Hey everyone, Kelsey here, and welcome back to Gal. Today, I'm showing you how to create 3-D animating text from scratch without any plug ins in after effects. A lot of you have requested this. And finally, I'm getting around to it, so I'm excited to show you how it works. So first in the tutorial, I'll show you how to set up your text. Have 3D enabled add some cool depth? And then how to add some cool, creative texture and lighting on top of it, because that's how you get it to look 3D. And of course, you'll learn how to animate a 3D camera layer as well, so you can start below your text in orbit around it in 3D, which is really cool. And also right behind me here, I have the Dell 40 inch curved, ultra sharp, wide ultra HD monitor. I recently started using it with my editing, and it's been a game changer. There is so much space to tell you more about how awesome it is. Later in the video. But thanks to Dell for sponsoring and the chapters are just down below to skip around in this tutorial. Let's go ahead and jump on it first. Let's click on the comp icon to make a new composition. We will keep it at the default 1920 by 10 80, and I'll make the frame rate 30 frames per second. Now, since we are working in 3D, select the 3D renderer tab and here, let's make sure to set it to Cinema 4D. We won't be using the Cinema 4D app in this tutorial, but we will be using its engine and then also click on options. And let's move this slider to a quality of one for Draut speed so we can get better playback rendering while we build the 3D text. And of course, you can increase the quality at the end. Before we export. But for now, just hit, OK? And you can always go back into the comp setting by clicking on this hamburger menu and go to comp settings to make adjustments later on. And now let's create the text, click on the type tool and let's type out the text 3D from our character panel. We can select a cool, thick sans serif font. I'm using a font called Monument, and I've linked to this font below. If you'd like to use it, it's completely free. Once you get to the sizing rate, we can then go down and make the text 3D enabled to do that. Check the box underneath the 3D cube icon in our comp. And now it's 3D enabled. It doesn't look 3D, but we can move it in 3D. So if you open up this layer now, you will see that there are position and scale controls that we see normally on a regular layer. But we also have 3D controls. You can use the X rotation to rotate the text along our X axis, which is the horizontal axis. And you can use the Y rotation to move it along the Y axis, which is the vertical axis, and the zero notation which rotates around the center intersecting points of X and Y. For now, let's leave these controls as is. And later on, I will show you how to create cameleer where you can move the text in 3D space. But before we create a camera layer, I first want to show you how to add some more depth to your 3D text. So let's toggle open the text and let's open up geometry options. And let's increase the extrusion depth. Now, you can see that as we move the Y rotation, you can see more depth. But it's lacking some texture and lighting, which we will get to in a moment. But first, let's create a camera which will enable us to control 3D space easier and allow us to animate later on. So let's right click here in the comp and create a new camera. I'll use the default lens of 35 millimeters. And now with the camera layer selected and our preview, you can press the key as a shortcut for the orbit tool. And if you click and move this around, you'll be able to change the orbit of the text. You can move it around. If you press see again, you'll get the camera pan tool and you can move it left, right or up or down. And then you can press again to get the dolly control, to zoom in closer or zoom out further away. So you can use these C shortcuts to quickly move the text in the orientation that you want using the camera controls. And I'll show you how to animate using the C keys later on. And now on to the creative part, the lighting and the shading of the text. Let's right click on the comm space and create a new light for this light. We're going to use a spotlight. So we're going to keep the intensity at 100. And you can play around with the angle controls. It simply just controls the width of the light. I'll keep it at around 90, but we can always change this later. The feather at 50 is fine, will also enable cast shadows. And I have my shadow darkness at one hundred and diffusion at 30. And now we'll hit, OK? And immediately you can see that the light is starting to give the text more shape. Next, we can use the transform controls to move. A light into the correct place, you can use the point of interest controls to change where the light is hitting. Also, the position controls to move your light into place. You can rotate the light with X, Y and Z controls. And as you start to move it, I recommend going to The View dropdown to show two views or four views. So you can see exactly where the light is from an overhead view from the front and from the right side. You can use these views because it helps you see where the light is and position it in the right place. So for this particular light, I just want it to nicely illuminate the face of the 3D text from the left kind of above. So I'll situate the spotlight up there, and we can always adjust it later on. You can also go into the light options from the comp and change the color. So I'll set this first light to a blue color. Next, I'll make a second light. This one, I'll also make it a purple color. And for this one, I'm going to move the camera. So it's off to the right from the bottom to cast a purple shadow upwards towards the extrusion on the side of the text. And this is giving it more texture and dimension. Next, I'll create a third spotlight. And