After Effects Tutorial: 3D Titles - Element3D

this video is sponsored by envato elements in bottle provides over 1 million digital assets such as graphic elements stock footage fonts music and much more so if you're interested I have provided a link down below in the description which will take you to their website and of course if you do decide to register I get to earn a commission now in today's tutorial we're going to be taking a look at how to create 3d titles within After Effects using element 3d before I say anything else let's take a look at what we're gonna be creating as you can see I've created three examples we're firstly going to start with a paranormal title which if you're not aware was based off of the paranormal stop-motion film and basically once we go through the steps and create this one then you're going to be able to recreate the other two as well or any other 3d title for that matter so that's why I'm going to cover the first two animations in more detail as for the third title which is obviously referencing Toy Story I'm only going to give you a quick walkthrough for that one since it follows the same principles but to a more extreme level now here are the timestamps for each of these titles in case you want to skip to any of them which I don't recommend you should because there's always going to be something new here and there for you to learn even if you've been using After Effects for a long time with all that said let's jump right in and get started alright guys so here we are now in After Effects and as you can see down here I have the paranormal monster and Toy Story compositions opened up these are the original ones but we'll leave them there just in case we forget something or we want to get back to them anyway let's go ahead and create a new composition by going up to composition new composition and let's just name this paranormal tutorial let's leave it at 1080p frame rate of 30 seems fine and then a duration of 15 seconds is okay so let's okay now let's zoom in here and click on the text tool then click and drag and just type in paranormal and for this one I use the creepy crawlers font and I'll make sure to include all the fonts and all the materials that we use in this tutorial and the project files down below in the description then we can click on Y to bring up the anchor points tool and then click on this anchor point and hold down control and you can snap to each of these corners or we'll just snap it to the middle or you can also use ctrl alt home and then ctrl home to Center it to the composition like this now let's click s to bring up the scale scale this up a bit and now let's go over to layer new solid you can use ctrl Y as well we'll just name this element 3d and hit OK now we're gonna add the element 3d plugin and to do that I'm gonna click control space and this is gonna bring up the FX console plug-in which is also from Video Copilot dotnet but this one is free so that's cool and just type in element and hit enter and it'll automatically add that effect to this layer instead of you having to go up to effect Video Copilot whatever or even using the effects and presets bar which as you can see sometimes a bit laggy let's go down to custom layers and under custom text you can see there's path layer number one and we'll set that to paranormal text that we just created and then we'll go over to the scene setup and once we're here we can simply click extrude and there we go we already have our 3d text now since I'm using element 2.2 it adds this extrusion model to a group so let's just click and drag that out of it and just delete the group since we don't need it now before we mess with any of these settings let's go back to the composition so we can see what that looks like in the composition itself let's turn off the text and let's create a new camera maybe make it thirty five-millimeter now we can use the unified camera tool you can also use these separate ones which is orbit track and track Z but instead I like to use this one and simply use the shortcuts left click to orbit right click to track in and out and then middle click to move around so let's go back to element 3d and go back into scene setup what we can do now is go over the settings you can click this drop-down arrow and you can see there's the bevel and this is basically the text itself and if you go back to the extrusion model you can see here it says bevel copies and we can choose two or maybe even three and you can see those bevels being created but for this one specifically we're only going to be using one bevel so let's go back and just set the bevel copies back to 1 under the custom path here we have custom path 1 so remember we said that in the element 3d custom layer panel whatever custom path you choose here is what's gonna be shown in the extrusion and we got a bunch of other settings here which we're not gonna be going through all of them but let's discover some main ones so you got path resolution and this is basically the number of polygons that you want to have on your text to make it as smooth as possible so let's go down to low and you can zoom in here by the way I'm using the scroll wheel to zoom in and out the left click to orbit around while zooming in with a scroll wheel you can hold down shift which will make it much slower and more precise and also while holding shift you can left-click and drag around which will change the lighting also you can change the lighting down here with some pre-made lighting setups which won't affect the overall look in the composition unless you actually set it to the element 3d panel which I'm going to show you later so this is just give you a better idea of how this level is gonna behave in different lighting conditions but for this one we don't need it so we'll just set it back to single light and as we were talking about the path resolution you can see up here the vertices count in the faces count you can see that goes up as soon as we click on these more extreme values now this is extreme which is too extreme and I'm thinking we'll just leave it at low for now moving down you have basically all the transforms that you usually have within After Effects so you got the Anchor Point if you want to change that you scale it it'll scale down from that point you have some presets here or you can just manually tweak it alright for now let's go back to the bevel and start working on the look for this guy over here we got the bevel settings and basically the extrusion is self-explanatory so let's make that a bit higher so maybe like three I think in the original