3D Layers and Lighting in After Effects | Part 1: Intro to 3D Layers

[Music] [Applause] so as we start our our new concepts instead of after-effects I want to segue from 2d into what some people call two and a half D I like to call it faux 3d we're going to talk about 3d layers and After Effects today and we're going to set up a fake 3d environment and then we're gonna use fake lighting and fake cameras to completely work inside of that fake 3d environment this is a really fun a really fun concept to learn because it allows us to take our worlds that we make in 2d and then to layer them in z space again z spaces is depth it's from me to the camera as opposed to flat two-dimensional which is just the Y axis and the x axis z space introduces depth and so if we can then layer our After Effects files in z space we could take a fake camera and kind of fly through that scene that we've made so I have some files for you on canvas if you guys head on over to canvas you will see something called download 3d room assets it's a zip file go ahead and open that up download that and then unzip or extract all those files so you can get those imported into After Effects which I've done here it's a brick wall a brick wall with a window some candlestick mounts a fire pit and a forest we're gonna make kind of a brick wall to environment so get those important After Effects and then go ahead and just watch me real quick because I want to demo what it is we're gonna be working on I'm gonna make a new composition that is 1920 by 1080 pixels the duration is irrelevant as long as it's at least 10 seconds that's fine I'm going to call this Shadid ball and to show you guys what 3d layers do and how they accept lights I'm just gonna draw a very basic circle here I'm gonna fill this with blue okay nothing crazy about this it is literally just using my ellipse tool and I drew a circle now what if I wanted to make this look like a 3d shaded ball well I want to introduce to you guys the switch that makes any layer we work with a 3d layer now we've already talked about motion blur and the motion blur switch is right here if you look to over there is this kind of three-dimensional looking cube and a check box underneath that this check box when checked turns this layer into a three-dimensional layer now that does not mean that all of a sudden this 2d circle is now a three-dimensional sphere it's not it's still a two-dimensional circle but what this allows us to do is it gives us now this z space transform property so if I pull up my position just like we've known how to do I hit P on the keyboard notice now there are three parameters here our x-axis side-to-side our y-axis up and down and then our z-axis which is away from the camera or toward the camera it looks like it's scaling but it's actually moving it to and from the camera so by hitting this 3-dimensional box it just gives us that z-axis parameter same thing with rotation we now have x axis y axis and z axis may control-z back until we had just a kind of a regular ball here now with this 3d layer checkbox turned on the layer will also be able to accept lights now we haven't talked about lights yet at all in after-effects but they are a wonderful way to transform our composition and light it just like we would a movie to add a new light we can go up to layer in the menu bar new light and when I click on light our light settings dialog box comes up we can name our light which I won't for right now the important thing here is that we understand the different light types spot and point are the two that we're going to be using throughout this exercise parallel and ambient or kind of their own beasts and I'm not going to cover them in this unit spotlights work just like a spotlight would on like a stage before we kind of get into this I want to just hit OK and show you guys what this means we want this to cache shadows now this is our light this cone that it makes notice if I take it and move it around it is a three-dimensional light imagine this like a light in the studio and this cone is the amount of spread that the light has I can click and drag this light around and notice how when I do it changes the lighting on the ball so now that we kind of understand that I'm gonna go back into my light settings for my spotlight I can do that by double clicking my spotlight in my layer panel I can now adjust things like the intensity the cone angle the cone feather and how dark the shadows are from our light and so what's cool is though this isn't an actual sphere we can start to really make it look like one just by using the 3d checkbox and adding a kind of high intensity spotlight so those are 3d layers and those are lights we're going to be using those throughout the entirety this exercise but I wanted to use this it's just kind of a demo to show you guys how they work so let's go ahead and make a new composition you guys can do this with me composition new composition 1920 by 1080 is great I'm gonna go ahead and make this comp 30 seconds long with the black background is fine I'm gonna call this 3d root and I'll hit okay so we're gonna create a 3d room using 2d layers let's start with our brick window wall drag that into your layer panel now I made this in Photoshop for you guys it's literally a brick wall with a window in it the window is transparent now our temptation is to scale this but I don't want to scale it what I want to do instead is I want to move it in z space now I'm going to show you guys a brand new way to view fake 3d layers if we come over here underneath our composition panel we have a one view pulldown toggle that down and we see a whole bunch of different views that we can set for our composition now one view makes sense we just have the one flat