Advanced 3D Light Rays in After Effects!

hey what's up Andrew Kramer here for Video Copilot dotnet and welcome back to another very exciting After Effects tutorial today we're going to take a look at creating some cool 3d volumetric light inside of After Effects so let's take a look at a few different examples so in this example we have a cell phone that's projecting all of this light this is actually a prototype for the new iPhone has a laser and it can project light and cut through steel a bunch of cool stuff we've got some light rays coming through a window and you can tell this is all 3-dimensional and I've actually done a 3d camera track to get this to work right we also have a few examples with just some title designs and some smoke and of course the primary design here with just some light rays coming through a title this technique was also used on the star trek into darkness title sequence that we helped out with and we can kind of see right here the light shining through now the best part of this technique is that it's super easy to do and let's jump right in now you may have seen our recent blog show where we talked about creating some volumetric with the smoke machine and some stencils so check that out for some cool practical effects but today we're going to create this effect in After Effects without any third-party plugins alright let's go and get started we're going to create a new composition and we'll do 1280 by 720 and maybe 500 frames and we'll hit OK then let's take the text tool and we'll go ahead and type in here light and we can pretty much use any font this looks good now I want to Center it pretty well and then we're going to pre compose it so choose layer pre compose it might be off the screen there and we'll call this title and let's also change the comp to volume light and we'll hit OK let's go and make another solid this time we'll make it kind of gray and this will call the floor and we'll make it a 3d layer so toggle the switches 3d layer and we'll also make the title a 3d layer and we'll take the floor at the W key and we're going to rotate this and move it down right below the title and then we can actually hit s and scale it up alright stay with me I know this is some advanced stuff let's also create a camera and we'll do you know 28 millimeter take the orbit tool and we can kind of see 3d yes let's put the title above the floor and let's also create a black solid background so this will leave as a 2d layer call this background now let's go ahead and add a light this time we'll do a point light cast shadows and hit OK and we want to push this light into Z space behind the title move it up a little bit and let's go to the title hit AAA and that brings up the material options and let's turn on shadows so now we can kind of see this is starting to work so we'll take our light hit t increase the intensity a bit there we go we can also hit a a and we can change the diffusion of the light so we can soften that shadow a bit now I may also go into the render options and limit the resolution of this to say 500 and it'll make it a little lower quality but also render a touch faster so let's soften this a bit more all right so now let's go and create our volumetric light I'm going to come over here to layer new solid and we'll make a white solid and we'll call this light source and hit OK then I'm going to take the ellipse tool and draw a small circle so if you hold down ctrl alt shift perfect circle let's make it a 3d layer and let's also hit AAA and turn off except lights and that way it won't be affected by the lighting it won't cast shadows that's also off so now let's move it back into 3d space alright so here's how we add our volumetric light we're going to create a new adjustment layer and we'll call this volume light let's come over here to the effects and presets and type in radial fast blur and let's drag that out on to our volume light so let's set the zoom to brightest and turn up the amount so right away we kind of have the basic idea now the truth is it's actually a 2d effect I just say it's 3d just so that I can get more hits and more views and all that stuff so have you ever clicked on a video expecting to see something specific and then some crappy video with like a million dislikes anyway I invented that I keep telling myself I should make good videos but you know what are you going to do ok so we've got the basic light effect now to make it look 3d what we want to do is create a new null object and we want the null object to be a 3d point so we'll call this point and it's important at this point let's just make it a yellow is pushed back in z space as well so we want to push it back behind our white light now keep in mind that this volumetric light is not working right now so what we want to do is take our volume light radial fast blur effect and we're going to add an expression to the center we're going to alt click on the stopwatch and then we're going to take the pick whip and select that point layer that we just created now before you hit anything we're going to type in a quick expression it's dot - comp parentheses bracket zero comma zero comma zero in bracket and in parentheses now you guys probably thinking wow how does he know this offhand he's so smart and good-looking well actually I just have it typed up off screen here so now this expression basically turns that 3d point into a 2d position for the radial fast blur effect there's one last thing that we have