2D to 3D: Moving into the Next Dimension with After Effects

[Music] [Ian Robinson] This is 2D to 3D: Moving into the Next Dimension with After Effects. And my name is Ian Robinson.

I've been teaching After Effects a very long time since Version 4.1, I think was the actual time I started. So the reason I'm telling you this, you're in good hands in terms of this. And I created this class specifically because when people transition into After Effects, how many of you are still designers, like you do a lot of Photoshop and Illustrator? Yeah? Awesome. I love to see that. So a lot of people when they get started coming from that field, I was the same way. I actually started in Photoshop and then I would import layered Photoshop documents into After Effects and I would just animate those things. And then when 3D was enabled in After Effects, that was really when all the motion design work started coming in from the post houses where you used to have to have a half a million dollar box to be able to do all of these crazy things and now we can do it on our laptops. So in this session, we're going to cover a couple of different things.

We're going to do an intro to 3D and After Effects. It is somewhat as simple as just enabling 3D on a layer, but how many of you have ever had a little bit of a challenge when you're positioning things in 3D space? Lights, cameras, yeah. So I'll give you some shortcuts that you can use to reposition objects in 3D space.

If you have been a 3D designer and working in Maya for a decade, this may not necessarily be the session for you. But if you are trying to get up to speed in terms of working with After Effects, and make that transition from 2D animation into 3D, this is the session. I will be covering some of the fundamentals and the-- Well, the fundamental tools you need to understand to successfully navigate 3D in After Effects. But towards the end of the class, I'm going to jump into some more advanced things. So first off, what is a renderer? A renderer is also known as a render engine. This is how the software parses the data to recreate each individual pixel. So when you have a pixel and you have a light and you have a shadow, it has to compute where that pixel exists in 3D space, how the light bounces off that pixel, what the color of the pixel is, how the shadows are being created, etcetera. And there are currently three renderers in After Effects, and they all have slightly different capabilities when you're working in the application. So it's important to understand what those are, and we'll start by looking at the Classic 3D renderer, which is the very first renderer in After Effects where you could position 2D layers in 3D space. A lot of people call it postcards in space. That's an easy way to visualize exactly what's happening as you're moving these layers around. And then, of course, we'll get into lights, cameras, and material options. Now it's important to understand that the lights and material options will change based on the renderer that you choose. So we're going to go over the Classic 3D renderer and the Advanced 3D renderer. Of course, as we do that, I'll talk about positioning layers in a video scene using the 3D Camera Tracker. How many of you have ever used the 3D Camera Tracker? Some of you? A lot of you? Okay. Awesome. So based on that feedback, I will jump in a little more quickly with that, but don't worry if you've never used the camera tracker, I'll explain what's happening as we do it, but that's also an excellent introduction into 3D space in After Effects because when you bring these elements into 3D space...

Specifically using that tool, it can be a little daunting because you're matching something in 3D space that's literally sitting on top of a 2D image. And the technical things that are happening. I could remember the ridiculously high cost that the post house I was working for paid for software to be able to do that, and now we can just do it really quickly. But when you drop elements in, they are existing in a 3D world. It looks like it's actually interacting with the background. It's really cool. And then towards the end, we'll get to Substance Stager, and Substance 3D is a series of other 3D applications that you can utilize that are integrated with After Effects. So I'll show you how to create a pretty straightforward model in there. I can use it to actually source 3D models, texture 3D models, light those models, export models as GLB files, and then I can import those into After Effects to animate those, and they will actually exist in 3D space. The other cool thing, if you add lights and other things, you can extract those into After Effects so that you actually have the lights in After Effects. So if you start to position other 2D layers, they can also take on the similar effects of that. So as we do that, I'll talk about environment lights and adjusting material options for lights and shadows using that. Now other exciting news, Generate Video is now in beta. If you haven't been to the Adobe booth in the video section, you should definitely go. You can check it out. Think of it like Firefly, but for video. So you can write text prompts, and it will actually create moving video of scenes. So if you're interested in signing up for the beta, go ahead and scan that QR code. I'm going to leave it up there for another second or two, and then we'll hop into some other stuff. Now I'm going to pause for a quick second. How's everybody doing volume wise? Are you hearing me okay? Okay. This is really fun. It's like a silent disco. I feel like I could just do whatever and everybody out there wouldn't necessarily know. This is a lot of fun. All right. So does everybody have the QR stuff? You good with that? Please sign up and check it out and give feedback and utilize it and literally give feedback whatever you think. So please check it out.

Starting off in After Effects. Excellent. I can see that on the screen here. I'm going to go ahead and double-click in the project panel to open the Import File dialog box and navigate to where I saved my Illustrator file. I like working with Illustrator files when I'm positioning 2D layers in 3D space because they are vector based, as I'm sure you all know. So if I bring the camera up close, I can turn on continuously rasterize, and I'm not going to lose any quality for that imagery. If I am taking a layered Photoshop document and positioning that, you just need to be aware when you are positioning the camera close to layers, the size of those layers. So it's usually not that much of an issue, but if you're flying the camera right up close to an image, you should use a nice high resolution image when you're doing that, all right? Okay. Or at least high pixel size X and Y, okay? So when I click Import, it's going to ask me Import Kind. I'm going to choose composition and then under Footage Dimensions, I'll choose layer size. This way, when I go to rotate the layers in After Effects, the bounding box will only be around any of the painted pixels. If I chose document size, the edges of the layer would go all the way to the edge of the document, and that really isn't helpful in many situations. So a lot of the time, I'd say 99.999% of the time I choose layer size, and I click OK. So I'll double-click on the composition to open it in the Composition panel and the Layers panel.

