3D Article Animation (After Effects Tutorial)

in today's tutorial we are going to be looking at a very requested effect that is the 3D camera effect where I'm going to be showing you how to highlight an article or screenshot of any sort of kind I've got a good few requests on how to do them because I've used it a lot in my videos we have previously used the 3D camera in deu tutorial Vox tutorials the map animation tutorial this is going to be a little bit different but a lot of the same principles still apply so hopefully this will be helpful in giving you an insight into how I go about it so in off effects I have a 1920 x 1080 composition where I at 24 frames per second where I've just added a PDF of an article I'm going to start off by pre-c component so I'm going to hit shift command C and I'm just going to leave all attributes in 3D cam in the composition in here we want to add some highlights so usually you'd have this if uh you want to highlight the title or a specific sentence in this hit G to bring up your pen tool you want to make sure that you have it set to only stroke no fill you can always click the fill and then remove it if you have it selected and just pick a nice highlight color in this case I have yellow that work perfectly good I'm I'm just going to click somewhere on the layer with nothing selected very important click and then just go to the other end of the sentence and that'll make a little line you can adjust the width to just make sure that the text is covered click off just keep doing that for all the little bits of pieces you want to highlight maybe go down a little bit and let's highlight something down here we can decrease the stroke width a little bit cuz we don't need it to be that big then you want to go into the just any layer really open it up and outside of contents you want to hit add and then we are going to add a trim PA open up the trim Paws go to about 1 second key frame the end go back to the beginning set that to zero and that's just animating our little line select the key frames in this case I'm going to use flow and we are going to be using this curve which also looks like this so just a super simple a little less aggressive than the sexy speed you want to keep in mind that you want this to kind of match a natural flow of reading so you don't want it to be too quick you don't want it to be be too slow so I like this one it keeps it nice and intermediate I'm going to hit end and then I'm also going to hit trim pause while holding command down and just copy that so command C select all my other layers command V so if I hit U now I can take all my key frames and just set them back so they're all at the same point we of course want to be able to see what it says underneath all of these so selecting your shape layers you can change the blend mode to multiply and that will reveal the black text underneath we want to move this around a little bit so one sentence at a time move this about a little bit and maybe this a little more over like that ideally you want to match this to let's say someone's reading a piece of an article you want to match the highlights to what is being read but in this case I just want to offset it a little bit now it's time for the actual animation itself so we want to make sure that we have 3D put on and that we are using the classic 3D renderer if you don't see this button over here you can always hit command K which open up your composition settings go to 3D renderer and select it in there classic 3D is just going to allow us to get some typ of field which which is exactly what we want with our layer selected we can hit P to open the position and then shift R to bring up the rotation I like to start it at a zoomed out bit just to create a little bit of initial impact I just think it looks super nice so key frame all of these parameters except for the orientation we don't need that go forward a little bit like let's say around right here and then move it up super close we want it to cover a good bit and then move it down a little bit and maybe rotate it ever so slightly and here I'm just trying to get something that looks visually interesting and and brings attention to what is being highlighted and you can always go in and open up your proportional grid and Center it up through there so now we have this initial animation that comes in and we want to keep the momentum flowing we don't want it to be stale and stand still so I'm not going to set other key frame I'm just going to go forward even more and I'm going to move it down to where our next bit of highlight will be coming up one thing I love doing is keeping the momentum flowing from side to side so coming in we have it tilting towards us on the left side so now I'm going to go to the opposite side and that's just going to keep the momentum flowing and keep it interesting and not not so linear feeling cuz it can quickly become very linear and again we just want this to kind of be scentered up the the bit that will be highlighted mess around with the angle a little bit to create some interesting looks I like to keep it most of the time pretty steep but you want to make sure that it's still fairly readable so just mess around with these parameters until you get a look that you think is pretty good so now we have something that looks kind of like this and it goes down into that I'm going to drag these out just a little bit more and we'll play around with the easing of the key frames afterwards and do a couple tricks in there cuz that is really what sells it fit I'm going to zoom in a little bit more turn it I want to zoom in even more and put it on a little bit more of an angle another reason why this helps a lot in selling the look is because once we add the camera we'll be able to manipulate the the depth of field and that'll just give us a bit more depth and look a little bit cooler in my opinion and we want it to look cool without it being too crazy and then I'm going to go pretty far out Zoom it out a little bit and then again rotate it the opposite direction and adjust just like that so so far we have something that looks like this after this we can just return it to its original position s your key frames and you can do this by hitting just F9 to ease them or again use the same easing as we used before and then I'm going to open my graph editor cuz there's quite a bit of stuff that we want to work on here if we just play it right now it looks as you can see very choppy you zoom into a point it stops then picks up the motion again