Animate a Simple 3d Book in Adobe After Effects

hello everybody this is Evan Abrams and in this After Effects tutorial we're gonna be opening a book in After Effects we're gonna work in the 2.5 D environment of After Effects and make this lovely 3d opening book these curved pages that's right curved surfaces in After Effects it's pretty wacky so let's turn the page to another tutorial this tutorial about so much knowledge found in books is brought to you by skill share skill share is an online learning community with thousands of classes in design film writing and much much more and is found on the Internet it involves notebooks a premium membership on Skillshare gets you unlimited access to high-quality classes from experts working in their fields you'll improve your skills unlock new opportunities and do the work you love to do these are experts like me I have courses on there but also experts like the amazing Jake Bartlett aka Jake in motion I'm a big fan of Jake's works and teachings on motion design he's a really cool dude and he's a pretty cool YouTube channel too Skillshare is more affordable than most learning platforms with an annual membership coming in at under $10 a month and the first 500 people to use the link in the description sk l dot s h /e c Abrams 3 will get 2 months of Skillshare for free alright so we're here in after-effects let's get to work it might seem kind of complicated with all these layers but I promise you this is fairly easy stuff and hopefully this will get you way more acquainted with the 2.5 3d environment inside After Effects if this is your first time doing something in After Effects you might want to re-watch this a couple times or slow it down take it one step at a time it can be a little bit confusing but we will get you through well first thing I'm going to do is crack open a new composition and we call this the assembly this is where we're going to assemble the book alright and we're just going to use the HDTV 1082 for frames the second preset and this is where the book is going to be built so we need to create all the pieces that will eventually become that book so let's first make a new composition that will be our blank page I'm gonna name it that and what we're gonna do here is go with a width how wide is the page it's gonna be 580 and it's gonna be 830 so we're making like an a5 size of page hit okay and I'm gonna just go new solid make comp size and let's go ahead with a nice light makes a light color down here this looks fine nice and bright crisp white pages and that's gonna be our blank page you can put whatever you'd like in here if you want to do some animations in here if you want to do a picture you want to put some shape layers put whatever you want on this page it won't matter at all it'll matter cuz it'll look nice there but you can put whatever you'd like that's what I'm trying to say now I'm going to duplicate the blank page and rename this cover so this will be what the covers look like and in here I just open up the thing called cover there it is and I'm gonna select this and we're just gonna go layer solid settings and I think I will just make this you know a nice goes nice rich orange ready orange kind of thing perfect good and that's gonna be our cover I'm gonna duplicate the cover and make one called spine this is gonna be the spine of the book it's not a magazine doesn't fold around some staples so we're gonna have a spine of a book double click on that to go into the spine go to the composition settings make it 40 pixels wide I'm calling out some really specific numbers and if you want yours to look exactly the same stick with those numbers but you can do this with different numbers it's really going to depend if you can take this technique and you'll probably just extrapolate it to your own stuff let's get into it let's assemble this stuff in the assembly space so we're gonna bring the cover out that's one thing we'll need one cover two covers and one spine and that will assemble to make a book I think so we'll just align the spine into the center here I'm gonna grab grab this cover move it over grab this cover and move it over and I'm holding down command so that these snaps on a hold down command you can see it makes a little square there and that's gonna snap it you know snap its feature to the nearest feature which is its middle middle box right there so these three things together call up their positions call up their anchor points if we want seen ice around numbers and what I'd like to do is I'd like this book to fold over so I'm gonna take my Y here and hit Y call it my pan behind tool grab this anchor point and move it over here and then I'm gonna grab this anchor point of the spine and move it over as well that's cuz I want them to fold along that edge and now what I do is I take all these layers I make them three dimensional here by clicking this 3d box and you'll notice this little little reticle shows up on the anchor point and tells us that's the point it will rotate around I'm going to select this layer here move it above and just call this the front cover I'm gonna parent the front cover to the spine and a parent the spine to what we will rename the back