Now I have a couple different shapes that I've used to create this cloud, and I want to select all of these layers pretty quickly and easily. So I'm going to click on the first layer, hold down Shift, and click on the last layer for those clouds. I'm going to come over here to my color swatches, and I'll click on these label colors, and I'll choose a purple label color. That way in the future, if I reposition other layers in the layer stack, and I still want to select all the cloud elements, I can just click on that label and say select label group, and it will automatically select all of those layers even if they're divided up in different spaces, okay? Now let's talk about the 3D aspect of things. First off, I'm going to click here in the Composition panel, and I'll press Shift+/ to have it automatically resize to the size of the window. As I'm working, I like to have this drop-down on the left set to Fit or Fit up to 100%, and then this drop-down I like to set to Auto. The reason I do this, if I'm working and I have a lot of layers and this goes down to 50%, it's now going to render four times faster because yeah, half the pixels vertically and half the pixels horizontally. So if you're working in 3D space and you have a 200-layer composition, sometimes it makes sense to work at a smaller resolution like this so that things can speed up. I'll show you other ways to speed things up as we continue working. I'm just trying to give you a good foundation for working in this. And don't worry, if you've known everything that I've shown you so far, just laying the foundation, it's going to start picking up speed here in a second, but it is 8:20 something in the morning, the day after MAX Bash. So I'm trying to just ease everybody back into this. Does that sound like a good deal? Thumbs up? All right. Awesome. So the cloud, I want to draw some delineation between each one of these circles because right now they're all white and they're just sitting over top of each other. There's no delineation. So one of the easiest ways to do that is to reposition these elements in 3D space. So I can either click directly in the Composition panel, or I can select elements here in the timeline. I highly recommend selecting elements in the timeline when you first get started, just because sometimes it's a little hard to select a layer in the Composition panel if you've got a whole bunch of layers, okay? Also, when I enable 3D, I'm going to see some additional tools. So on this layer C1, if I go to the middle of the timeline and enable 3D by clicking this little box here on this layer, now, I get the 3D gizmo, which is extraordinarily helpful. I'm sure you've seen this in a lot of different Adobe apps. It's great. If I hover over any of the axis handles, I can reposition those layers in 3D space. So if I hover over this one, that's a Z and drag, it's actually moving forwards and backwards in the scene, but it's really hard to get a perspective as to where I'm moving this without having a different view in the scene. So I'm going to make this panel a little larger just by hovering over the edges of the panel, like so.