one what I did is I expanded the edges inward because if you zoom in here between the R and the M you see they kind of overlap so let's make that minus 1 and then the bevel size if we zoom in here and let's just go down to the bevel segments and set that to zero and this will give us a chiseled look and this way we can see better what the bevel size and the bevel depth do so let's increase the bevel size and then increase the bevel depth so you can better understand what's going on with these values anyway let's just bring the bevel depth down maybe one and then the bevel size just shrink that down and then we can bring the bevel segments back to three all right now there's a bunch of other settings here that we gonna be going through maybe later but not for now so let's go ahead and click okay now let's go ahead over to the camera and click P bring up the position hold shift a points of interest and then right click and reset both of these before we do anything else in here let's go back to the text let's turn that on drag it down so we can see it and what I did in the original example is I went to a character and I selected this P letter scale it up and as you can see it's automatically updating to live which is great and the good thing about element 3d is is responsive but it's also very fast now let's go ahead and shut this off again and as I said in the intro I use the logo of ParaNorman stop-motion film as a reference for this so let's go over to stuff let's bring it in the comp let's just drag it over let's just scale it down and bring it over here at the bottom we can even select the element 3d layer and just bring it over here just so we can see it better and then we'll bring it back in the middle you bring this on top the original one has this sort of like curve at the bottom the camera is also on a low angle so we can click the camera and by holding down shift and orbiting you can actually snap vertically so you don't just pour a bit like this and lose control and now let's zoom out I'm clicking V to bring up the selection tool and then H to bring up the pen tool or you can be on the selection tool and just hold middle click and pan around like this now of course I'm pretty sure they went in and customized the hell out of this return is too full you see there's so much more detail here like you got these pieces of like hairs sticking out and stuff like that every letter is basically resting on other letters as well like you got the P perfectly resting on a here and you can see there's like a curve on the a letter and you can do that as well if you can work with like say illustrator or whatever and then bring that in here and extrude that custom design but for the sake of this tutorial we'll just go with this one anyway let's go back to element 3d and what we can do now is we can use these deform tools to maybe make it look as close as possible to the original one and one thing I didn't explain is that element works in groups so if you go back to the scene setup you can see over here this number represents the group that this layer is in element 3d supports up to 5 groups and since this one is group number 1 and go back hit OK you can see that whatever we do to this group 1 panel is gonna affect our text so we got the particle looks sighs and under particle look down here you can see it says deform now zero down to taper and let's enable that and what we can do now is increase the amount and kind of like stretches it and so I think I did it at point five or like point zero five this is just a subtle deformation and then we can go down to the origin and maybe play around with the orientation 180 so it's kind of like stretching at the top here and go over to bend and then enable that and increase the angle so maybe like thirty five and of course the look of this all depends on what kind of style or what kind of design you're going for so just keep that in mind you can experiment freely this is just for the tutorial but once you understand all these steps and all of these tools then you can really incorporate it into your own work and of course I say this just in case it turns out to be total garbage because most of the time the original example doesn't really match with the tutorial example that we do in this case I'll just shift the blame to you by saying just make sure you experiment and you know if it doesn't turn out well the blame is all on you all right back to the tutorial maybe just give it a bit more of a taper here and then maybe the bend is a bit too much maybe change the orientation so yeah as I said before just make sure you experiment with this now one thing I'm noticing here is this rnm are not really in contact as you can see if you orbit a bit around but from this angle it does look like they're intersecting so let's bring the paranormal text back on let's shut this off and let's just select this R and let's just increase the gap turn this back off and now we can select the element layer and right-click transform reset to bring it back to the middle alright now let's go ahead and start texturing this text and let's use this as a reference so let's go ahead and create a new solid by going up to layer new solid let's name this noise texture and what we'll do now is pre compose this so let's go ahead and over to layer pre compose or ctrl shift C let's just name this texture of comp and move all attributes and hit OK now before we can move inside of the comp let's go ahead and click on this paranormal logo ctrl C to copy it then go inside and then ctrl V to paste it and in here we'll just right-click and turn into a guide layer and what a guide layer does is basically makes it so that we can see it in this comp but when we render it or when we bring it over here it's not really visible all right now if we zoom in here and we have the resolution full can see it's got like a very noisy kind of texture it's got these black specks here and it's got these white little specks here I don't know if you can see them because of YouTube's compression maybe and mainly it has this green color which fades into like a purplish magenta kind of color it has these sort of like cracks at the bottom as well so let's try to recreate that look and what we're gonna do is we're gonna be using fractal noise to generate the texture and then play around with some other materials that I prepared for us today okay so back to the solid let's control space to bring up the FX console again and type in fractal noise and boom you got some clouds now back to the fractal noise we got a fractal type that said that too may be like