cover just hitting return and renaming things I haven't moved the anchor point of the back cover cuz I don't really care that much it's fine where it is and because I've parented the front cover and the spine I'm gonna call up their rotations move ahead to one second and I'm gonna set a keyframe here on their Y rotation and the Y rotation it's gonna make them bend around like so and if I just set both of these to -90 the book is now closed pretty cool right we'll say it'll start here as a closed book and we'll go ahead 10 20 30 40 50 60 frames and we'll set some keyframes here and then the book can kind of relax back open so if we have a look you can't really tell what's going on because you don't have any lighting or anything and we're looking through an active camera so if we just move to custom view 1 and I just go ahead and put a new light in the scene new light so put this light in the scene make it a point light okay you can kind of tell what's going on now here we go now we can kind of what exactly is going on the book is indeed folding open I'm not gonna end up using lights so I'm just gonna delete that we might recolor these to be darker or lighter but the big thing you have to do when we're gonna work with 3d stuff is be aware of what 3d renderer you're using I'm using the cinema 4d renderer which you can change in here so you go to your composition settings go to 3d renderer and you can change the renderer to the cinema 4d renderer and this enables things like extruding and beveling reflections curved footage layers curved that's how we're gonna bend these pages material overrides and environmental layers but it disables a lot of things so there's a lot of things we won't be doing but to bend these pages this is a pretty easy method to make that happen so I'm gonna select these keyframes hit f9 so they're nice and smooth as this is opening up working an adaptive resolution and my quality if you go into your options my quality is set down to 1 and that's when you're working set your quality way down and it'll just work a lot easier it's a lot smoother to kind of deal with and figure out your motion and then turn that quality up when it's time to render so the next thing to do is to get our pages in the mix here so let's make a new null object make that null object 3d and let's parent that null object to the spine now basically I want something on the spine that's gonna sit in the middle of the spine and hold those pages together so if we have a look here stop looking at custom view 1 go back to the the main look here and it's kind of hard to tell what's in the middle of what but I can already see because the spine the middle of the spine should be right here on that crosshair this is not there so I'm just gonna call up the position bump this over 20 so this is gonna be 25 15 so you'll notice now the null is right in the middle and I'm gonna rotate the null a little bit I'm gonna rotate the null around so that when the book is open this thing is pointing straight forward alright so if again we look back to the custom view you can see it's coming a perpendicular perpendicular to this particular layer so as this is rotating around because this know this page holder is linked to the spine that's gonna go wherever it goes so now we can bring out some blank pages I bring out the blank page I make it three-dimensional I hit a to call it its anchor point set it to zero and if I parent this to the page holder while holding shift now it's sticking straight up perpendicular hey so now this when the book opens its gonna open up and just be looking flat just like that I would like this page to rotate as well so if called open its rotation by hitting our and I want to have the same kind of timing here so in a set keyframe here on the Y rotation and we're gonna move ahead and by the time this book is open it should be kind of like this maybe yet at 90 would put it totally flat that's not exactly what I would like so you know I'm just gonna offset it a little bit so maybe it goes maybe it goes to like 89 or 88 degrees so as it opens up we have to easy ease these so they're all going at a similar speed as you can see it is opening up with the book just like that so that's pretty good the only qualms I have is that it's not very interesting because it's not Fanning out the way I would like a book to kind of fan out so I'm gonna go one two three and go 30 frames and I'm just gonna offset this a little bit so that it's kind of just hanging out let's put this at like 35 so this is starting to fan itself out a little bit and I'm gonna orbit the camera around so we can kind of appreciate what that fanning out kind of looks like so there it is it's fanning out like this and what I'm gonna do is gonna take this keyframe I'm gonna hold down command click on it twice so then we have the auto bezzie a keyframe if we look at the graph editor you can see how that looks when this comes up and then goes like that so if we play that back you can see here that it's gonna go we and it kind of relaxes into the space awesome so I'm gonna duplicate this a few more times so let's see let's duplicate it once here I'm gonna call up in its rotation or you can hit you to just