And let me just show you this really quickly. When I have a layer selected, on the right-hand side, we have the Properties panel, and it's showing me X, Y, and Z. If I select another layer where 3D hasn't been enabled, you also notice that there is no Z property. So when you enable 3D on a layer, you get a lot more information here in the Properties panel that you can also use to reposition the layer. So instead of the widget, I can just click and drag here in the Properties panel and reposition those elements. Now notice when I reposition this in Z space, I'm still not getting much delineation. So this is when I'd want to actually add a light. But before I add the light into the scene, let me come over here to the right side and show you these drop-downs. The first one here is my Renderer drop-down. So I am in Classic 3D, which allows me to create postcards in space, okay? I can move those layers in 3D space. Advanced 3D will allow me to import actual 3D models like GLB files and OBJ files. I can import those and position those in 3D space. I recommend working with GLB files, and I'll show you that here in a little bit. And then there's the Cinema 4D renderer, which allows you to open Cinema 4D Lite, and that has a whole host of things. I'm not going to be diving into that for this session, but I just want you to know that it's there, okay? So with Classic 3D enabled, I can click on the next drop-down, and you notice I have Views. And each of these different views will change dependent upon what I choose from the drop-down. So if I click on top, I am viewing this directly from the top of the scene. When you have a layer selected, it allows you to see more clearly where that layer is, but notice if I select these other 2D layers, it's just giving me the bounding box because those aren't in 3D space. If I were to render the scene right now, it would be 100% black because there is no depth on a 2D layer when you're viewing it from the top. These types of views are called orthogonal views, which means they literally remove all of the depth from the scene. So I am looking at it directly from above, which is why I can see just that little line, okay? Now changing these views can be helpful if you're just using one panel, but a lot of times, I like to use at least two views. So I'm going to switch this back to Active Camera, and I'll go to this next drop-down and choose 2 Views. Okay? Now on the left side here, I have the Active Camera chosen, and if I go to the right side, I can click on it, and it's hard to see, but there are little blue triangles around the edge, letting you know which side is active when you've clicked in that area. So for this, I like to use Custom View 1, or if I'm positioning things in Z space, I like to use the Top view. So let me select C1 here, and I'll just move it forward in the scene. And I want to enable 3D for all of these other layers, so I'll just click and drag down. And if you hold your mouse as you drag down, 3D will be enabled for all of those other layers. So if I just click on each different one, I can reposition it in 3D space, and you'll see I get the little lines letting me know exactly where I've positioned everything. So you can see that they are all offset, and that's giving me a much better view. If I click on Custom View here, now I can see it as though I'm sitting up in the rafters. If I was up here in those lights, I could see what's going on, on the stage here. So think of it like being a stagehand. You're sitting up in the rafters above the entire stage, and you can see everything, okay? So now I'm going to add a light. I'll go up under Layer and choose New, Light. There are four different kinds of lights in the Classic 3D renderer. We have a parallel light, a spotlight, a point light, and an ambient light. So a parallel light is really interesting. There is no beginning and there is no end. It is infinite, okay? But what it allows you to do is you can rotate that light around, and it will change the angle of the light that's actually being created. It's a really fun light. You can cast shadows with that, and then the spotlight is probably what most everyone is familiar with. It's like when you're on stage and you have a literal spotlight, you can control the size of the light itself, as well as the softness of the edge around the light. And you can control where that light is pointing using a point of interest on that light, okay? Now the one I like people to use when they first get started is the point light, because it is the most simple one to think about. Think of a light bulb on a lamp without a lamp shade. It's just throwing light in all directions, okay? Also, I can choose Falloff. Falloff is how the light actually degrades over time. So we don't have any really strong lights here, but if you look at some of those lights coming down on the wall there, you can see how the light actually changes as it goes over the distance, right? That makes perfect sense. If I click on this Inverse Square Clamped, it will simulate the way light falls off in the real world, which is an exponential fade. It's not a gradual fade, okay? The thing to understand with Inverse Square Clamped, if you have 12 lights in your scene and you've got 300 layers, it might take a lot to process that information because it's doing exponential processing for each individual light. So you have another option, Smooth. Smooth allows you to just control the Falloff like this. The radius is how far that light goes based on the intensity setting. So if I set the intensity at 100, at the center of the light, it'll be 100% bright. And then for 500 pixels, it'll still be 100% bright. But when I go to the Falloff Distance from pixel 501 to pixel 1,000, it's going to go from a 100% brightness all the way to nothing at all. Does that make sense to everyone? The reason I like to explain people that and just choose smooth is because if I add a light into the scene, and I position this light way over on the side, and it's 1,500 pixels away from the objects in the scene, do you think I'm going to have the ability to see those objects? No. Right? So you need to keep that in mind when you're working with those things. I like to enable Cast Shadows, and in this instance, I'll leave the Darkness set up at 100 and the Diffusion set to 0. So it's going to create really harsh shadows, like you're in the middle of the desert, and it's like 1:00 in the afternoon, okay? When I click OK, that point light will be added to the scene, and notice immediately, you can see the clouds are black up here. Who can tell me why none of these other elements look like they're affected by light? Yeah. Not 3D. Exactly. Okay? So I love the fact that you can merge 2D and 3D in here, but in this instance, I want to move this light closer to those clouds. So I'm going to show you a really cool shortcut that I think a lot of people miss. If I were to move this light exactly where, one of these layers exist like C1, I can hold down the Shift-Command, and when I click and point it at that layer and let go, it's automatically going to reposition that light exactly on the anchor point of the layer that I'm pointing it at. Did everybody see what I did right there? I'll just undo this. Undo that. Okay. I'll add my New, Light. Layer, New, Light, okay? So if you click and point the pick whip, you can click and drag and it will give you-- Sorry, it will give you a hint, hold Shift to move the layer to the location of the parent. So if I hold Shift and let go, you can see the light is now positioned right on that layer. Does anybody think that might be remotely helpful for you when you're positioning those layers in 3D space? Yes? All right. Is that new to any of you? New stuff? Yes. Okay. Awesome. So once I position that, I can hover over the Z-axis and I can just move it like so, but notice as I'm moving this, what's the deal? If I double-click here, I've got Cast Shadows. Why am I not seeing shadows? Well, when you enable 3D on a layer, you need to be able to access the Material Options. So the keyboard shortcut for that is pressing A+A on your keyboard, okay? When you press A+A, it'll open the Material Options, and now, I can say Cast Shadows On, and it's automatically going to cast a shadow for that individual element. So now, I'm going to grab my point light and reposition it by hovering over the axis handle on my 3D gizmo, and so now, I can control how that shadow is cast. And if the shadow is too dark, I can just open up my light options and change the darkness down a little bit, so that it's not quite so harsh, and now I can see that. If I go to these other layers and press A+A, there are other things you need to be aware of. For example, Accept Shadows. It's on by default, but if I turn that off, then I wouldn't necessarily see the shadows on that other layer. So it's important to know when you are enabling Cast Shadows, you need to go to the other elements and make sure that they're accepting shadows if you're not seeing those. Does that make sense to everyone? This allows you to have more control than the real world because when I shine a light on something in the real world, it's always going to cast a shadow, but I can position something here and not have it cast the shadow. The other thing that's important to understand, if I go up and I adjust my point light here, I can change the color of that light. Let's say I want it to be blue, okay? And I click OK. Now the entire cloud is blue because my light in essence has a gel on it, and it's casting blue in that specific area. But once again, if I go to my material options and I don't choose Accept Lights like I can turn it from on to off, now it's going to go back to white. It's still going to transmit a shadow, but it's not accepting the light itself. So the light won't change how that actually looks in the scene. Does this make sense to everyone? Okay, I hope I've covered a lot of things that people find a little bit challenging with this, all right? Now I gave you my little shortcut for repositioning elements in 3D space. We talked about adding lights into the scene. We talked about Material Options for those individual lights. All of these things will work universally across all the different renderers. You'll have Material Options. You'll have the ability to Cast Shadows. You'll have the ability to use the Shift parent technique to move layers in 3D space. That doesn't matter depending on the renderer that's across all renderers. Does that make sense to everyone? How's my pace? Are we doing okay? Okay. So let's check out another way to move in 3D. But before I do that-- Sorry, I want to make sure we do have a question microphone here, if anybody wants to ask a specific question about anything that I've done, or you could just raise your hand and ask me, and I'll repeat it so that everybody else can hear it.