dynamic and then noise type too linear because we don't want it to be as soft then we can increase the contrast decrease the brightness a bit let's move down to transform and maybe scale is down quite a lot because we want this to be kind of like a noisy texture and then over to sub settings you got sub influenced you see what that does it's kind of like a secondary transform if you will then sub influenced it gives this sort of sharpness we don't want to overdo it now if you were to animate it you can just use the evolution value down here and you can basically just alt click on this stopwatch and type in time times say 150 so every second it'll shift by a value of 150 but we're not gonna use it in this tutorial I just wanted to show you for the sake of showing you alright so once we got that locked in maybe we can duplicate this and let's just increase the scale a bit and let's go down here and let's just turn the opacity down quite a bit maybe set this to screen or maybe even soft light and then decrease the opacity of this too now let's go back to the project tab and let's drag in this green texture that I got let's turn this off for now and let's just scale this down and we don't want the texture to be as big so what I did in the original example is I just shrunk this down and then I added this effect called see see repeat I'll what this does is just repeats it so if you increase the expand right and the expand left and then expand down and expand up now we don't want it to be repetitive like this instead we'll just use the tiling of random and then also let's control space at a fast blur just increase that just repeat edge pixels so that's the quarter for now I think we should increase it even more now what we can do is set this to soft light now let's go ahead and bring this grunge texture on top of the green texture let's click W to bring up the rotation tool and then click and drag to rotate and hold down shift to snap it by 45 degrees and scale it down bring it lower like that control space CC repet I'll expand down because we actually rotated this now let's go ahead and set this to unfold so it just unfolds like that now let's go ahead and select the mask tool up here or you can use the Q to toggle between the different shapes and let's just click and drag to select the rectangle tool and click and drag here at the bottom and then click F to bring up the feather and just feather this out like crazy and we'll set the transform mode to multiply which will get rid of all the white and leave us with only the cracks or the blacks then click T to bring up the opacity maybe bring this down a bit and what I'm noticing here is that this fractal noise texture let's just turn these both off for now it's a bit too big so maybe this bigger one let's just name this big noise small noise this bigger one maybe turn it down the opacity it maybe increase the brightness and not as much contrast then go back to the small noise maybe make this like four and increase the brightness a bit and then turn the textures back on let's go ahead and create a new adjustment layer real quick and add a curves adjustment let's just bring this down and add a bit of contrast and maybe turn down this texture at the bottom a bit as well okay now if we turn this back on the original logo animation of ParaNorman we zoom in here you can see there's these dark specks around the text and there's like these white small little specks the way we can create that is by duplicating this small noise let's do that bring this on top and let's just solo it out for a second let's increase the contrast increase the transform control space add luma and say key out darker for example so what this does is just keys out any dark value so we're left with all these small little particles that are all white and then maybe you can scale these up a bit so we don't have as much and then control space and add a simple choker as well this will choke out the small size particles and we'll be left with just a few of these dots across the screen and then we fee unsolo this you can see another level of detail and we can just duplicate this again let's name this white specks black specks and what we can do for this one is just rotate the evolution so it's not the same and now we can just add a simple fill and make it black now we can just play around with these just have a bigger black specks or even more threshold down but we don't want this to be overdone so slightly add some detail to it okay now let's go ahead and duplicate this big noise again so name this top noise and let's just select the mask tool mask it around the top over here we kind of like one a bigger texture to be over here at the top and maybe let's just turn down the complexity a bit yeah maybe the transform just a bit the brightness down and just feather this out like crazy now what we can do is create a new adjustment layer let's bring this at the bottom of this one so let's call this cc it's called this color what we can do now is mask the bottom and as I showed you in the beginning there's this sort of like purple color at the bottom here and so we want to be able to recreate that over here so let's go ahead back to the color adjustment layer and control space add the hue/saturation effect and what we can do now is just ship the heal let's bring this on top and move it out of the way and then just ship this until it matches with that one so maybe kind of like this color anyone can desaturate it a bit and then of course feather it out like crazy and maybe even decrease the opacity of it we want all of these textures to be balanced with one another and then we can add an adjustment layer all on top which will affect all of these integers bring them back to normal like add contrast to it and whatever so let's go back to the cc layer now and less control space add a hue and saturation and over here on the channel control we can actually affect the individual Channel so let's go over to yellows let's just give a slightly more bluish color and increase the saturation to give it more pop and then we can go to magentas increase the saturation a bit and going back to master and just give it a bit more pop +2 I think I did one more thing where I added this new adjustment layer and let's rename this top CC and let's mask the top and I just added a curves over here at the top let's just brighten it up and then feather it out now let's go back to the original CC layer let's give it a bit more contrast not as much we don't want to overdo it and then there's this effect called highlights compression and let's just