then in and I can already see that this is a little bit too close together so I'm just going to space that out a little bit more but open back in your graph editor and select your first parameter I like to start with the first one which is usually the position if you see all of these at the same time you can open up your little eye icon and just make sure that show animated properties is off it just makes it a little bit more confusing so I'm going to zoom in here so we can see what we're actually doing and the main principle that we want to execute on in terms of this effect is lifting our key frames off the ground and that's going to allow the motion to keep going cuz as soon as it hits the ground that's zero movement that's no Pace no speed no nothing so if you lift this off the ground you can see we get just it slows down but not enough to where it comes to a complete still sand so it always keep the momentum and that's a huge part in keeping your animations flowing you don't want something that feels super linear and stagnant as you can see we've created a lot more of interesting Movement we don't have any still stops or anything of that sort it just makes it look a little bit more organic it's still very fast which we can always play around with afterwards but this is a general concept of of what we're doing next I'm just going to go to the rotation zoom in and it's the similar principle so if I just drag this one up and that one same with this one we'll drag this one up as well and meet them right right there and then onto the wire rotation same principle I can't stress enough how important this step is and how important it is to take your time with this to get a really nice looking animation now that we've messed around with our little gra you can see some of our key frames have moved a little bit so we can just line them back up with where we want them to be just so they are you know lined up with one another now that we have the base of our animation this nice little article animation as you can see it's very very fast if you want to space it out a little bit make it a little bit slower s the your key frames all down while dragging the last key frame and you can just drag around to distance the key frames evenly space them out make it a little bit more pleasing and easier to read what's going on and of course you want to change the pacing of your highlighter effects so you can always go in and then just move these something like this so now we get something that is a little bit easier to read and follow along with so I'm going to right click down in my composition in here go to new and new camera I like to start with a 50 mm and then for these I typically set the f- stop to .9 just get some nice shallow depth of field we can open the two View mode so that's just going to allow us to see where the camera Focus distances which is what we're going to be animating open up your camera go into camera options and then key frame the focus distance at the very beginning go forward until your first key frame and you want to line this pink line up or with your layer that you can see all the way over there so just move that along and you should be able to see it over here change live action you can see as we move across it's get some nice depth of field so if we set it to that that looks pretty good with this is in Focus go forward to the next one maybe right in the middle go over here and then forward again move that up to that towards the end right here and then back to the very beginning you can just copy and paste the first key frame sect key frames same easing as before and that's just going to give us some some of that nice depth of field as you can see as we go throughout and that just adds another layer of Det detail that just makes it look a little bit more realistic if you don't feel like this is blurry enough which I definitely think it is in this instance you can always go ahead and play with the aperture set it to more set it to less and I typically do like to change the Irish shape to hexagon it just looks a little bit more pleasing softer more realistic which is perfect going into my precom I want to crop out these areas up here just cuz I don't feel like they add anything so selecting my initial layer I'm going to use the rectangle tool and I'm just going to click and drag and cut it right here and set that to subtract click on it again move down to the bottom and then I'm also going to mask out this set that one to subtract as well just like that we have now just cut that out we don't need that going back into our initial composition you can see it looks maybe a little bit weird now which is is fine so if I open my proportional grid just want to make sure they're centered so I'm just going to move that up at the very beginning and the same at the very end but what about the background well typically what I like to do is just create a solid so just command y to make a new solid use the pi Whip and just select the color of the Oracle cuz usually there's nothing else around it especially with our little Sid cut off and that just give us a nice Infinity looking thing and then when you zoom in you don't have any weird edges or anything of that sort so it just looks a little bit cleaner the last thing that I do like to add is a little bit of texture just because you can never have too much texture so we are of course going to add a pressurized time just set that to 12 in most of our projects I like to add a little bit of camera wiggle camera Shake but with this in particular I want the viewer to be able to read the text and I don't want to add too much movement that obscures from that so we already have some pretty good camera movement we don't need that you can add a little bit of grain or some particle overlays if you want to just to spice it up a little bit just like that we have a super nice little aticle animation and uh that's pretty much it for for this tutorial I just want to say thank you so much for watching hopefully you learn something new hopefully you're going to be using this technique uh just because it's it's it's sexy man what can I say it's it's sexy and um yeah thank you I'll see you again next week don't forget to like comment subscribe all that good stuff we're so close to hitting 10K it would mean the well to me and uh yeah uh peace out

Channel: Mapal

Views: 31,376

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Id: fDD0q7zUnbw

Length: 11min 12sec (672 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 10 2023