But does anyone have any questions about enabling 3D, positioning 2D layers in 3D space, using the 3D gizmo, using multiple views, changing the resolution, any of the stuff that we've covered up to this point? Are we good? Okay, you guys are making me feel like a master because nobody has any questions. You okay? All right. Yes. Okay. Awesome. All right. Let's move on to the next exercise. I'm going to go ahead and close this.

Don't save, and I'll double-click in the project panel to import-- Actually you know what, I don't need to import. I'll just open up the project.

So in here, I have my Live_Track project. I'll click Open, and this is what we'll go ahead and create in this instance. We're going to use the 3D Camera Tracker to actually move through a scene and place text in 3D space. I did have the text flicker here that is not an error that's how it's designed.

There is a shadow but notice as I'm moving it actually has depth of field. So the elements will blur in and out as I'm moving across those individual elements. Does this look like something you guys might want to learn? Thumbs up? Yes? I hope so because this is what I got, all right? So here, I'm going to go to the start section, and in this Composition for the start, I have a Precomp. I always like showing this because a lot of times when people are working with footage that they want to actually composite other elements into, they've used the Warp Stabilizer. So if I double-click to open the Precomp, the Warp Stabilizer is applied to this individual layer. Whenever you use the Warp Stabilizer, if you are going to add things on top of it, select that layer and go up under Layer and choose Pre-compose, okay? This will move that layer into the Precomp, and, actually, let me just show you what it looks like so I can access that menu. When I go to Pre-compose, I want to move all the attributes into the new composition. This will move that effect into the Precomp.

This is only for a processing benefit that isolates that effect to be processed on its own individual thing, okay? So now, I can go ahead and add another effect on top of this, and After Effects will not look at one effect, and then mix it with the next effect. It's literally going, let me process the stabilization. Okay. Cool. Now I'm going to go ahead and do the 3D Camera Track. So if I go up under Animation, I can go to Track Camera, and it's going to analyze the scene. As it's analyzing the scene, what it's doing is it's looking at the movement of the camera in the scene, and it's trying to find points in the scene to create a point cloud. And based on the movements of the point, of those clouds, which exist in 3D space, it's going to reposition or it's going to recreate the position of the camera in 3D space, creating the exact same move that I created when I shot the actual footage itself. Does that make sense to everyone? Okay. Now I'm not going to sit here and let this go through all of that stuff right now because I've got the finished composition. So let me go ahead and-- Here, let me come back here. I will just duplicate this.

There we go.

