After Effects Tutorial - Create Cel Shaded 3D Objects Using the Cinema 4D Renderer

hey everybody its EJ from Aya's I'm calm and today I'm going to be showing you how to create 3d cel-shaded objects inside of After Effects CC 2017 using the brand new cinema 4d renderer so what are we going to be creating today is breaking down how I created this 3d fully 3d controller on Tendo controller inside of After Effects using the brand new cinema 4d render so let's just start from scratch and you can see that I just have an illustrator file that I imported as a single layer and I'm just going to go and just hop into after into illustrator and just break down what this is I mean it's got the buttons it's got everything in their own little layer so I got all these different elements in here saved it made our little Nintendo controller import it and there we go so the only thing we really need to do is you know turn on this layer and boom you made it 3d inside of After Effects alright that's it I'll see you guys later now we're gonna go way further than this right so this is the old way we would do the two and a half D and aw man was it limiting like we live in the future now we're using After Effects Creative Cloud 2017 we're not even in 2017 yet so we're already in the future right so let's uh let's break down how we can actually extrude all this stuff and make this actually 3d so the thing I want to do so we got our layer in turn on the 3d turned into a 3d layer what we're going to do is click this little button over here and what that's going to do is bring up our composition settings and throw us in our 3d render attempt so by default in your composition it defaults to that classic 3d renderer which is what we've been used to for ages right where we just have two deep lanes in 3d space that we can rotate and spin around but it's a flat as a board right so we now have this cinema 4d render and our old friend the raytrace 3d render which I'm sorry to say should never use ever again because this cinema4d render is insanely faster than the old ray-traced 3d option plus it's got so many new options so much more flexible in again the speed the speed seriously you guys it's super fast so that's what I'm going to be demonstrating today is the cinema 4d render and how to use it to create like a cel-shaded 3d Nintendo controller so once we change it to the simha 4d renderer we have this dialog pop-up that lists all these things that are enabled and disabled so you might be freaking out because that's a lot of stuff under disabled right the number one thing is going to be blending modes so that's kind of a workaround you're going to need to figure out and it's actually very easy to figure out is because these layers these 3d layers in the cinema 4d renderer does not handle blending modes basically you would just need to make your 3d make your 3d layer whatever pre-comp it and then then that new composition just use the old classic 3d render and then you can use blending modes track mats all this good stuff so pre comping again sometimes things don't work with effects on a layer right so you got a pre comp that layer with the effects and then you can go about your day and be all normal and stuff using your track match your masks all that good stuff but what's enabled which is the most important part is extrudes and bevels and the most important thing to notice is that it's extruded in beveled text in shape layers so what does that mean well we just have our little illustrator layer right here so what we're going to need to do is for this new cinema 4d renderer to work and be able to extrude things in bevel things bevel objects and have reflections and all this other good stuff is to change this to this illustrator layer to a bunch of shape layers which is super easy or if you're just using a text layer you're already good to go because this automatically works so let's just hit OK and what we're going to do is troll this down and the one thing going to notice that is added is this geometry options and right now this just has like the old curvature thing that doesn't really do anything because we're still a flat layer right so what we need to do is convert this to a shape layer because remember we can't do anything we can't extrude unless this is a shape layer so I'm just going to select my layer my illustrator layer I'm going to go to layer and create shapes from vector layer so this is a vector layer from illustrator and once I do that it's going to turn off my illustrator layer and create this shape layer that if I twirl down the contents you can see I have all of my elements here I have my buttons all separated I have my little backplate here whoops don't want to do that I have my backplate here right and then I have my main white controller layer so what we can do is actually probably rename these we can actually know what the heck is what so this is just the directional pad pad there we go this is the right button so these are all groups that are shapes right and they all have their own little options here all with their different fills and paths so each of these are just little groups inside of a group we're in group inception right so this is our select button our start button start and then our back little act like accent plate and then our main controller backing alright so we renamed everything because we're nice and neat people and we like to think keep things organized right so in the geometry options you're going to see that that changed when we change this a layer to a shape layer we have these all new options we don't have that everything whatever we now have legit 3d options including bevels and extrusion depth so right now we don't have I'm not going to worry about bevels or anything because we want to make this nice and 3d in and a nice and cel shaded so I'm not going to worry about