bring this all the way at the top and this compresses the highlights so it doesn't get blown out so that seems fine for now let's go back to the paranormal tutorial comp and let's try to add that texture to the text so let's go back to the element 3d layer now we're gonna go over to custom texture maps and set that to the texture comp and we want the texture calm to be off now let's open up scene setup and in here in order to apply the texture to the text what we have to do is go over to the bevel and down here you can see it says diffuse you can click on that and then load the texture as a custom layer 1 which is the custom layer that we set before and then hit OK now it should appear here in the preview tab and it also should appear in this box but for some reason it doesn't I don't know if this is a glitch only for me a workaround that I came up with is let's just go back hit OK you can see the composition it shows up but we need to be able to control the position the stretching since we're not seeing the purple at the bottom here we need to be able to do that in real time so let's go back to the texture comp we can go ahead and click ctrl alt s to save this as a texture and let's just leave in a desktop texture tutorial let's just make this a JPEG best settings and just hit render I took a long time then go back to the paranormal tutorial go inside of the scene setup back to the diffuse and we're gonna just click on this one and find that texture and click on that and now it shows up so we can hit OK and now we can preview it in real time with an element let's just set up the UV mapping you know to do that we have to go back to the extrusion model and go down you see this tab it says UV mapping and you can go ahead and select any of these to see what works best for you but I found that plane XY was the best in this case and then also I play around with the UV repeat let's have the X 2 maybe 3 and then the Y 2 maybe 3 already you can tell what we're going for now of course you get these like stretches over here on the sides of the letters but it's not really gonna be a problem that much also you can use these ue offset values to just move this around so you can see at the bottom here we just offset this and make it perfect at the bottom also at the top now if you zoom in here you can see the textures and you can also uncheck this draft textures so you can get even more detail now let's go ahead and click OK now of course it looks really dead right now but we will be adding lighting and shading to this before we do that let's just go back to the scene setup one more time and go to the bevel and set the texture back to the custom texture comp and of course it's not gonna show in here but once we go back to the comp everything should be fine and just to demonstrate let's go to the texture comp create a solid and make a shape like that go back to the paranormal text you can see that texture being updated live so let's go back and delete that and now let's go ahead and start getting this to look nice first thing we can do is select the element layer and go inside of the render settings up here and maybe go to ambient occlusion and turn that on and what this does is basically just as shading wherever there's contact between different objects or objects are close to each other so this just adds a bit of depth to it there you go with just a click of a button it looks 2000 times better then we can go back to the comp and let's start creating some lights so let's go up to layer new light and let's name this backlight and make it a point light and hit OK and now what we can do is just position this light to be behind the text his backlight is usually very important when it comes to 3d titles because you want to have that sort of like edge light here that gives depth to it and makes it pop a bit more so in order to make it a bit easier for us to position these lights what we can do is use the views over here at the drop-down list so we can go on the top view you can see this is our text this here is our camera the light is actually in front so we can drag this back and then we can go on the left side drag is over here at the top and go back to the active camera and you can see now it creates this edge light and that's what we want so let's go down to the light options and maybe we can increase the intensity down a bit we could duplicate this now and then bring this in front and I think I added one light to this side and then duplicate that and add one to this side just so we're here something I noticed is there's this reflection of the light over here like a specular we want this material to be non reflective so what we can do is go over to the scene set up and we'll play around with the material of the bevel let's go ahead and select the bevel go down increase the specular but decrease the glossiness the glossiness is pretty much the sharpness of the specular highlight let's just set this to 100 just to demonstrate and hit OK you can see since we increase the specular it's even more visible but when we go back to the scene setup we can now decrease the glossiness so maybe 15% and now it's really soft maybe name this left name just right these lights have a bit too much intensity so like that decrease this as well and then we can have one more in the middle here and we'll just make that very low next thing we can do is maybe add some color correction control space on the element 3d layer type in curves and just maybe like darken it a bit like increase the highlights and just maybe even decrease the blacks altogether and it's looking a bit too saturated now so let's add a hue and saturation effect bring this down try to shift the hue of it towards a more cooler look and if we zoom in here let's make this full you can see these bandings or like these edges that are very sharp and this is called aliasing and the way we can fix that with an element is by going up to output and there's this option called multi sampling and super sampling maybe we can set this to 16 we can go down to a super sampling and just set that to 4 and immediately you can see we got a much cleaner edges and then there's also the sampling and aliasing effects a a smoothing which just smooths the edges all together that that is 6 it was a lot more blurrier but i want to recommend this unless you really need it so let's go back to zero and go down here you can set this render mode to preview so what will happen is whatever settings you're using it'll just make sure to use lower ones just to speed up the process another thing we can do is add a glow effect to