Okay. So I've got this, and in my Effect Controls, there's my 3D Camera Tracker, and I have all of these points. So the way this works, I can just hover over any section, and if I click, that will select those points. And if I right-click, I can create a solid and a camera. But let me show you one thing. If you're going to be working in 3D space, I want you to choose this Set Ground Plane and Origin. When you do that first, now if I choose Create Solid and Camera, when it positions that solid into the scene, if I select it, notice the position data is 0, 0, and 0. So now, if I create any more additional 3D layers and I change their position to 0, 0, 0, it's going to be exactly where I had it set up in the target. Does that make sense to everyone? Yes. I like to create layer solids because eventually, I can turn them into shadow catchers, okay? So if I want to add text into the scene, I can come back to my camera tracker and I can come right back to this point, and I can right-click and say Create Text. It's going to add text into the scene. Here's my text, and I'm going to go over to the Properties panel, and I will center that text, and I'm going to use my 3D gizmo. If you hover over the circles on the 3D gizmo, you can actually rotate, and there was an example of sometimes it being hard working in the Composition panel. Now there's my text, like so, okay? And I can rotate that if I want to reposition it. Okay, on this layer, and I can go ahead and change the size of that text. All right. And now I can add a light into the scene. So I'll just go up under Layer, and I could choose New, Light, and I'll add a Point light, okay? And I'll click OK. It's going to Cast Shadows, and I'll click OK. And that light's added over here. So to reposition it, I'll use Shift+click, and I'll reposition it to the middle of the scene, and I can simply move that light up and move that light back. And now it's going to go ahead and cast light around that text. But what I need to do to clean this up is adjust some of the Material Options, okay? So here's my light. It's casting shadows. I've got my shadow catcher on here. But with my point light, I want to go ahead and make sure that it looks pretty good, okay? Yeah, that's great. For my text, I want to open up Material Options by pressing A+A, and I will make sure that Accept Lights is Off. And now I can actually see my white text. And if I come down here under my Track Solid, I can press A+A. And for my Material Options, under Accept Shadows, I can change it from Off to Only, and now I'm only going to see the shadows on that section. So here, I can just bump my text up a little bit, and there. Now I've got my actual shadows that are being cast in the scene. So if I want the shadows to move, I can just simply animate the light. And if I want the light to be stronger or brighter, I can increase the radius of how far the light is being thrown. I'm going to go ahead and dissect my reference element that I have here. So here's my Point Light, and here's my shadow catcher that is catching the shadow of the words that's coming off. And now, I want to show you the depth of field, okay? So when I right-clicked and I said Create Camera in Solid, it created the camera. And if I double-click on the camera, I can come here and Enable Depth of Field, okay? With depth of field enabled, usually, what I do is I set an F-Stop. So for this F-Stop, I set it to 2.8, which is normally a relatively shallow depth of field. Obviously, I know some of you probably shoot at like 1.8 or something like that if you really want that soft effect. But once I do that, then I can crank up the blur level to really determine how blurry I want the text to be when it's actually out of focus, okay? And I can also adjust the focus distance to determine exactly how far or close it needs to be from that object before I see the blur. And I'm holding down Shift as I click and drag to actually preview what it's going to look like as it's moving through the scene, okay? Also, with camera options, I like to switch my units to pixels because when you're working in After Effects, most of the time, you're working with pixels. So I know if I position something 500 pixels away, if my light is 1,000 away, it may or may not light the scene depending on the radius and the falloff. Does that make sense to everyone? Awesome. So let me take you through cameras for one hot second. There are two kinds of cameras in After Effects. There is a One-Node Camera and a Two-Node Camera. A One-Node Camera will function just like you're holding the camera in your hands. So if I take this camera and I rotate it, like I'm pointing it at the crowd, and I go to rotate it with my hands, it's going to pan across the crowd. That makes perfect sense, right? If I reposition it in 3D space, like it's sliding on a dolly, it's just going to move in a perpendicular fashion to you all as I'm moving my hands around. Does that make sense to everyone? Okay. So a One-Node Camera is really independent. A Two-Node Camera works as though there is a string tied from the center of the CCD right behind the lens, through the lens, to whatever the point of interest is. So imagine if I was shooting video of a person, and they were holding on to the point of interest, and they moved around the scene, the camera would automatically follow them because that string is tied to them. Does that make sense? If they're stationary, and I go to move the camera on the X-axis, the camera is not going to move perfectly perpendicular. It's going to rotate because it has to maintain the framing on the point of interest. Does that make sense to everyone? Yeah? Okay. So if I know I just want things to reveal vertically into the scene, I will choose a One-Node Camera, and I can just animate that on the Y-axis, and any layers that are in 3D space will appear or disappear as the camera moves up and down. Does that make sense? If I'm trying to frame a specific element, then I'll choose a Two-Node Camera, and I'll position the point of interest on the point of interest, and I'll go ahead and move the camera around and take advantage of the fact that it is, in essence, tied to that point of interest as I'm moving things. Does that make sense to everyone? Yeah? Okay. Awesome. So let's pause for a hot second. I want to make sure that we're doing okay with all of this. Does anyone have any questions about the 3D Camera Tracker? Yes.

Give an example of a Two-Node Camera. You want to see it? Yeah. Okay, so give me one second here. I'm going to double-click my hills, and I'll import it as a comp, retaining layer sizes, and I'll click Import. When I double-click on the hills here, I'm going to go ahead and enable 3D for all of the layers except the background solid, okay? And I'll just reposition these layers in 3D space. I'm going to go over here. Let me make the window larger, and I'll make the view from the top so I can just quickly grab some of these elements and reposition them in 3D space just a little bit like so. Okay. And then my clouds, I'll just move that back.

Move this here.

