatically getting that resolution pop immediately. So this is actually a three-dimensional layer in three-dimensional space natively inside of After Effects, I can move it around, notice I'm not getting very much lag at all, and it's allowing me to create true 3D in After Effects in pretty close to real time, and I can go ahead and render whatever it is in my scene once I go ahead and queue up that individual render. Is anyone excited about this? This is huge news, okay? Native 3D support inside of After Effects. This is in the Beta version of After Effects. If you want to try this out, download the Beta and check it out yourself, okay? So I want to thank you all for coming to this session. If you have any questions, feel free to come up afterwards. But my name's Ian Robinson, and I really appreciate your time today. Thank you so much.

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