just make this pop that much more let's just turn it off for now and over here at glow colors instead of having original colors begin to select a and B colors and select this one and maybe a darker green cuz we don't want this purple color to glow at all let's turn it back on you can see it only affects the green now let's just leave it there and then increase the radius quite a lot turn down the intensity to 0.4 really subtle but for me that's the best way to go with these details just make them really subtle so that they don't have a lot of attention compared to other elements in the shot let's go back to the project tab and I have this forest kind of wallpaper you can drag it down it's it's actually really small but it doesn't matter since we're gonna be blurring it by the way I'm holding down shift to just scale it proportionally instead of like it going crazy as you can see the angle matches pretty nicely since it's from the ground and it's photographed towards the sky so we got this low angle kind of look and control space add a curves effect and control space add a hue and saturation effect let's just break this down preserve the highlights and just crush the blacks and then over to the hue and saturation let's just shift the hue so it matches with our text also let's go ahead and add fast blur maybe make it like to bring it out of focus a bit let's click on the element 3d layer and let's talk a bit about the render settings so before I talked about this aliasing problem and we can fix that by simply increasing the super sampling and the multi sampling and then you got the ambient occlusion and the intensity and you can even use ray-traced ambient occlusion but just beware this is very slow and very heavy on your computer and also sometimes the SS AO in some cases looks better instead of the ray-traced and then moving down we got samples if we preview this if you look closely here you can see this or like weird thing going on here at this edge and that's because there is not a lot of samples for the ambient occlusion so we can do to fix that is set this 264 usually that's enough and then you can set the multi sampling of the ambient occlusion as well it's maybe four and that should fix even more edge problems as you can see here now let's create another adjustment layer and just make a color correction on top of everything and let's control space curves and control space hue okay now with all those covered let's go back to the original comp and see how close we actually got it so brace yourselves oh my god it's actually not much of a difference but since I got to work on this really long time got into the details and polished it a lot more let's make some more room here and let's just press you to bring up all the keyframes so the first thing I got is fade in so I got a black layer here and just faded it out over here this is the part where the lighting flash happens so you can see I basically animated all of these lights come on and off and then sometimes on the right side it's a bit brighter on the left side is a bit darker skip it a bit more variation at this point you can see it goes completely dark and then the background goes very bright and then it goes off and then back to normal for the text as well and then it continues and if we go into the CC adjustment layer you can see what kind of effects I added here so you see we have a curves and a hue/saturation but I also used luma tree color just to cool off the temperature and give it a bit of a negative tint and then I use the film convert plugin which is also paid plugin but you don't need to use that you can just use a noise effect because all I did was use this to add a bit of noise and a bit of texture to it and also you're gonna use the unsharp mask effect so you can see it looks really soft without it so basically what it does is sharpens the mask but it's ten thousand times better than the sharpen effect alright guys so that's it for the first part of this tutorial but keep in mind that whatever you learn here you should try to incorporate that into your own projects make sure to LIKE sprinkle your own imagination and your own ideas into it just to make it that much more original with all that said let's now move on to the second part of this tutorial alright now moving on to the second part of this tutorial I've already gone ahead and created a new composition using all the same settings as before and let's click ctrl T now bring up the text tool and click and drag and just type in hipster monster and then the font I use for this one is called monsters pretty convenient and then ctrl alt home and control home to Center this and then maybe scale it up instead of using this text as a custom layer for element 3d we can turn this into a solid and use masks instead and the reason we need to do that is because in the original example I added these sort of teeth to the O letter and I also made this ol letter a bit wider okay so the way we can turn this into a mask is by simply right-clicking create masks from text there you go and now we can go in here and maybe select this and click ctrl T to transform and just scale it up by the way I'm holding down shift to proportionately scale it and also you can hold down control to scale it from the anchor point and then we can go in here and just add some points we need one more and then just drag these up holding shift to snap them vertically and the cool thing about this is that now we can go in here and actually customize the look of this so maybe we can align this T with this e and then align this R with this e let's go back to this B and I think it's actually too close and then this R as well so I'm just a bit more gap and there you go we have the design set and let's create the element 3d layer let's control Y iii-v control space element and now we can go over to custom layers in custom text and masks and select the path of the monster layer and then just set this to masks and now when we go to the scene setup when we click extrude boom and you can see our little teeth right there now before we move on let me go back to the original comp real quick and show you something so let's go over to monster and as you saw in the original animation you can see that the old letter is its own group and the mas ter are their own group as well so what I did to achieve that is let's go back to the monster comp what we can do we can duplicate this layer just type in m-mister and this one should be the O and now what I can do is just delete every other letter except for the old letter and then in this one delete the old