Okay, I think that's enough with repositioning things. Let me go ahead and switch this view back to active camera. Now you can see this hill as I moved it, it really drastically changed the overarching view of things. So I might want to reposition those layers just using the 3D gizmo instead, okay? And I can see the edge of that one. Nope. It's this one. There we go. So since this is vector based, I can pretty easily just press S, and I'll crank up the scale, and I'll enable continuously rasterize. That way, it won't lose any resolution as it's over 100%. Okay. So now these layers exist in 3D space. If I go up under Layer, New, I can say I want a New Camera. And first, I want to show you how a One-Node Camera works. When I click OK, now the One-Node Camera is here, and I had Depth of Field enabled. So I'll just turn that off and click OK. So here's my camera, and I can come over to my Camera Options, and I can scrub on the Y position. And notice now it's moving perfectly perpendicular to the individual elements in the scene. Does this make sense to everyone in terms of how you're seeing it? Yeah? Okay. Awesome. It's important that I show the One-Node Camera before I do the Two-Node Camera so that you can understand the difference, all right? So I'm going to go up under Layer, and I'll choose New, Camera. And instead of a One-Node, I'll choose a Two-Node, and, yes, you can have multiple cameras in any composition. And when I click OK, it's going to give me the view of this individual camera. So now if I actually scrub on the position data, notice it's rotating in the scene because the point of interest is in the center of the scene, okay? So I want to actually keep the clouds framed in that scene. So the camera here, I've got my Transform options. There's my point of interest. I can move it. I can actually go to two views if I want to, and there's my point of interest. I'm going to show you a little thing called rigging, okay? I'm going to go up under Layer, and I'll choose New, Solid. And, actually, you know what? I'll go up under Layer and choose New, Null Object, okay? And for this null object, a null object is a layer that exists in the composition, but it does not render, okay? So this object, I want it to be positioned where the cloud is. So I'm going to use my keyboard little parent trick, and I'll hold down Shift, and I'll point it at C1. And so now that null is in that space. And then I'll go to Camera 2 here, and I want to look at the Camera Options. There's my point of interest. And if you look on the right, I have a pick whip here as well. So I want that point of interest to follow this null because the null is in the middle of the cloud. So I'm going to go to the point of interest, and I will point it at that null. And now it's going to look at the position of that individual layer, okay? Why is it giving me an expression there? Hold on. Where is it? Oh, okay. That's fine. It's parenting, but I wanted it to actually look at the position. Sorry. There's the position of that. So now the camera is pointed at that individual element. Do you guys understand what I just did to fix that issue? I was just having it parent, but I wanted it to actually follow the position of that null object. Yes? The question was, can I just have it, look at the clouds? Since the cloud is made up of multiple layers, I chose to just have a null object instead of the cloud. But if the cloud was a single layer, I would have just had it point at that individual layer, okay? But the beauty of the null is the fact that I can reposition the null, and it will change what the camera's actually looking at.

And so now if I go to move my camera, you can see it's always going to be pointed at the clouds. And once again, we can see it more clearly in this instance because I'm using two views with Custom View 1 here, so I can see what is actually going to render out of the active camera, and I can also see where things are positioned using Custom View 1. Does that make sense to everyone? All right. I have another question. Yes. So the question was if I could throw a light into the scene. So I'm going to go ahead and add a Point Light into the scene that Cast Shadows, and I'll click OK. And there's my Point Light, and I can reposition this just very quickly utilizing the 3D gizmo. So I can light the individual clouds like this, and I know this is just such a beautiful scene. Here let me move my null object a little bit so it's not quite always following the clouds. But let's say I like how this point light is shading the clouds, but I really want to have the rest of the ground, be lit a little more brightly. But I don't necessarily want to have to reposition a bunch of lights in the scene to light all of those layers. That's when I can go up under Layer and choose New, and I can go to Light, and this is where I would choose an ambient light. This is the fourth kind of light. This just increases the brightness of everything in the scene. So if I click OK, now all the other layers are going to be brighter. And as I change the intensity of this, it will allow me to adjust the intensity of these other things. So of course, I'm not seeing shadows on the clouds because I haven't enabled that. So if I come up and select my label group, I can press A+A, and it's going to make everything cast shadows because this comp has all the same layer group, but that's fine. I'll say Cast Shadows, and I'll turn that On, and it's going to take a little second. And now I can see the shadows between those elements. So now I can adjust the light, and I can reposition the individual layers, and it will change how that scene actually looks. So now if I move this light around, you can see how the shadows are being cast or whether they're being accepted, etcetera. Is that good? Okay. How's everybody doing? Does this make sense? Is everybody confident with 2D layers and 3D space a little bit? Yeah. So in the previous example here, let me go ahead and open that comp, okay? The way I created the point cloud was I selected the layer, and I applied the 3D Camera Tracker effect. So I went up under Animation, and I chose Track Camera, and after it finished the analysis, if you have that effect selected, that will show you the 3D point cloud. But you won't see the cloud unless you have the effect selected in the Effect Controls panel, then you can see the cloud, and you can go back and you can make your adjustments. So after I did that track, I could move later down in the Composition, and here, this is where I could add an additional text layer if I wanted to, and I could rotate this layer and not have it be affected by lights.

Okay, Accept Lights Off. So now I can actually see it, and I could repeat the same process that I did with a shadow catcher, etcetera. So if I need to add a shadow catcher in here, the keyboard, parenting shortcut I like to use, just go ahead and add a solid, enable 3D, and then hold down Shift, and have it automatically move to that other position. Then all you have to do is just rotate it to get the specific angle properly. Does that make sense to everyone? Are there any more questions before I move on to Substance 3D? Yes. [Man] As far as footage, using footage and tracking it. Uh-huh. Sometimes we get mixed results as far as camera tracking being successful or not. Yes. Can you give tips on types of footage, or formats, or-- - Yes. - That sort of thing? Yes. Yes. So he was asking for tips as far as ways to make the 3D Camera Tracker...

