After Effects 3D Text Animation Tutorial NO PLUGINS! | Greyscalegorilla

in today's video you're gonna learn how to make 3d text inside of After Effects using no third-party plugins let's do it [Music] everybody it's Nick here from grayscale guerrilla bringing you the tools training and tutorials to help make you a better motion designer now today we're heading into After Effects to create 3d type using only the built-in plugins inside of After Effects there's no third party plugins or anything else to download if you have Creative Cloud you'll be able to follow along with today's tutorial now you'll also be able to download the scene file from today and other After Effects tutorials down below in the description here on YouTube or if you're watching at greyscale gorilla we'll have a link as well so don't forget to check that out all right with that let's head on into After Effects and let's get started alright here we are in After Effects and the first thing we need to do is make a new composition now if you see this button you could click that there or if you don't see it you can click this button right down here create new composition I'm gonna make a 1280 by 720 comp at 24 frames a second just for this tutorial here and I'm gonna make it about 10 seconds long and we're gonna click OK alright so here we are and the first thing we need is our text that we want to make 3d so I'm just gonna click our type tool right up in the tool bar here I'm gonna click on our screen I'm gonna type in 3d now you can type your name you type in your girlfriend's name your boyfriend's name whatever you feeling you know your company and over here we got a character now I'm choosing Gotham ultra which is big chunky typeface I would recommend this as well sans-serif typefaces these big chunky typefaces tend to look a little bit better when you turn them into 3d ok so now how do we make it big chunky 3d text well the first thing we need to do is make sure we're using the correct renderer inside of After Effects so all you have to do is come up to your composition go to composition settings go to 3d renderer and you want to make sure that this is set to cinema 4d now if you're familiar with cinema 4d we're not going to be using that software in this tutorial but we are going to be using its renderer so you just have to make sure that that's set to cinema 4d go to your options and set it down to one for now this is gonna allow us to see results very quickly and then when we do our final render we can always turn this slider up and then get better looking 3d here so but one will be fine for now alright so now we have our correct render engine I'm gonna come down here to our 3d layer and I'm gonna click this box right here this box will make our text 3d now it doesn't make it chunky 3d text 3d in fact I'm gonna hit W to get my rotate tool and show you it is 3d its rotating around but it's this flat kind of 3d that you may have seen before what we're building is a little bit different so what we need to do is open up this triangle open up geometry options and then turn this up extrusion depth let's go ahead and turn that up you'll see it's starting to change a little bit in the viewport but now when I rotate around you see it's not just a flat little postcard this is full chunky 3d text however it's not looking the way we want it to you're gonna notice that everything we do almost everything we do from now on is all about lighting and texturing and that's because lighting and texturing is the key to making 3d look good so let's get started lighting and texturing right now the first thing we'll do is go up to our layer menu go to new and go to light now you're gonna want to make a spotlight this is your first main light you can go ahead and set the color to all the way bright white and we're gonna change the color later but for now let's just set up a regular light we're gonna do 100 percent intensity 100 percent shadow darkness make sure that cache shadows is turned on I have 90 degree cone angle and 50% feather there's kind of a default spot light and I'm gonna hit OK and already we have something that's looking a little bit better you can see we can move this light around and it's going to give a lot more dimension to our 3d text now there's still a lot of work to do in fact the next thing we need to do is add a 3d camera and in fact if you've made any camera in after-effects it's almost the same way you'd make that so you go up to layer go to new camera and here we're gonna use a two node camera and we're gonna go to the focal length and set it to something like thirty millimeters and we will have other other videos where we go over more of these options but just for now you want a somewhat wide angle lens for this I'm gonna make I'm gonna hit okay and now we have a camera in our scene so what does this mean well with our camera we could hit the C button on our keyboard to move between the different camera tools so you can see the icons changing right here in the middle this is kind of a pan tool we have a zoom in an out tool and I'm just clicking and dragging and I'm gonna hit one more time to get the rotate tool and this is where we could set up a nice shot to kind of check our lighting okay so you can see right now we have some lighting we have some textures but they're not great not looking good right now but let's like look make this look way better by first of all adding some bevels to our 3d image I'm also gonna turn our resolution of full res for now and if we do