call up the things you put keyframes on and we'll say right here it should go to maybe 25 like that and when it comes to rest it shouldn't rest at 88 it should rest at like 86 so it's still kind of fanned open a little bit let's duplicate this again hit you again and then we're gonna go from 25 maybe down to 15 and we'll duplicate again and we're gonna go from 15 down to 5 and now I think we'll just touch up these keyframes here they go 88 86 84 and 82 so it'll end this kind of fanned out kind of kind of way here we'll just come to rest just like that so this is these are kind of our top pages the ones that are gonna go on the one side of the book now we need the pages that will end up on the other side of the book you might use more pages fewer pages anything you like really you can you can really extrapolate this out but I'm gonna duplicate all of these and move them up and I'm gonna change their color to be yellow and I changed these ones color to be green how about and let's affect now the rotation of all of these pages so I'm just calling them all up I'm gonna grab their rotation and we're gonna swing them back around this way so I think they're gonna have to go around minus 88 so this one's minus 88 minus 86 negative 84 negative 82 so they come to rest like that another thing that needs to change is that these key frames shouldn't be you know five it should be you know around on this side so it should be like probably negative 34 I think and then negative 25 negative 15 negative 5 so we have this nice fanning out of the pages which we can kind of you can kind of see if we put it like this there we go you can really tell that Fanning out of the pages so it starts to starts closed and then it fans out and then some of them relax back down and some of them open up so now we've got our book kind of opening the way we would like let's go back to the active camera right here so with this active camera we can't really tell too much of what's going on and mostly that's because all the pages are white you could use a light in the scene to kind of differentiate the pages from each other but what I'm going to do what I think I'll do is I'm just gonna make the pages a slightly different color I'm going to call up the effects and presets I'm gonna use the brightness so I'm gonna call up the brightness and contrast effect and I'm just gonna go like minus 120 on this page or you know maybe minus a hundred on this page I'm gonna copy that and kind of paste it on to to some of the other pages you know the pages that are that are in the back not the ones that are on the front so I'll just paste it in there so it's good and dark and we can tell the difference between the pages let's see this one here I'll paste one on there and it'll be like minus eighty so now we can tell the difference between those copy that right onto this page as well paste one on here so we're just pasting and see we'll go minus sixty on that one copy that paste it here all right so now we can tell the difference between the pages as they open up and I think that's working out so and if you're happy with having perfectly flat pages I think you could stop here this is where you might get off the tutorial and say I'm done I don't need to know anything else thank you very much but we do have the ability to curve these pages so I'm gonna select this one right here call up in its keyframes I'm going to twirl in I'm gonna twirl to the geometry options and we're gonna see right here that says curvature and curvature if we start increasing that it's gonna start bending bending this out and again if we look back at the custom custom angle you can see how it's bending this thing out so that's at minus 100 Bend I think we might might not go so extreme we might go like -20 Bend maybe but the way it been is kind of interesting to look at see it's really just bumping this out it's just pushing it out you noticed that it's not maintaining the same distance on the curve it's really just bumping this out which you know it's kind of funny and janky and it looks like it's breaking it into four separate pieces because we're dealing with four segments so I would increase that to maybe 10 maybe 20 it really depends on what you can get away with I think we can get away with 10 I don't think anyone's gonna call us out on it and I'm gonna adjust this to minus 20 now something else that should be happening this should be getting shorter it should be shortening as it's curving because if it curves it shouldn't shouldn't take up all of this space so what we would do is hold down shift and hit s I'm gonna call up the scale here and I would probably keyframe the scale to go along with the key framing of the curvature so I'm gonna set a keyframe for curve and a keyframe for scale and right here I think the curve is gonna be minus 20 here at the end I think the pages will flatten back out so the curve is going to go back to zero and the curve should start at zero when it's stuck in the book it should also be zero at the start and end let's easy ease those selecting them hitting f9 and in the middle we'll just to round it out using this auto Bezier I think the same is true for the scale the scale is gonna start at