to do we need to come over here to the effects choose color correction curves and let's put this before the radial fast blur and what we want to do is compress the range so that we only see the bright pixels so this is actually going to compress it we could also use levels but you know how I feel about that so now if we take the camera tool and move this around we have some volumetric looking light now one small problem we can't see anything else well here's the cool trick if we take that layer set it to screen we've now composited that light back over the top of our title so we can increase the amount we can even add some color correction now so we could come in here say go to the red Channel we could boost up the blue here and we've created this nice-looking volume light effect so now we'll get into polishing this a little bit more but let me show you a few ways to control this so if we take that point that we created okay by moving the position of this point so we can bring it closer which will make the beam wider or we can push it really far away to make the beam tighter and this will also affect how it looks when the camera goes from side to side so it'll swoop past a little bit faster and that looks pretty cool okay so now let's go ahead and polish this effect a little bit more okay so let's go and add a fractal noise so we'll add a new solid call this fractal noise and we'll come over here and type in fractal noise and drop that out here so we'll try to do this manually let's do dynamic and soft lanear looks good and then let's go to the sub settings and play with this rotation I don't this kind of look really tenderly and fiery almost and that looks pretty good they were to come over here add a ellipse tool we're going to create a little bit of a circle here hit F and feather it out a bit now here's my fractal noise trick so I want this to be very fiery but the only problem is it's got transparency into some weird issue so let's go to channel we'll do a solid composite of a black layer but instead of setting it to normal set it to none and that will get rid of the weird soft gray edges and we just had this nice sprite then we add a curves adjustment and that's looking good maybe add some color very nice so now let's go ahead unsolo that make it a 3d layer also turn off except lights f4 let's add or screen mode it so I do apologize for going a little bit fast still want to get to some other cool stuff in the video so let's take the fact on the eyes let's put it in order down here and then push it back in zSpace now we're running into an issue here where the fractal is intersecting with the ground layer but there's a simple solution based on this design that is to take the floor layer and set it to screen and what that will do is basically allow that other layer to be seen through the ground so let's disable our volume light for just a second while we set this up what we want to do is maybe duplicate the fractal noise or actually let's add a little bit of animation to it so maybe some evolution and a quick way to do that is alt click on the stopwatch do time times like 150 and then I'll just create a little animated movement and then let's duplicate the layer and let's scale this layer up a bit and maybe push it back and we can play around with some of the settings we can maybe tweak the evolution options give it a random seed even and then you could do things like change the scale of the fractal so it's softer or whatever so that's cool and we'll duplicate it one more time and maybe make it really large push it back in further so the idea here is just to kind of create a soft wave of noise around the background and just have a little bit of depth so we could bring this one a little closer and we can also brighten it a bit because this will affect the volumetric light so having some bright spots kind of helps now keep in mind if we go and turn our volume light back on what is controlling that threshold is actually that curves adjustment so we can turn it up higher and cut off some of those brighter values and remember we can just switch it to normal to see it all by itself we can switch it back to screen and you know you can play with us you can even add a little bit of a curve so that it has a nice fade between the really bright values and stuff like that so that's pretty cool all right so that is pretty cool maybe we want to add a little bit more readability to this and we can do that a couple of different ways so because of the render order of some of these effects we have to be very specific on how we do this so let's take our title duplicate it ctrl D or edit duplicate and we'll move the title above the volumetric light so we'll make the volumetric lights a blue and our titles now on top so let's come over here to bevel alpha and let's put that on our title and again hit AAA and turn off except lights and we can kind of see now we have this nice effect let's turn cache shadows off as well only off and maybe we can make the title black let's double click and then just change this to black the other cool thing is that we can change the text we can double click on it and it will automatically update in the other comp so it's kind of a cool trick so we've got our bevel alpha here we can kind of turn up the edge intensity here and you can see this nice edge then we're going to set the transfer mode of this to screen and that way we're only really adding that little bit of an edge and we can maybe move it