bevels or anything like that the main guy I want to worry about is this extrusion depth right here so what I'm going to do is just extrude that to say 110 or whatever you're going to see that we don't see anything because we're looking at this object straight on so again this is a 3d layer so I can just hit our go to my rotation options here and just rotate this and you can see that hey we actually have like an extrude going on here but right now it's just a flat color you don't get a sense of this really being extruded because there's really no shading typically you'd want to see a little darker shade on the actual extruded edge of this object to give it a little bit more sense of depth so what we can do to actually introduce that is let me just get to a good position right here is to actually just add a light add a light source right so what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a parallel light because I want to introduce some kind of like flat lighting and After Effects uh the best kind of flat light is a parallel light because it's just parallel just flat on is a flat light source and we'll just change this to white and let's just name this parallel parallel and make sure cast shadows is on no fall-off and we're good to go so once you see that we have this light in here you can really sense that this is a 3d object we have this little edge over here that's a little bit lighter we have a lighter face on the front holy crap my spell parallel wrong there we go I'm sure people were screaming at you spelled it wrong you dummy hey I'm a 3d designer not a speller not neder so we have this light we can adjust this right we can brighten this all up a little bit but what I want to do because you know again this is still pretty dark what I want to do is go into by hitting a a we're not going to AAA we're just hitting a we are going to mess around with these these material options right here because this controls a lot of how this object reacts to lights in our scene so the first thing I want to do is you can see that it's just very very subtle if I crank up the light options here like crank up the strength you can see a little bit of gradation because of where the light is and then a little bit of fall-off right and we want to get rid of that because again we're aiming for like a cel shaded type of thing so any kind of like fall-off shading we don't really want so to get rid of that we're just going to crank up this diffuse and what that's going to do is kind of flatten everything out especially our front face here so we just have solid white we no longer have like white and a little bit of gray along the edges or anything like that and then we're just gonna we don't need any shininess or anything like that don't need a reflection because we don't need reflections for cell shading and then metal I think we can just you know we'll just leave that on that's fine but the main thing is this ambient and diffuse and except shadows is good too so this is all well and good but really at the end of the day we just have an extruded brick we don't have any definition on our buttons or buttons have no depth right so what we need to do is actually move these move those button shapes forward but we can't really do that because if we go into our contents here you can see that transform we can only transform up and down we can ik we can't move position in z space it's just X and y so that kind of creates a problem but it's a problem that is easily remedied when we just say okay well I can control the extrude in the 3d transform on this actual shape layer so to be able to to be able to have to like to have these buttons have their own extrude and move it forward I just need to make it its own shape layer so all the buttons right so what we're going to do is just rename this controller and then I'm going to duplicate this and name this buttons so we have to shape layers now and our controller can just hold the accent and then the actual controller so we don't need the buttons layers anymore so I'm just going to delete that and on the buttons shape layer here I can go to the contents and remove the accent and the controller layers and now I have all these buttons on their own layer with their own extrude options so we don't probably need it as deep of an extrude but then I can actually move this I can either go into the viewport here and go on the z-axis here and move this forward or again I could just move this in the position right here so I can just move this forward you can see that hey we no longer have like a flat brick anymore we actually have our buttons with some nice definition that's looking really good now if you want to maybe have the buttons a little bit more you would just you know duplicate this have the buttons on a separate layer then move those a little bit forward but I think all these on the same z plane with the same kind of depth works just fine so the one thing I want to do is kind of brighten everything up overall and I'm going to do that by adding a new light so we're just going to add new light and this is going to be a ambient light and I'm just going to add a little bit of like bluish hue to this and just turn that on and you can see that kind of makes a little bit more cartoony because we got brighter colors let me just name this ambient you know I'm having I'm struggling with the old spell in there so ambient and then in the light options I'll just bring this down to say 50 yeah uh and you know we have this nice blue hue we can maybe crank that up a little bit more just to give this a little bit more more nice lighting alright so uh the one thing I want to go over is on these button layers you can see that this controller pad or the directional pad is kind of fallen in on the background element right there and the reason for that is well there's two things