Work a little better in certain instances.

One thing is make sure you're working with footage that is lit properly. If it's not, what I would do is do a basic color correction so that it's actually lit properly, and then I would Pre-compose it the same way I did with the stabilization. That way, that process is off on its own thing, and then I would go ahead and apply it. So that's the first easiest thing in terms of stuff.

The other thing is just the quality of the footage itself, compressions. If you have a chance to shoot it at, say, ProRes, or RAW, or something like that, that's going to give it a little bit information, additional information. Also with the 3D Camera Tracker itself, there are some options you can use. If I come down here and go under Advanced, there is this number here that shows me the average error. Anything under 0.5, I'm usually really happy with. If it's higher than that, I might want to turn on Detailed Analysis. Now this is not on by default because a lot of times, if there's too much detail in the scene, you can get things jumping around because it's seeing all the little points. But sometimes, if it's not tracking properly, you want to turn on Detailed Analysis. Another thing you can do is this drop-down where you can specify whether it's a Typical Scene or a Mostly Flat Scene. But yeah, those are the things that I would do just really quickly to help make that work a little bit better. The other thing you can do if the 3D Camera Tracker is not working, you can utilize some of the other methods of tracking inside the application, such as the Boris FX plugin which has excellent-- It's called Mocha. They have Mocha lite, that's integrated into the application. That is a Planar Tracker, but that's like a whole other session. So we could go down that for the next time, all right? Are there any other questions about lights and positions? Because I'm going to go into Substance, and then we'll go from there. Yes. So his question was, if I want to insert a 3D element into the motion track, is this the same workflow? And it is the exact same workflow. I would create a layer solid, and then I would drag my 3D element into the scene, and I would use the Shift parent to reposition that in the proper space, and then I would just turn off the Layer Solid unless you wanted to use it as a shadow catcher. There are other ways to you can Option drag and swap it with the Layer Solid, but I personally like to have the solid and the element in there as well in case I need a shadow catcher, okay? The other thing with the shadow catcher, you want to make sure it's large enough to catch the entire shadow, but you don't want to make necessarily layer solids that are 20,000 pixels x 20,000 pixels because that's a lot of processing power. Just make it large enough to catch the shadow. If you're seeing the edge of it, reposition that layer solid. Does that make sense to everyone? Okay. Awesome. Let's jump into Substance because this is one of my favorite things. This is called Substance Stager. A lot of people refer to Substance 3D as just Substance 3D, but there are four applications, okay? Now if you are primarily a motion designer or you are primarily a designer who just needs to get a 3D element to drop into a project, I recommend using 3D Substance Stager, okay? The reason is this. I could go into all of these things, and it could get overwhelming really quickly, but you don't really need to dive into all of these things. I want you to just focus on this panel right here, okay? On the left-hand side, I can choose Models. So if I scroll down through here, I have a whole bunch of models, okay, that I can choose from, and there are more substance models through Creative Cloud. So if you look for Substance Models on Creative Cloud, it'll take you to the website, and there are literally tens of thousands of models that you can utilize. Okay? I want to utilize a chair, so I'm going to go to search, and I'll say chair. And when the deck chair comes up, that's the one that I want to use. So I can just drag it and drop it into the scene, or let me press Escape there. I can just click on deck chair, and it's going to be added into the scene. If I need to frame this, I'm going to press F, and that'll automatically frame the chair in the scene. Now once I've searched for something just like in After Effects, you want to make sure to clear the search field. And then, I can go to, say, my materials, and I want to apply some materials. So if I scroll down here, you can see I've got asphalt. I have fabric. I want to add a fabric to this chair, okay? So I'm going to scroll through here and see. Let's see which one I'd like to add.

Yeah, I'll do this like matte tweed fabric. And when I drag it and drop it, it's going to try and apply it to absolutely everything on the chair, which is not at all what I want. So I'll just undo that, and I can go over here on the right and open up my scene, and there is my seat_mesh. So if I select that over here, now when I go ahead and drag this and drop it, it knows I'm just trying to apply this onto the mesh, okay? But look at how beautiful that looks. If I hold down Alt on Windows, Option on the Mac, and I left-click, I can rotate around the scene. If I middle-click, I can pan around the scene, and if I right-click, I can zoom in and out on the scene. I'm using a three button mouse from, the folks at, Logi, okay? You can go check out their stuff. They've got cool stuff.

I can also come down here and search for metal materials, but let me show you if I have my object material applied here, I can increase the repetition of this material if I wanted a tighter weave. Can you guys see how the weave is getting tighter or looser as I go ahead and scrub through? So I can make this look a little more rough, or a little more refined, okay? So let me look at some of the metals here.

Let's say, I want to choose a copper looking metal, okay? This is slightly brushed copper. I'll drag that and drop it onto the frame of the chair. There's one section.