letter and leave all the other letters now we can go back to the element 3d and set the custom path layer two to the O make that as a mask as well and go back to the scene setup and since this one is using the custom path one and we deleted the oh there's not gonna be a no here but now let's just drag this off of the group let's delete that we can right click and duplicate model set this to group number two and then set the custom path to number two as well now we have the letter O in itself so what this allows us to do is by going back we can go over to the group one and then go over to create group null and then create that have a null that is connected to these letters which makes it easier for us to animate later on and then go back to the element and create a group null for the group number two as well and then just reposition that to be where we need it to be let's go over to element three and go over to the scene setup and now start playing with a look of these letters first and then we can get to the animation part too let's bring up the bevel extrusion model one and let's just play around with this and then what we can do later on is just copy this bevel and paste it over to this letter let's go over to the bevel go over to the bevel options and maybe extrude this quite a bit maybe something like three we can go back to the extrusion model let's make this bevel copies to 2 and the bevel copy number two we're just gonna decrease the extrusion but we're gonna increase the Z offset so it goes in front of this and then we can expand the edges inwards and for this one since this was all sharp and stuff I just want to have double depth zero just set that to zero and for this one as well bevel segments to zero and bevel segments to zero now for this second bevel let's just leave it at white and maybe just make it a bit shinier and decrease the glossiness let's do the same for this bottom one and for this one let's just set it to like a cartoonish blue okay now let's move on to the old letter and what we can do is firstly let's set the bevel copies to 2 and then we can go over here to the bevel 1 right click copy go back here right click paste and then over here right click copy and right click paste so we got the same settings as on this one copy that and go back to the basic settings paste so we got identical settings for both of these groups we can go ahead and okay and you can see it updated in the composition now let's go ahead and quickly create a new camera layer new camera let's make this a 20 hit OK and let's turn off these shapes because we don't really need to see them and now let's create a new solid call this background and let's hit OK and we can go ahead and add a gradient ramp effect let's just turn this off turn it all off just so we can grab the color from this and then make this one all the way to white I have to turn it back on down here and now we can maybe make it radial ramp let's bring it all the way at the bottom maybe sort of like that and just drag this bottom point a bit maybe give it a bluer color like a bright blue now let's reposition the text let's go ahead and create a new light make this an ambient light so it's not perfectly bright let's just make it to like 75% go back to the element 3d so let's go over to the ambient occlusion go over to render settings ambient occlusion and enable the SSAO increase the intensity quite a bit now as for the shadow on the ground what I did is let's go to the scene setup I use 3ds max to create this plane and you can see it's already in here so I can click OK and then it imports over here if you have 3ds max you can easily create this and then export it as an obj cuz that's what element 3d uses I'll just leave this in the project file so you can download it and it'll all be there okay so now let's just bring this at the bottom set this at maybe group number 5 right click rename floor hit OK and now we can go over to group 5 create a group null and let's rename this floor control let's rename these as well text control and hold control now the floor should be below that let's scale this all the way and the way we can make this disappear and only have the shadow up here is by doing this so go back to the scene setup and under the material of the floor go down all the way at the bottom and just check this option where it says Matt shadow so there you go let's go ahead and add another light and let's make this point increase this quite a bit and hit OK and this is probably in front so let's go to the top view sorry if I'm going a bit fast now because we've already covered all of these in more detail with the first part now back to lighting let's move this around maybe go down and increase the light intensity as you can see what that does over here as I said before when I mentioned this lighting setup over here and by doing this it doesn't really affect the composition the way you can use this in the composition is by going down here and you can see it says lighting you can drop that down add lighting and this is where you can add those pre main lights maybe put it to single light go to additional lighting you can control the brightness overall and then you can rotate the light around so you can have this front side be a lot brighter than the back side now if we zoom in here we can see if we put this too full we can see that the shadow on the ground is very blocky and very noisy and that's because of the samples of the ambient occlusion so you can easily fix that by going down to the ambient occlusion and set the samples up to 64 and that should make it nice and soft and then you can increase the multi sampling and go all the way down to the output as well set this to 16 and the super sampling to 4 let's go ahead and create a new adjustment layer and let's just bring this on top let's rename this to CC and control space add a curves adjustment maybe just add a bit of contrast to this you can see it already makes it pop that much more and then add a hue and saturation maybe add some saturation to it can maybe even shift a hue like this so you can instantly just get multiple colors without actually having to go change them in the element 3d layer but anyway let's go back to how it was and then let's go ahead and create another adjustment layer and let's call this vignette add a curves adjustment bring this down a bit more contrast and what we can do now is select the ellipse tool and just double click that'll create on like a perfect circle depending on the composition size and we'll set the mask to a subtract and we'll just hit F to bring up the feather