one of the same color - there's no shadows to really give this sense of these buttons being on top of this background this a controller layer so what we can do is make sure we go to our on our buttons we're going to hit AAA to reveal the material options here and by default we have the cast shadows turned off so if we just turn that on and make sure we have our parallel our parallel okay our parallel light that our casting shadows and all we need to do now is uh just kind of move this a little bit move this parallel light in whoops don't do that don't do that because then you'll do that alright guys don't do that but it is nice because we're you know we have a 3d composition here right so we're just moving things in 3d space let's just move this ambient lights or this parallel light out a little bit and you see that if we're changing the angle here we can get this really nice shadow going on there and that kind of helps everything the buttons kind of pop up from that layer and we can actually go to the transform and adjust this a little bit like that so hey that's a little bit too much something like that looking pretty good and we could probably let's adjust the intensity maybe a little bit too but again we're still kind of losing this directional pad to this background layer so what we can do is go onto our buttons and maybe crank up the specular intensity and you can see that once I do that on all these button layers we can see that the front face is a little bit brighter because we added we introduced some specular so our front face that is facing the light is going to be a little bit brighter because of that so now we have this really nice definition you can definitely see the front faces of all of our buttons here and everything's looking pretty dang good and everything's looking pretty good and 3d and kind of cel shaded right so let's like rotate this a little bit to see how this looks as it rotates around so what I'm going to do is just grab both of our layers and just rotate and what you're going to notice is some stuff that's not not so good because these are two separate layers 3d layers with different access points different extrusion depths so you can see that things are moving out of place so what we need to do to correct this is zero out all of these uh zero out all these things and also zero out and reset the position here except for the extrusion we actually want to move this up to I believe that was like eight or seven something like that so now we got everything back in place so what we want to do is to just create a null so we can then rotate the null parent these two layers to that null so we can just control the rotation of everything with just that null so I'm going to go create a null and make that 3d and let's just go to our top view and make sure so there's a top let's just make sure that we're actually moving this null right about halfway of that extrusion so something like that so there's our null and then we'll just let's go to our active camera again and we'll just select both of our layers pick whip and make the null apparent so this will just be the controller null and now this is the guy that we will rotate and again since we position the the null a little bit back that's kind of that's not quite bit quite the center there so I'll just adjust this a little bit so we'll make sure this is in the center of that objects we have a central rotational axis and we can repair in that and there we go so now it can control both those layers and with this controller know enough to worry about things getting all wacky right and I'll just save that save early save off the one thing we could kind of mess around with a little bit is this controller know you can see that in the material options here we can just turn off metal we can turn on that specular a little bit too if we wanted to brighten that front face but really we probably don't want to get we don't want to have this thing where when we turn this we lose that bright white because again this is we're trying to create this like 2d cell shading kind of thing and this is a little bit too much 3d we're getting too much 3d going on on that front face so what I'm going to do and something that's really nice with the cinema 4d renderer here let me just move this down right like that is we can actually go to individual groups so individual controllers right here or individual layers here in our content so our controller layer here we have a fill so just like any other shape layer but with 3d we can acting we can actually control different aspects of our controller so I have this controller layer selected I can go to add and we're going to see this front bevel side and back options that are pretty new right we haven't seen those before and what this allows you to do is apply in a control things like color ambient diffuse reflection intensity and stuff for individual pieces of our extruded object so the front face of our extruded object the bevel which we don't have any bevels in the scene but the bevel on our extruded object the side of our extruded objects which is this side the extruded part is the side and then the back side of our extruded object we can define its own color and all this good stuff so this comes in handy especially with 2d cel-shaded things because we can actually define the shading on the front face the side and the back so if we want to do something like that with the control pad we just make sure we have that controller selected and I'm just going to add a color to that side and what's going to happen is that we're still getting this kind of like gradation shading thing which we can we're going to try to get rid of pretty soon here but we can control the color of just that side so we're going to make this a little bit darker and then we can we also have the fill which is just the the overall