3D Character Animation Tutorial using After Effects & Element 3D

[Music] what's going on guys nick crispino here and today i'm going to be giving you a tutorial on how to create a dancing robot using 3d tracking in after effects for this tutorial we're going to be using three things after effects premiere and the element 3d plugin for after effects so we're going to start off here in adobe premiere i'm going to be using this random clip that i took and i'm also going to be linking this clip in the description below if you want to go ahead and download it so you can follow along but i do recommend that you use your own footage so first thing we're going to do is make sure the clip is selected right click and replace with after effects composition i'm going to go ahead and save this composition in this folder that i created on my desktop and i don't know something really weird is happening with the letters down here i don't know what that's about but anyways so now that our clip is in after effects we're going to go over here to the sidebar to tracker and hit track camera if you don't see tracker here go up to window and in the drop down menu you should see tracker right there now we're just gonna let after effects do its thing and analyze our footage alright cool so once it's done you're gonna see all these points pop up on the screen go back to the first frame of your clip and select holding down shift click and select four points that line up against the ground once you find something that you're happy with right click and go and hit create solid and camera once your solid appears select the solid layer go down to transform and just play with it until it is it looks like it is aligned to the ground alright it looks like it's sticking pretty well so now we're going to create a new solid this is going to be our element 3d layer so i'm just going to call it e3d now go up here to effects go down to video copilot and hit element okay so before we go any further we're going to go to mixomo.com to get our 3d model mixomo's is great website it's got loads of pre-made 3d models and animations and it's totally free with your adobe subscription so we're going to go ahead and use this model and we're going to hit download and the only thing that we're going to change is frames per second make sure it matches your sequence my premiere sequence is 60 frames per second so i'm just gonna make it 60 and hit download now once that's downloaded i'm just going to drag it into my robot dance tutorial folder now it's time to open up blender i know i didn't mention it in the beginning of the video and i know what you're thinking oh my god i hardly know how to use after effects let alone blender we're only going to be using it as a conversion tool you see the file we downloaded was an fbx file and element 3d can't work with those they can only to my knowledge it can only work with obj files so we're going to use blender to convert it from an fbx file to an obj file so if you don't have blender go ahead and download it now it's a free software so you don't got to worry about paying for anything and while you download it i'm going to wait right here [Music] all right so once you download blender go ahead and open it up and you should be introduced to a screen that looks like this go ahead and press a right click and delete this will give us a fresh plane to work with now hit file import fbx find your fbx file and import now that it's imported all we simply got to do is export but before you do that you're going to want to just create a designated folder to export to i'm going to go ahead and call this robo convert i cannot stress enough how important it is to export to a separate designated folder and you'll see why in a minute go up here to file export wavefront.obj find the folder you want to export it to and go over here and make sure animation is checked off now export now depending upon your computer this process may take a little while i'm not on the craziest setup so for me this usually takes anywhere from five to ten minutes so i'm gonna let blender do its thing and i'm gonna go get a snack [Music] that's a good apple okay so now that blender is done doing its thing you're gonna go into your robo convert folder and you now see why we render to a designated folder blender is going to export every single keyframe of the animation if you go down here it is a total of 250 keyframes and trust me it is not fun exporting all that to your desktop by accident i've made that mistake before you don't [Music] so anyway we're going to go back into after effects select your element 3d layer and hit scene setup this is going to bring you into element 3d go up here to file import 3d sequence go into your converted folder and select the very first keyframe of the animation and hit import 3d object make sure force alignment is on the bottom and hit ok now where the hell is our robot don't worry all you need to do is go over here and click normalize size and there it is next thing you're going to want to do is go over here to create and create a plane this is the plane we're going to use to form our shadows go down here to scale i'm just going to make it huge make it 1000 that's perfect go over here to presets materials pro shaders oops i'm sorry not pro shaders physical if you don't see pro shaders don't worry about it that's something that's like an extra thing you can buy off video co-pilot so don't worry if you don't have those you don't really need them for this tutorial so hit physical and scroll down until you see this right here matte shadow drag and drop it onto your plane go to the y-axis and just drag it up ever so slightly until the grid disappears hit okay now our robot is in our scene but we're not done yet go to group one create a group null and hit create now what we're going to want to do is go to our track solid open up our transform settings do the same for our group null and what you're going to want to do is copy the position of the track solid onto the position of the group null and do the same for the orientation and any changes that you made to the x y and z rotation on your track solid uh copy and paste it to the group null as needed now as you can see our robot is on a 90 degree angle go back to your element 3d layer and go to particle look i believe yes particle look and particle rotation go to the x rotation particle and make it 90 degrees as you can see our robot is upright but he's a little big so i'm going to go over here to particle size and i'm going to make it let's see what seven looks like i'm still a little too big maybe 4.5 um how about four you know what i'm happy actually no what no i'm happy with 4.5 yeah he looks uh pretty lifelike there now let's hide our track solid and see if it looks like he's standing on the plane it doesn't really look that aligned so what i'm going to do is go to the group null