animation or anything you might want to set this lower but for now to check lighting we'll set to full res and first next thing we're gonna do is go to the 3d layer and I'm gonna use a shortcut that I use all the time when working with 3d objects and that's to hit a twice a as an apple on your keyboard hit it twice boom boom and now all of the 3d options pop up in your in your layer here so now we can you know change the extrusion depth but what I want to do is add bigger bevels and to also set bevels you want to come in here to bevel style and just pick convex for now you could try the other ones later but you can see right already we have some nice-looking bevels I'm gonna exaggerate this a little bit more just we could see that now our light has something to reflect off of that's not just a flat plane and this is what makes 3d look so much better okay so now how do we add even more to mention to the scene well let's go up to our spotlight and let's hit duplicate so I'm just gonna command D to make a duplicate light I'm gonna hit P on my keyboard to open up the position on on this layer and then I'm gonna use this to move our our light over to the right and that this is by the way XY and Z if you haven't used 3d in in any software this represents right and left this represents up and down and this represents forward and back so I'm gonna use this Z to move my light back a little bit so I'm catching the edge of this type and already we're adding a little bit more dimension I'm gonna also lower the light to act a little bit more light down here okay well we have some good lights however we're still missing a key part of this and this is some shadows by default 3d layers in in after-effects do not cast shadow so what you want to do is go to your 3d type and turn on cast shadows just click off to on and you'll see now that these lights produce these nice shadows and in fact if I position this other light a little bit more in the front you'll see that it's catching a little bit of different lighting in here we get these nice little pieces here looking much better however we can do better I know we can so let's go ahead and open up our spotlight and I'm gonna use the same shortcut I'm gonna hit AAA on my keyboard and right here you're gonna see that we can adjust all of the spotlights settings and the first thing I want to do is adjust color now adding color to your lights is a real big part of of adding a lot more dimensionality to your 3d scene now you don't have to go all the way crazy colors like we're gonna do in this one even a little bit of color goes a long way but in this one we're actually gonna go make the front light this this bright red and then I'm gonna go to my spotlight hit double A again and in this case we're gonna do something like a light bluish and this is going to be kind of our rim light over here okay we got some good dimension and remember I said you know lighting and texturing is everything in 3d already we're much much more interesting looking 3d well what else can we do well let's go up to layer let me show you a light that I use in almost every 3d render I I do in After Effects and it's I'm gonna go to a new light and I'm gonna use an ambient light now an ambient light is just light everywhere it's there's no shadows there's no there's not even options for shadows it's just a global light everywhere I'm gonna make it a little bit blue and what this kind of is is like a skylights it's like a a nice blue day where light is just bouncing everywhere I'm gonna make this light blue and I'm gonna hit okay and we're gonna look at the result we're gonna go whoa Nick you have no clue what you're doing and that may be true in other parts of my life but I tell you this light here I I'm in love with it so here's here's what we need to do is hit a open up its intensity and just turn it down it's just too bright you can go really really low with this I'm talking like 10 15 12 12 percent let's start real low let's just go 10 and this is gonna add a little bit of dimension alright let's add one more light and then we'll jump to the next part here so let's duplicate this let's duplicate our front spotlight duplicate and this one's gonna be a rim light on the other side so let's hit P for our position and again you could move this until it looks good but what I'm gonna do is move it to the left and down quite a bit and I'm also gonna change its color by hitting AAA and let's make this a kind of a darker green and again we're adding a little bit of dimension that is oh that is way way too much green good news is we could just dim the intensity down okay this is just supposed to be a hit I hit P again for position this is again just way over in in the corner to kind of give a little bit of dimension down on this side okay remember earlier I said that it's lighting and textures that make 3d objects look good well let's go ahead into our textures for our 3d layer and we hit AAA on our keyboard to expose all of these layers and and options and what we're gonna do is come down here and talk about the specular intensity and we'll have other videos that go in in deeper in all these settings but the specular intensity especially when you're dealing with spotlights is kind of the key one so first of all you could turn this up and this is gonna brighten all of our lights and give that specular which is the the think of specular is the shiny part of the light the vert the the really bright part and then you can also adjust the specular shininess now