two-dimensional view but I want you guys to click on two views horizontal now some of you might be thinking that looks exactly the same and you would be right but I want you guys to do now is turn on the 3d layer checkbox for our brick window wall notice now how our left window has to think of this properly this is viewing the window wall dead-on this over here to our left notice it says top in the upper left-hand corner we're viewing this from a bird's eye view looking down this is the window wall layer looking straight down on top of it so it's flat because it's two-dimensional but notice now we have our z space if I grab this blue arrow and move it back and forth we're actually moving this further or closer to our field of view and so this is how we're gonna start to craft our room I'm gonna move this back wall to the back of my composition now that I've moved it I am going to hit s on the layer and I'm gonna scale this down just a little bit so that way we have some room to work I'm gonna make this about 70% in size because we're gonna add the other walls next to it and below it great so now we're gonna use the brick walls jpg for our other walls and floor so let's drag the brick walls jpg into our layer panel and let's turn on our 3d checkbox now it's covering our window wall which makes sense look at my composition here is the brick wall we just laid down here is our window wall so if I move this behind that layer you can see now it's moving behind it in 3d space now I want to scale this to 70% just like our back wall and then I want to rotate it by hitting R on the keyboard I want to rotate it on the y-axis to create our walls and I want to type in on the y-axis here 90 degrees notice now I have a perpendicular wall to my window wall I can now take my Z arrow and move this to the side and notice here I now have a fake three-dimensional wall coming from my back window wall I can do the same thing drag my new brick wall layer down turn on the 3d checkbox scale it down to 70% come to rotate it and rotate it negative 90 degrees the opposite of the other wall I'll now take my Z space arrow in my composition panel and I will move it over to the other side you guys can see now how we're really starting to create a three dimensional room now let's go ahead and create the floor I'm gonna drag my brick wall layer in turn on the 3d checkbox and this time I'm just gonna rotate it on the x-axis and rotate it flat so negative 90 degrees so now in this composition panel it looks like it's completely thinned out and now when I take my Z arrow and drag it down we can see it starts to come in to view and again because we're looking at this from the top down over here in our left camera we're actually just seeing the front face of our floor on the entirety of our image so let's get some of these other assets in here let's take our forest JPEG for example and let's drag this at the very bottom of all of our wall layers notice now that that allows us to kind of have an outside to our window but let's make it a 3d layer now it's inside of our house it defaults to the center of our composition here as we can see from our top view I'm gonna zoom out by just clicking my mouse wheel toward me and I'm gonna push the forest outside like this now notice how I can make this go as far back as I wanted to depend on how sumed out I am the goal here is to give this a sense of parallax if we think of this square right here our composition Square has a actual house the forest the the distant trees would probably be about 30 to 40 feet outside of that so by bringing this out will create some semblance of parallax as we go to light this and move the camera around okay looking good let's go ahead and drag our fire pit in let's drag this on top of all of our layers make it a 3d layer now I want this to be positioned kind of dead center but a little closer to the window so we're going to scale this down just a little bit about 60% looks good to me and I'm going to use my green arrow here my y-axis to bring it down to the floor you can kind of see how it starts to disappear into our floor wall that's fine with me now obviously these are actual photographs that I've found online these could easily be hand-drawn assets and environments that you've made for your two-dimensional characters okay let's go and do the same thing with our candle mounts let's drag those in these candle mounts I've intended to kind of go on the wall over here on both sides so let's make them three-dimensional objects you can see how they just sort of disappear into the wall that's good I'll kind of make those right against and then we can scale those down accordingly probably to be maybe 60% as well I'm gonna duplicate this by selecting the layer and hitting control D on the keyboard and then I'm gonna rotate it the opposite way negative 180 and then bring the arrow to the other wall this now assures us that both candlesticks are on the exact same plane and the exact same height on both walls so we've now set up our three-dimensional room there is actual depth and we'll see that more when we start to play with cameras now lighting this is going to be a beast in its own so in the next tutorial we're going to talk about how to use cameras and how to light this and the neck really make this come together so take some time rewatch this in order to get this set up and then start the next tutorial [Music]

Channel: itsalantime

Views: 977

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: tutorial, tutorials, after effects, adobe, photoshop, learn, how, beginners, animation, new, good, creative, mograph, motion, graphics, rigging, lights, cameras, 3D, layers

Id: nluMPMB8Qlw

Length: 16min 31sec (991 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 23 2020