color so that's changing everything else so that's already set to white so what I want to do is just control the colors with all of these different options right here right and define a colors that way so what I'm going to do is I'm not going to use that light to shade the objects anymore so what I'm going to do is go to my material options and say except lights to off but we want the shadows to still be cast this so we can see the shadows so the first thing you're going to see is our shadows got really really dark so what we're going to need to do is go into our parallel light here and just bring down the shadow darkness to something a little bit more subtle not so dark so let's just say 45 that looks pretty good it's 255 so but now what we can do is now we're just dealing with flat colors you can see we no longer have that gradation along the edge we just have these flat colors that we are controlling those colors with these side options here so the side color is now that darker color we can add a different front color so that turns the front of our extrude ed so maybe we want like a little lighter but a little beaut blue hue in there looking good and now I'll just go to my controller here turn this around you can see that that backside is that default white color that is just the fill color for everything else that's not currently defined you know material options so we can do is just add a back color and let's just make this what's just sample the side color make it just a tad darker something like that and there you go now we have full control with the full control that we have over all those the colors on each of those extrude pieces we can kind of really recreate a a cel-shaded object even though this isn't really even though that parts not being controlled by lights the other parts are to some extent and you still see a little bit of the gradation going on right there so if we really want it to we can go in on the button layers and just make the front face red the side of it be a darker red and have like no shading come from the the light at all but actually like having a little bit of something like the buttons where it's such a subtle thing I'm just going to leave all that stuff on so the one thing I want to go over is in the cinema 4d renderer here we have this options tab and this options tab is also accessible by clicking this little wrench button here and this is going to be super super handy because what we can do is bring this draft all the way down to like one and one thing I'm going to notice so I was set at quality too and you can see our anti-aliasing looks pretty good only being a quality of two that looks really nice actually you know but if we set this all the way to one this is actually going to be the fastest speed that we can possibly do and the anti-aliasing is going to be set to none so I'm going to hit OK and hopefully you guys can see let me zoom in here you can see how aliased our edges are but the thing with that is that it's going to render super super fast whatever we're doing so again work like this but then even just changing this draft quality to two that changes the anti-aliasing to geometry which is the next step up of a lat anti-aliasing in the cinema 4d renderer and you can hit okay and you can see that that smooths everything out a little bit and as we actually turn this to our hundred percent view you can see that looks really nice those edges look nice we have anti-aliasing and for like 2d cell shading stuff really you don't need to go much higher than two because anything else is just kind of overkill I mean this kind of helps out the shadows and stuff like that if we up it to the one thing is that we as we adjust this slider you can see that stuff like ray threshold which is all these are all just things that kind of help out when dealing with reflections and stuff like that the higher these values the nicer quality the sharpness of shadows specular reflections stuff like that and the shadow depth but again for something like this it really doesn't we're not doing any high intensive 3d calculations here so the one thing to keep in mind is if you are doing like 3d text with reflections the breaking where we go from geometry quality to to decent quality and showing some really good nice reflection stuff is 51 and you can see that when we go from 50 we still have the geometry and when we go to 51 this is the next step up of sampling in cinema 4d in the cinah 40 render space and typically uh when doing things with reflections and stuff like that you're probably not going to want to go much above this 51 because even when working in cinema 4d the application itself these are the settings that you would use for a typical render so just trying to balance render speed when you actually render some thing with more intensive calculations just keep that in mind but again first whatever we're what we're working with right now we can just hang out at 2:00 and that'll be just fine and that'll render really quickly so let's actually just let's actually animate so we actually have something to render let's just move this like that and I'm just going to keyframe the Y rotation let me just zoom out here and we'll have a little bit of anticipation as it rotates the back way in the opposite way that we're going to eventually rotate and I'll just have this spin around I believe that was we started at 30 degrees yep so we just have that anticipation rotates 360 and then we'll have a little bit of let's do a little bit of overshoot like that so we want somewhat good looking animation and let's just select all these keyframes Easy's them let's just adjust these curves a little bit something like that and looking good we'll give each of these little key of these curves some love so something like that we can Ram preview and again this is where you're going to