and just mess with it until it looks like he is actually standing on the ground negative 50 is good so just remember that any changes you make to the group null you have to make to the actual track solid so i'm going to go ahead and make that negative 50 as well just so everything is the same and i'm also going to mess with the size again i'm just going to make it four so now we're going to create some shadows go up here to help go to new light and make sure the light type is spot drag it up above the group null so it is the top layer now what i like to do is copy the position of the group null to the position of the spotlight as well as the point of interest of to the spotlight now you may notice only the robot got darker that is because we did not um enable shadows so go back to your element 3d layer scroll down to render settings find shadows and hit enable now go back down to your light options and it's going to be different for every single scene so mess with the light until you get shadows that you're happy with so i'm just going to play with the positioning a little bit until i find something that i'm happy with as you can see the shadows are appearing and our robot is looking a little bit more lifelike i don't know exactly what time of day this clip was taken so i'm not entirely sure where the sun was at this point in time so i'm just gonna make the shadows uh i'm gonna put them right there that looks good a pro tip if you're gonna do something like this try to shoot a clip where there are actual real world shadows that way you have a reference it just makes it easier now since this was a cloudy day our shadows don't really look very accurate to the environment and neither does the light shining on a robot so i'm gonna go down here to light options and just bring the shadow darkness down a little bit and as you can see the light on our robot is getting a little less defined uh 48 is fine i'm just gonna bring the diffusion up a little bit that'll give our shadow a little more blur and a little more believability um let's see how that looks yeah 124 is good i'm also just going to make the cone angle a little bit bigger i want this light to cover as much space as possible now go back to your element 3d layer go back down to render settings and find ambient occlusion and select it with it off and with it on gives the robot a little bit more shadow definition i'm gonna see what it looks like with six um yeah that looks pretty good i'm gonna go five instead so i'm gonna let this render and we're gonna play it back and see how it looks all right that's looking pretty good so far and as you can see it does reset that's because the animation itself is only 250 frames while our clip is i think it's about 500 frames 500 400 something frames you can go mess with the settings in mixamo to create a perfect loop but for the sake of time i didn't do that alright so everything looks like it came out pretty solid the tracking looks nice and smooth now let's go back into element 3d scene setup and give our robots some detail the great thing about element 3d it comes with this great starter pack of all these colors and materials with this specific model you can only color in two sections the torso the head the arms are all represented by this light red coloring and its elbows joints and all that stuff are indicated by a darker red i'm going to go ahead and just drag paint red onto the joints and as you can see the coloring is less dull it's more glossy and let's see what gold looks like that looks pretty cool but what i'm going to do is go down to the model layer select paint red go down down here to basic settings and diffuse color you can change it to whatever you want you can change it from red to purple blue and you can spend forever customizing your robot to your liking but for now i'm just going to make the joints black and everything else white and i'm getting some mad stormtrooper vibes i don't know about you but i'm liking that gonna make your robot even more lifelike go down here to environment i'm gonna select default and as you can see the reflection kind of changes whatever you're wherever you shot your clip just try to find whatever bets best suits uh the environment so for here if you're shooting indoors there's a lobby if you're shooting like in a downtown metro area there's a town you can see everything's reflecting but if you want to be a little more subtle they also have these blurred options so to make it not as obvious i'm just going to go ahead with the default and let's see how that looks now that is really nice now since the robot in this clip is far away you can't really tell what the reflection is unless you zoom in but i like to do it anyway now i like to use the dynamic link between premiere and after effects because i like to make all my final edits color grading resizing for instagram etc in premiere you don't have to do that if you're just fine with just importing into after effects making the clip and exporting you can do that too but if you're like me you're probably making this for instagram so i'm gonna go back into premiere do color grading reshaping and exporting so for the sake of time i'm just going to throw on a quick lut for the colors go in here maybe turn the intensity down a little bit that looks pretty good mess with the basic color correction doesn't have to be perfect i do recommend however going into your effects and adding some noise personally i think noise helps make everything blend together makes the robot actually look like it's in the clip itself there we go that looks pretty good nice and subtle now we're going to shape this for instagram i'm going to go to file new sequence go over here to settings and i'm going to make this the portrait uh dimension size for instagram so i'm gonna make it 1080 by 13 50. go back to your first sequence and drag it into the portrait sequence keep existing settings go into effects and resize as necessary go ahead and let that render so i can see how it looks all right and that looks pretty good all things considered and there you have it that is how you create the dancing 3d robot using element 3d after effects and 3d tracking if you do use this method to create something awesome be sure to tag me on instagram i'd love to see the cool things that you guys make hope you guys found this tutorial useful i'm sorry if it seemed like i wasn't articulating very well i'm stepping out of my comfort zone making this i'm usually on the other side of the camera not good in front of the camera i stumble over my words i stutter but i digress and uh yeah that's about it and scene

Channel: Nick Crispino

Views: 6,674

Rating: 4.9652176 out of 5

Keywords: Video Tutorial, After Effects, 3D Animation, Adobe, Video Editing, Videogrpahy, Editing, Art

Id: zxXvT65laGA

Length: 14min 38sec (878 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 29 2020