up to the top here and that will just help the title kind of pop out a little bit more from the background alright so I change the font and it's looking pretty good let's go back to half res now the other thing we can do here is make our title a little more 3d so let's just duplicate that ctrl D and hit a a turn cache shadows off and maybe add the bevel alpha to this layer and let's see here maybe just push it in zSpace just so it fills up a little bit more and maybe and let's also make sure except lights is off as well and that way we can see our bevel alpha effect alright so that's pretty cool let's go and add another adjustment layer on top of everything and for this one we can just do another curves adjustment this way we can give a nice blue cast over everything alright so that looks really cool now another thing to keep in mind is that a big part of this effect is the light source so back here we have a single light source but we can actually do things like move it around we can size it down we can even get rid of it and just use the fractal noise as the light source so if we brighten this or scale this up we could just use that as the light source I think it looks cool with a point source so we could turn that on maybe duplicated slide a copy over here maybe another one over here maybe you just move these down a bit and that really starts to add a lot to the design now you can also change the color of this light source and it will actually affect the color of the light so like in this example with the phone you can actually see let's see here that the screen is actually generating the color of the volumetric light so you can really kind of see there's some different different color rays here we have some blue but then we also have some green and yellow here so you can really do some fun different stuff with this effect and I guess the other big thing is that the light sources don't necessarily have to be a circle so you can maybe take you know take one of them let's see here zoom in maybe scale it up a bit and let's say we take the pen tool there we go alright looks like Batman has been drinking a little bit but uh all in all I think this works let's set that mask to subtract nice and maybe scale it down a bit and look at that it's been terrible looking Batman logo um I should have prepared that maybe that would looked a little bit better oh well I already got the hits for this video so at this point I can pretty much talk about whatever I want alright so this is the basic idea of this effect but let me just show you quickly how you might do this effect with some live-action footage so now you might take a look at this and say it looks really pretty you know the light coming in but actually if you wake up and see this it means you've just survived a nuclear explosion and this is not a good sign but it looks great and also great for wedding videos nuclear explosions weddings fantastic okay now inside of After Effects cs6 and CC we have the tracker so this is a 3d effect so what we're going to do is track the camera so this track camera effects going to pop up here and it's going to start analyzing now I've already done this once so I've got all these points and what we're going to do is with the effect selected we're going to click on the wall and we want to click on a surface that's flat so these three points creates a nice flat surface right click we're going to create a null and a camera so now we have a camera from this we'll go to half resolution again and there's that 3d point perfectly in 3d space so to create the volume light effect I'm going to run through it one more time quickly we're going to create a new adjustment layer will type in radial fast blur and let's also add a tint effect along with a curves adjustment and we'll put the curves after the tenth so tint curves and let's crush this down so we just see those highlights there we go and then we can take our radial fast blur amount and crank it up now here's the tricky part so what we're going to do is set the transfer mode to screen and we have some of the light coming through we could animate this point and that would be fine but I actually want to tie this to this track point that we just created so here's how we do it we all click on the center bring up the pick whip select that layer so let's see the track point layer and we're going to type dot - comp zero comma zero comma zero bracket there we go so that punches in that expression so now wherever we move this so let's scale it up so we can see it wherever we move this is the direction the light will be coming from so if we look at the animation now we can kind of see it looks more volumetric here let's add some contrast to this so let's do like maybe I should want to add some red blue down lets's be like extremely extremely radioactive okay so let's see here very nice and depending on where we move that point the light will stay connected we can actually push this thing further into Z space so that it's so far away that we get this really nice kind of volume effect alright well I hope you guys enjoyed the tutorial be sure to check out the website Video Copilot dotnet follow us on Twitter I'm Andrew Kramer thanks for watching and we will see you next time

Channel: Video Copilot

Views: 2,282,591

Rating: 4.9473186 out of 5

Keywords: andrew kramer, Adobe After Effects (Software)

Id: frXQxwMKh6c

Length: 20min 41sec (1241 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 11 2014