There's another section. There we go. And then I could do it on this last one here, okay? So now I have this actually set up like a beautiful brushed metal. Now I can come over here under my Lights, and it's going to show me no results because I didn't clear that out. So make sure you clear it out. And I can scroll down here, and I can choose a terrace lighting setup. And now I have all of these lights that have been created in the scene, and I can adjust exactly how the shadow works by going to the rotation of my environment light. And I can even come down here and go to a Generative Background, and I can type a prompt, and it will generate a background for me. Now it's not going to be a 3D background. It'll generate a still element background, okay? So let me just show you the finished version that I did with a background. I'm not going to save what we've done here, and I'll just open up that scene. It's going to take a hot second to load. But this was a generated background that I've done for this, and I could export a layered Photoshop document, with a scene/objects, and I could also export models. So here, I could say a GLB model, and it will just export the model of the chair. Does that make sense to everyone? Okay. So generating the background works great if you want to create a composite here in Substance Stager.

And if you want to export a layered Photoshop document, you could have it as a flat element to composite elements on. But most of the time, I'm just coming over here to create a chair that I can then export a GLB model into, okay? So now if I come over to my Project panel and double-click, I can open up my Import dialog box here. And in my models, I have my chair that I've created. And here, I could just-- Let me choose this one. I'll go ahead and import, and I can add my chair into a composition. And when I do that, it's going to ask me, Object Scale. Do I want the position changing while scaling? Do I want it to affect the position or not? I could choose the axis. I could enable preview, but when I click OK, now I've actually got this 3D model that's in the scene, and I can rotate it around, and I can make adjustments to the model like so, okay? Now with this, this is the Advanced 3D renderer. So it is supporting this chair in here, and with the Advanced 3D renderer, I have access to a new light. So if I go back to my projects, I can import HDRI images, High Dynamic Range Images, and I can import EXR files and HDR files. And when I click Import, those elements will be brought in here, and I can go up under Layer and choose-- It's grayed out because I don't have the proper panel selected, so I'll select my timeline. I'll go to Layer, New, Light. And for this light, I'm going to choose an Environment Light, okay? And when I choose the Environment Light, I can set the intensity and whether it casts shadows and the shadow darkness. And when I click OK, it's going to create that Environment Light, but I need to hook it up to an actual environment. So I'm going to choose one of these HDRI images. If I double-click to open the HDRI, I can see that one here. I created a generation in Firefly and made an EXR file out of it. Let me go ahead and apply that rainbow into the scene. I'll just drag it and drop it down like so. And once it's in the timeline, you can choose the source drop-down and choose that EXR file. And when I choose that EXR file, notice it's relit the scene. But check this out with my environment light, now I can adjust the X rotation and the Y rotation, and it will orbit around, and it's giving me all of those rainbow lights on that individual chair that I've added into the scene. So I can use the 3D Camera Tracker and place it into the scene the way that we saw, or I can just use it like this and render it with an alpha channel if I wanted to just create something that exists on its own. I'm going to show you one other project just so you can see a more fleshed-out version of all of this. This is a watch_explode project, which is pretty awesome. This will show you exactly what is possible when it's actually finished. So if I open this Precomp here, you can see I have one 3D model, okay? This model was animated using Blender. And if I open up that option here under Animate Options, I can click the drop-down and choose the animation, which is one second. And you notice with time remapping enabled, we actually animated this from zero seconds to one second, and that's the explosion of the watch. And then with my Transform Options, we were able to rotate, scale, all that stuff, and actually have this rotate through the scene. Let me make it a little larger so everybody can see it, okay? So it's rotating through the scene, and I'm getting all of those beautiful reflections because you guessed it, there are lights that actually are environment lights, and there are environments in here that I can go ahead and rotate around. So there's the EXR file, there's the environment light, and if I open this up, I can go ahead and transform the rotation of the environment light, and you can see how the reflections are interacting with that individual model that's been placed into the scene. So this took a little bit to build, but I want you to understand what's possible. I know I didn't go through all of the different options here, but as you can see, there are tons of things that you can do to actually create a beautiful render inside of After Effects utilizing GLB models and environment lights and 3D layers, all right? So are you guys remotely inspired by this? Yeah? All right. Awesome. Thank you so much.

[Music]

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Video, Audio, and Motion

In-Person On-Demand Session

2D to 3D: Moving into the Next Dimension with After Effects - S6601

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Speakers

  • Ian Robinson

    Ian Robinson

    Creative Director and Motion Graphics Trainer, Creative 111

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About the Session

Join Ian Robinson, owner and trainer at Creative 111, as he shares his most valuable tips and techniques for taking 2D motion designs into 3D space. Make your product motion graphics stand out with animated models, lights, cameras, shadows, and more. You’ll learn what to do and what not to do when moving into the third dimension.

This session will cover how to:

  • Transition from 2D to 3D and effectively build your composition
  • Work faster in the third dimension with the Properties panel
  • Get comfortable with 3D cameras, lights, shadows, and materials
  • Use fundamental camera rigging for more direct control of cameras and camera settings
  • Transform your product models from average to spectacular using Substance 3D

Technical Level: Intermediate

Category: How To

Track: Video, Audio, and Motion

Audience: Motion Designer

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