really see the differences of course Ram previewing when it comes to 3d but you can see how fast that that Ram previewed this is fully 3d using the cinema 4d render again like compared to the old raytrace this is just this is going to kick its butt any day so you see how fast that renders again if we go up to this wrench and we bring this up to you even when we bring this up it's for like highly refracted highly reflective and stuff like that so this is this kind of even give you helpful hints as you move this along so if we bring this up to something like that you can see this slows down the render a little bit more and really really not gaining any detail but when you're rendering or when you're animating and stuff just keep it keep it all the way at 1:00 because then you got blazingly fast Ram previews and you get the animation looking good and all that good stuff and then once you're ready to render just crank that crank that draft crank that render quality up to whatever you want for this to is good hour 3 let's Leah let's go 3 whatever the last thing I want to do cover is we got our 2d shading right we got our we got our 3d object spin around having a good time what I want to do is introduce even more flatness to this not flatness to this 3d object and by flatness I mean like I always call this like the simcity look where you're at that isometric view where everything looks a little bit more geometric and you totally remove what you can kind of see right here which is this depth perspective because this left side is a little bit shorter it gives the sense of depth than this side right here what we want to do is just totally get rid of that we can do that by introducing a camera which we should have had a long time ago actually but I'll just make this camera preset a 50 millimeter you're going to see that that's just default we're just still looking at it through that same lens we still have that depth perspective depth distortion kind of going on what I'm going to do is to get rid of that I'm going to go to my camera settings and to get a more flatter field of view we're just going to bring up the preset to 200 millimetres we're going to get a very big focal length and what's going to happen is we're going to get really super close to our object because of that and what we're going to need to do is just zoom out with our camera and you can see right away that we already lost that depth perspective again we're introducing that simcity looker it's more geometric right we have this sharp edges we don't have this side kind of smaller with that depth perspective we have a little bit of it it's very very subtle so we can actually go to our camera settings again and say bring this to say 300 that might be a little overkill but I'll just zoom out again and you can see that we have this really nice geometric looking 3d composition even as the spins everything's very geometric right we have nice sharp parallel edges here and really nice parallel edges on the top and bottom as well everything's looking really nice so if you're looking to do you know 2d cel shaded stuff with that isometric kind of look just crank up the focal length on your After Effects camera and there we go so now we got something that's looking really nice in you know again this is fully 3d in your After Effects applications so if you're if you're wanting to get into 3d this is the best way just being able to do to shape layers and just extrude I mean extrude the most basic 3d uh 3d use in in most applications I mean that's where you cut your teeth with modeling just extruding simple shapes and just layering them on top of each other but this will be a great introduction into the world of 3d in the application of After Effects that you've been working your in your whole entire life but then using some of the elements in cinema 4d to help render and add nice bevels and stuff like that and just everything in the in your adobe world so I hope this inspires you to check out the new cinema 4d renderer again this is the newest version of After Effects After Effects CC 2017 so update to the latest and greatest to be able to get the new cinema 4d renderer and play around in 3d in side of After Effects alright so there's a little introduction to the brand-new cinema 4d render inside of After Effects CC 2017 and we used it to extrude shape layers to create our Nintendo controller we shaded it with some 2d cell shading sputtering around and just had a a swell of a good time inside of After Effects playing with some 3d shapes so if you have any questions about anything I did in this tutorial or questions about the cinema 4d renderer in general let me know in the comment section I'd be happy to try to help you guys out with learn a little bit more about it if you guys create anything using this technique or any 3d inside of After Effects I'd love to see what you guys come up with be sure to share it with me on twitter or facebook or myspace whatever you guys are into these days and if you like this tutorial if you like this video be sure to press the like button I'd appreciate that and I appreciate all you guys out there watching this tutorial and I will see you all hopefully in the next one bye everybody

Channel: eyedesyn

Views: 56,311

Rating: 4.9656897 out of 5

Keywords: Motion Graphics, Design, Animation, Adobe After Effects (Software), Cinema 4d, 3D Modeling (Profession), Mograph, Tutorials, eyedesyn, c4d tut, cinema 4d tutorial, c4d, cinema 4d, maxon, cinema4d, mograph, motion graphics, adobe create cloud, after effects cc 2017, cel shading in after effects, after effects cel shading, 3d in after effects, after effects 3d, after effects extrude, cel shading, cel shading tutorial, ae tutorial, after effects tutorial

Id: NyjVtf8Zjrc

Length: 33min 42sec (2022 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 15 2016