watch what happens when I adjust the shininess these little highlights get smaller and smaller it makes it look a little bit more glossy compare that to this where it's a little bit more diffused a little bit softer looking and you can dial this up and down to create different types of looks now don't go crazy with this I'm gonna do something like 20 that's looking pretty good and what this is gonna do is allow you to see a little bit more hotspots and almost what almost looks like reflections when you move your type around so I'm gonna go to this rotate tool and kind of rotate around my type here and you can see now that red highlight is really moving around as the camera moves in and if you're comfortable animating in After Effects you can see that very quickly you can get these nice glossy effects and you can add more spotlights wherever you want that that little highlight to to pop okay so from here I think we should concentrate on getting that final look what's nice about doing 3d in After Effects is that you could do the compositing and everything right on top of it and and kind of dial in your look so what I'm gonna do is go ahead and click into my comp here I'm gonna hit command a to select everything and just twirl it all up okay this is just cleaning up my comp I'm gonna add a new solid this is gonna be my background I'm just gonna make it an almost black solid for the background here I'm gonna drag that down to the background and then the next thing I'm going to do is add a new adjustment layer this is gonna float on top of everything and this is gonna give me general control over the final look of this object now this is nice because if I don't if I like the overall look of my scene but I want to tweak it I can add these adjustment layers right here and after effects and so what I'm going to do now is pull up our effects window so I'm gonna go to window go to effects and presets and then I'm gonna type in curves now curves is my favorite color correction tool I'm gonna drag it onto my adjustment layer and up should pop your effect controls now if you're not familiar with curves we have other videos about this but for now you can follow along by making this nice s in your curves and this is gonna give a nice little bit of contrast to your scene you can see already our colors are popping a little bit more are our colors are more saturated and this gives us the control to say I want this a little bit more moody and darker or maybe it's the opposite I want this much brighter than in the in the final render but instead of messing with the lights we could just do this in the composite which is really nice okay another trick I I love I've been doing this for years but it always looks good I go into my blue channel in my curves and I kind of dimmed down the blue highlights and I and I crank up the blue shadows now I'm gonna overdo it to show you this effect see that kind of faded blue that's too much you just want to dial in a little bit and there you go okay so now you have this nice 3d text you could hit your camera tool and start to rotate around and see some of these effects that you can make so just as we wrap up here let's do a really quick animation and we'll have other videos where we dive more into this but let's go to in my camera settings I hit P for position that open up my position settings I'm gonna go to something like two seconds turn on a position keyframe go to zero seconds I'm gonna hit C until I get that rotate tool around and I'm just gonna start you know maybe lower maybe it's up high yeah up high and I'm going to set the end of my time line here by hitting n on my keyboard and and I'm gonna hit 0 on my keyboard if you don't have that you can go to your preview button here and hit this button this is just gonna make a Ram preview of all of these frames now you can see it takes a little bit to render these frames and as always if you want to see things faster you can go to half res which I always recommend and I also hit shift when I hit this button or when I hit 0 on my keyboard and this is going to skip every other frame and it's going to render quarter res which speeds things up like crazy and so boom there you go you have your nice little 3d move you can ease that in and add a bunch of effects on top of it but that is for another video in another day thanks again for watching everybody I hope you enjoyed it I had a lot of fun with that one After Effects is my first love in many ways it's so robust it does so many things so if you're interested in learning more about After Effects and specifically about the 3d side of After Effects don't forget to subscribe down below and also pick up those scene files while you're down there as well alright with that I just wanted to thank you once again for watching and I hope to see you in another video really soon keep learning everybody I love after this I just love it I love it

Channel: Greyscalegorilla

Views: 480,968

Rating: 4.9455662 out of 5

Keywords: Cinema 4D, c4d, tuts, tutorials, motion graphics, greyscalegorilla, after effects tutorial, after effects 3D, after effects 3D text, after effects 3D type, after effects 3D animation, after effects 3D lights, after effects 3D tutorial, after effects cinema 4D, after effects extrude, after effects title, after effects 3D intro, after effects no plugins, after effects 3D easy, after effects text, after effects text animation

Id: lR4GHA5_J5Q

Length: 17min 12sec (1032 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 12 2018