and feather that like crazy now if we turn that on and off you can see what difference it makes it's really subtle but it really helps focus our attention towards the center here okay so I think as far as the design and the look of this goes it's actually looking pretty nice of course we can always come back to this and tweak it later if we're not happy with something or we want to make some changes or adjustments but for now let's just leave it that and move on to the animation part and for this one I'm gonna do the same thing and cheat a little bit and just take you through the keyframes that I created in the original composition instead of just going over and redoing the whole animation now let's go over to the monster main comp that I did before so as you can see the camera kind of like comes out through this oh letters mouths and you can see the tooth and it's this sort of like growling shaking animation and then the other letters just come in together and you have this bouncy animation you see that the letter O is kind of like being squashed and you can also see that they have this sort of like twist and this was all created using element 3ds animation values let's go over to the composition click you to bring up the keyframes we zoom in here using alt and scroll wheel you can see that I use this tint effect and I keyframe it to go from 0 to 100 so that it tints the entire screen to red and this was a really fast and easy way to tint the entire comp right instead of actually changing the color of this background or these letters and all that and then from 100 it just slowly goes back to zero I also used the optics compensation effect and what this does if we increase this just demonstrate or you can uncheck this reverse and it makes it like a fish eye lens but in this case we'll just leave the reverse on actually let's just ctrl Z everything in the beginning you can see it's more powerful like you got 65% and you can see the first keyframe because it's off the composition so let's just select this one it'll select all the keyframes and we can bring this over so you can see there's the first keyframe at 92 but I push this over so that it starts at like 65 I have easing on this and also increase the keyframe velocity to maybe like 75% then let's take a look at the camera itself so we got the camera and then I got a bunch of nulls here to add extra movements to the camera so if we zoom in here the main camera does this so it's it's over here goes in front of the O and you can see I animated the position the point of interest also the zoom when the camera is right here in front of the oh it says 1152 this is basically 11 millimeters it's very wide click and drag it's gonna go slow and then hold down shift is gonna decrease or increase very fast see if we go lower it becomes wider and if we go higher it becomes more zoomed in it's like 3,000 that means it's 30 millimeters and the reason I add extra nose to add extra movement to the camera is that when it comes here you can see that this camera comes to a stop right here but if you have another knoll and attach this camera to that no you can add some movement to that no going from the front here a bit backwards so it doesn't just stop so like comes here boom stop and then starts moving again and then I have another extra null here that has some more movement to it if you go over to the end here let's just unlink this from this null you can see it just stopped over here and it didn't move at all anymore but if we have this linked what happens is after it stops it actually keeps on going a bit more and it just slowly eases into the stop now of course you can use keyframes and mess around with those so that you don't have many keyframes to worry about but this is the way that I like to do it now moving down what I did with the old control extra I played around with a rotation a bit and then the position too and then the scale here this point is very important because you can see that the scale goes from 87 over to 102 and then it goes back to 100 that gives it this sort of like bounce you look and at the same time it looks as if these letters are squashing the old letter I also animated the properties within the element 3d layer so you can see down here what I did is I play it around with a bunch of these key frames from the deform section so let's go over to Group one and go down to particle look and deform put down the twist you can see what the twist does on the x-axis so I simply animated it to do this and I animated the scatter and the XY displays and you can find these just by simply right-clicking and then reveal in effect controls so it'll take you right there so it's under multi object and we got this place X Y Z we got the size got the size randomness I played around with that as well so as you can see there's a bunch of keyframes that were added because I worked on this animation for about two hours I think just to get it to flow properly and make it look as interesting as possible okay so I think we've covered pretty much everything that I did in the original example so we can move on to the third part of this tutorial which is the Toy Story inspired 3d title and we can go ahead and check that out real quick and for this one we're only going to be walking through some specific things that I did that are kind of like unique and different because it's pretty much the same principle and the same techniques used but to a more extreme level so let's check it out okay so let's scroll down on first off let me just let you know that this one was created using three copies of element and the reason for that was because element 3d only supports five groups and because I wanted to have control over each of these letters and each of these outlines of these letters in this box as well that meant that I was not gonna be able to fit all of these elements into different groups because then that way I would need to have more than ten groups and that's the reason why I had to split all of these and of course this is really heavy on the PC and I actually had to render these out separately and then composite them back together in another come so I basically had to turn these two off render this layer and then turn this one off render this layer and then turn this one off and render this layer and then compose them back all together after they were rendered now he scrubbed through and go back to the beginning just to check out the animation what you can see here is that the animation is very bouncy that was the look I was going for it so let's give that a quick preview you can