this time I'll make it a yellow color. And now I'm going to use the position, orientation and rotation controls to quickly move the light behind the text, to illuminate the backside of it, to give it more shape. And remember, to turn on the view options to help you position the light in the right place. And lastly, I'll add in a fourth light this time does an ambient light just to bring in some more natural light to the space. And once it's created, you'll see that it looks way too bright. And what we need to do is go into it and actually reduce the intensity down. So around 10 or 15 or so is just fine, just enough to make it look a little bit brighter. And you can turn off this visibility of this light to show you the before and after. And you can just see it's looking a lot better, a little bit more bright. So next, I'm going to show you how to add more detail into the 3D text, such as how to cast shadows on a text and at some bubbling. But before I do that, I want to tell you more about this awesome new monitor I have behind me. So Delery shot to me and they were like, hey, do you want to try out this new 40 inch curv monitor? And I was like, why not? Let's see how it goes. I hadn't tried a curved monitor before. It was something new and I wasn't sure if it was going to be the right fit. But man, when I took it out and use it, I was super impressed. It's huge. There's so much space in the monitor and it's super sleek, really nice design. It comes with all of the necessary parts. And when I have my Premiere Pro timeline or after effects comp, there's so much space so I can literally have my whole timeline open. That's one of the struggles of editing on a smaller monitor. Is that your timeline? You constantly have to expand it and reduce it. So that's one huge benefit. The resolution of this thing getting into the tech specs, it's a five K resolution. So there's so much color in here. It's super bright. They include a whole sheet that details all of the color calibration. It's impressive. And the speakers, it comes with speakers. I usually edit with headphones, but if I need to quickly just unplug my headphones and hear it in my space is really nice to have a nice pair of dual integrated speakers. Another huge benefit is with my precision laptop. I can have the thunderbolt connected to my laptop as the display cable, and it simultaneously charges it. So it reduces the amount of cables that you need. And obviously, because it's so long, if you don't want the full program to take up the full space of the screen, you can always shrink your program that you're working in and then have another program open at the same time. So if you need to reference another program while you're at it in such as a script, you can have multiple applications open at once. There's really so many benefits of it. If you want to check out more specs to see if it's something that you would want to try. I'll put a link just down below. But thank you so much to for sponsoring today's video. And yeah, let's go ahead and jump back into the 3D text. Let's open up our tech settings, go to Cast Shadows and let's turn it on. And now you can see the text has shadows that are reacting to the lights. We can also go to Bevill Depth and increase this to around five. And then from Bevill style select Angular to see how it looks. And it's looking pretty good. But let's try a concave and then you can see how convex looks. I think I like convex the mouse. I'm going to go with this one for this style. So now we can move on to the camera animation. One thing to note is that you can apply some of the 3D text presets to this layer. For example, you can go to effects and presets, then to animation presets, then to text, then to the 3D text section. And you can see there's a lot of different 3D text presets. You can drag and drop these onto your text layer. And you can preview how they look. And you can play around with it. But, you know, I'm not going to use these. Animations for this particular effect. But I just wanted to let you know that they are there in case you might find them useful. So now let's do the camera animation. First, let's move our text into the angle we want as our starting point. So I'll move the camera using an orbit tool by pressing and see to make it like work completely beneath the text. Looking up at it. And then we can use the pan and the zoom tools to make sure it's at the right distance and location. So once we have our starting place, create a key frame by pressing the stopwatch next to the position. Now let's move ahead to around four seconds to where we want the animation to end and then press the see keys again to use the orbit tool, the dolly tool in the PAN tool to get it into a new location. So I'll move it more directly onto the text and then for faster playback to preview it. Turn on the draft 3D. And when it's blue, it means it's on. And you'll have a faster preview of your result. Now we need to render out the preview. So press and to set the work area to just this four seconds. And then we can press the spacebar to render this out. It will take longer if it's at full resolution. But you can always lower it to a half or a fourth for faster playback. But it will have a lower quality render. And here is our final result. So that's all for this video tutorial, I hope it was a great introduction into 3D text in animation inside of after effects after effects can be kind of intimidating at first, but once you start using the camera tools over and over again, it literally was a game changer for me. And now I just feel so much more comfortable using cameras to create really dynamic scenes inside of after effects. And don't forget to give this video a big thumbs up, as well as hit that subscribe button. So you're notified when I publish new content. And as always, keep creating better video with Gal.