a hundred percent it's gonna end at a hundred percent and here in the middle I'm just gonna unlink the two things here here in the middle it's gonna just get a little bit shorter so maybe I don't know down to 98 something like that so then we just take this hold down command click on it a couple times till it's this circle and then we can kind of see I'm just gonna Ram preview so we can really enjoy and now we can observe that page you know sweeping and curving I think it looks pretty good as it does that you might choose for yourself to maybe have it not end totally flat and have it go curved so you could do that you can curve it around the other way like that so it's it's bending in the opposite direction that's totally fine too you'll just have to watch out you don't want them to poke through each other so let's go ahead let's copy these curvature and scale keyframes copy them and then go to all of these pages and paste them so now they should all be nice and curved as well so now I'm gonna go here to these other pages select all those and paste them there so now we look yeah they're all curving in the same direction as they go up and then when they come to rest they all curve back but unfortunately these yellow pages here should curve the other way so they should be like minus 20 minus 20 this one here negative 20 here negative 20 here so they're all they're all like folded the correct way so now we can rant I'm gonna RAM preview that see if we enjoy it oh yes that's very nice and look at look at how that goes and now you've got a book that's opening I think you've done pretty well the only thing left to do is move the camera around a bit so let's go ahead back to the active camera which is right here and I'm gonna go ahead and create a new camera I'm gonna go with the 35-millimeter preset okay and now I'm gonna create a new null object and make the null object 3d I'm going to take the camera and parent it to the null object and what I'm gonna do is for the null object I'm gonna have it rotate so I'm gonna call up its rotation set a keyframe on the x-axis here and I'm just gonna have it rotate down a little bit like this so we can really enjoy that book as it opens up I'm gonna ease those keyframes so that it's easing itself open as we're opening the book the angle is gonna change so if we just scrub through here you can see you know as the the book is opening the angle is changing and there we go if you wanted to put something on the pages it's just as simple as going in here and then you could just add add something to these pages if you wanted to so I'm just gonna make a circle and you know we're gonna make that circle maybe not a white circle like a dark just a dark circle just to illustrate what can go on and you'll notice it shows up on both sides of the page because these are the same on the front and the back so that's something to kind of be aware of with these pages if you wanted them to be different on the front in the back that's not really gonna be super possible with this limitation that we have using the cinema 4d renderer and bending these things any content you put on here is also getting curved and bent along with the rest of the layer and I think it works very well so hopefully this has opened up your mind to some of the knowledge that you can gain in After Effects about the 2.5 D or 3d environment in here if you like having your mind filled with knowledge might I recommend you go over to Skillshare Skillshare was the sponsor of this tutorial skill share as I said is an online learning community with thousands of classes and design film writing and much much more there's even some stuff about 3d in there so I would recommend you check that out a premium membership and Skillshare gets you unlimited access to high-quality classes from experts working in their fields experts like me and two experts like the amazing jake bartlett he also teaches motion design these courses will help you improve your skills unlock new opportunities and do the work you love to do Skillshare is more affordable than most learning platforms with an annual membership coming in at under $10 a month and the first 500 people to use the link in the description sks h /e c Abrams 3 will get two months of Skillshare free if you want to get your hands on the project file of this book that we just put together then head on over to Evan Abrams and download that the links to that are in the cards in the description if you've enjoyed learning this kind of thing please subscribe to this channel and you will see when new content goes up here we try to get up a few tutorials a month so hopefully you enjoy them and if you do that then I'll see you around the Internet [Music]

Channel: ECAbrams

Views: 202,797

Keywords: adobe after effects, after effects, adobe, after, effects, fx, mograph, motion graphics, motion, graphics, vfx, visual effects, instruction, tutorial, tut, how to, how, to, help, tips, tricks, after effects tutorial, motion graphics tutorial, vfx tutorial, book, open, curved, arch, c4d render, 3d, 2.5d, easy, simple, basic, beginner, 3d book

Id: oeKHH400n8Q

Length: 21min 48sec (1308 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 20 2018