see that the animation is very bouncy you can tell how they just extrude more than they should and then they retract back into place and if we click you to bring up the keyframes you can see that it's actually not that complicated like you got two keyframes for each of these letters this is the M control then you got the outline control the Y control Y outline control and so on and so forth we got the force opacity down here and the reason I did this and the force opacity basically allows you to control the opacity of all these letters or all these objects or these groups shift them over and you can see what they look like since I'm going in the negative on the scale it's gonna flip and also go extrude backwards and then the force opacity right at this frame goes to a hundred percent let's just control Z and undo those force opacity keyframes you can see at this point the board pops up and so that's the reason behind these force opacity keyframes now I'm gonna show you real quick how I decided to separate these letters into different layers so let's go over to my element and go over to the scene setup and this is how I set it up so we got the M letter and it's on Group one then we got the M outline on group three then we got the Y letter on Group two and then we got the Y outline on group 4 real quick to demonstrate how I did the outline it's actually pretty easy if we go to the outline material what I did is I simply just checked this bevel outline and able as soon as I had one of these letters set up with a fill and the outline I just duplicated them multiple times changes the custom path to be set to the path that I actually wanted so in this case it's the custom path one because that's where the M letter is and then for the Y I had the custom path - and seeing as element only supports five groups this was perfect so we got the mm outlined why Y outline that's four layers and I also had the holder and I made that as a matte shadow so if you go here go down you can see that the matte shadow is checked and therefore since it's coming into contact with a box I had to have that in the same element layer as well and in fact this box element is in all three of these element 3d layers so if you go here to the element 3d toy going to scene setup you can see here we got the holder it's not a matte shadow because we need to see it on this one and then we got the T OH and Y and all of these have no outline it's just the fill and therefore we only have to use four groups and again all of these are linked to null objects and all these have been named so you can see it's T ctrl o ctrl ctrl shift H by the way to toggle the UI so we can see where the controls are but other than that we can maybe talk a bit about the look of these letters so you can see it's pretty shiny and it's pretty reflective so let's go over to the say my element and then go into the fill material so I have the reflectivity up to 15% I even put some illumination intensity into it to like pop a little bit more so I put it to 30% and also chose the same color as the diffuse color I even added some diffuse to it just to make it pop that much more and then I just copied all of these material options and pasted them over to all of these other ones so let's go back to the comp you can see that there's a shadow being cast on the ground the way I did that is by basically putting the back light to cast shadows so you got the cast shadows here on also if you go a bit closer here you may notice that there's a bit of glow going on in these letters and that's because there is so let's select this element layer and go down under the render settings we can find the glow turn that off you can see the difference basically this glow is the same as the glow effect that After Effects has but it's a lot faster and you can also have some very specific effects when it comes to element 3d itself for example here we got glow from luminance and instead of having that which is gonna affect the entire title it's only going to affect the illuminated elements let's go back to the scene setup when I told you about the illumination that I added 30 percent intensity if this word zero there's no glow whatsoever because it's not illuminated then the glow is actually coming from the illumination so it's not gonna have any effect in this case so let's control Z and then moving on you got some glow radius you got glow intensity pretty self-explanatory and then you got glow aspect ratio this one is pretty cool cuz if I increase this let's turn these two other ones off and zoom in and let's just increase the intensity just to demonstrate you can see if we increase this the glow becomes much more stretched out horizontally kind of like a anamorphic lens would make it look like so let's bring it back to two intensity of point six or whatever it was also if we go down all the way at the bottom here under output you can see that we have the multi pass mixer and what I did in this case is I increase the reflectivity and all of these options are Global's so whatever you change here will affect the entire objects that are within these groups of this certain element layer I even added some illumination as you can see alright so I think that's pretty much it and we're finally done with the third part of this tutorial as well excuse me if you actually expect it to go a bit more in-depth but I did try to make this as short as possible while at the same time making it as informed as possible but also at some points maybe try to go a bit faster or maybe even skip some things since we did cover a lot of things in the first part and then we got the second part as well so once you get these steps laid out and the process and the techniques I'm pretty sure you can follow along pretty easily and then end up creating your own self in experiment and do whatever it is that you need in order to get the best result possible for what it is that you're doing with all that out of the way let's now move on to the outro of this video all right guys thanks for watching and being patient all the way through consider subscribing and hitting that Bell button to be notified whenever a new video comes out if you want to follow my work or ask me any questions personally then you can find me on Instagram if you have any suggestions then leave a comment down below thank you once again for watching and I'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Broken

Views: 14,177

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Id: AU8mrRnAARo

Length: 49min 40sec (2980 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 23 2020