Animated MicroWorlds | Template Included

how is it going guys and welcome to the olufemi channel where a group of teachers that want to shore up your video production skills in as little time as possible g'day guys welcome back to the channel my name is nick i am a visual effects animator from sydney australia i've been doing this for a really long time um today guys we are going to jump into a really fun tutorial about how to create this thing from benny productions called micro worlds he did it all in photoshop but we're going to try and do it in after effects today so that we can get it to move and put some extra elements in so guys sit back there's gonna be a long one grab your cup of coffee grab your drink we're gonna go through everything and i'm talking about everything on how to create our version of microworlds in after effects and by the way guys this episode is brought to you by the lyric video creator kit more on that later in the episode [Music] so we're going to jump straight into after effects right now and firstly we're going to set up the block and guys do me a favor click the like button on this video share it far and wide with your friends and get them to click like too and if the video gets more than two and a half thousand likes i will show you how to make a moving cityscape microworld which will be super fun to do so we're going to make this easy for ourselves so that's basically a lot easier to change things as we go along so we're going to create these three sides first as a template so firstly we're going to create the top and actually let's just create a new comp so we're going to make it 1080 by 1080 to make it nice and square very instagram friend friendly if i can talk micro worlds one let's just make it 15 seconds and zero zero and then go okay we can make it 25 whatever you want to make and i'm going to make a 25 frames per second and then we're going to go ok all right so we're going to make a white background first so let's i'm going to press command y control y and then make a white solid you can also do this by going to layer new solid and we're just going to pick white you can pick whatever color you like of course now we're going to make the tops and the sides so what we're going to do now is we're going to duplicate this white and we're just going to press command d or control d we can just duplicate and go layer uh duplicate wherever that button is solid settings oh sorry is it here it's here sorry duplicate right here wherever that under edit duplicate now we're just going to pre-compose this so we're going to layer pre-compose um wherever that is pre-compose because i usually issue shortcuts that's why i remember where the pre-compose button is and we're just going to call this top and right now as you jump into this it's just exactly the same it's just a white top we're just going to make this just a touch longer just for my own sake so instead of 15 seconds we're going to make this let's just say 30 seconds uh how i got in there was pressing command k or control k all right as you can see here i've got a little bit more time uh that's actually a bit long we already wanted 30 seconds i don't know i must have typed it in wrong so let's make this 30 seconds dead on there we go fantastic all right so that's the top and just so we know where everything is we can just type in the word top just so that we can keep everything kind of nice and organized all right so that's the top now what we're going to do is we're going to duplicate this and so we're going to go edit duplicate and um we're going to go call this left side um watch to keep this all in a nice comps let's put this all into so we don't lose anything comps and then we're going i know i already got a comps here this is the old one we've got a comps old and we've got this let's go up here and we'll call this sides and we'll put these in here as well all right cool now we're going to go to and we're also going to duplicate this one more time and call this bottom and i'm going to go and jump in here real quick and just rename this bottom bottom just make this it doesn't really matter this is just for your own sex so you can just um you know see what's going on all right left side let's call this left side i'll also center this as well now we're going to change the we're going to change the size of this so we'll go press command k or if you want to go composition oh sorry yeah composition composition settings and we're going to change the height to 360. and that's just going to be very short and we're going to do the likewise with the right side so and we're going to jump in here and we're going to call this right side all right so that's all our sides kind of done and we could actually change the color of this so it's just be easier to see so if we go to solid settings just to make it a slightly different color so it's a bit easier to turn up well i don't like it to be too bright because it hurts my eyes but you know um just pick some appropriate colors so you can kind of see what you're doing um and you know which side corresponds to which bit and you know so you can kind of get things all sorted all right so uh i'll just make the top one blue i like to make them gar-ish because you it makes it means that you know that's not supposed to be there all right let's just get to assembling our our world so firstly let's just shrink this down just so we can see what's going actually we don't even need to do that let's um just bring our sides in all right so let's bring our left side right side in and right what we're going to do is we're going to rotate this clockwise so i'm holding that shift as i'm rotating and pressing w to actually bring up the rotation button now i'm just going to bring it all the way to the edge here and so it's running the edge likewise this we're going to go and we're just going to bring this down all the way to the bottom oops so that it is right on the edge of the frame here like so it's like try and get it as pixel perfect as possible now we're going to bring up the pan behind tool which is up here uh or press y and we're just going to bring this all the way up so it just really is at the very top there and likewise with this one we're going to find the pan behind tool on the left side and we're just going to bring this here like this all right now what we're going to do is we are going to turn on the 3d for all this so we'll just turn this all on and we're just going to turn this 90 degrees down um there we go and likewise with this we're going to turn this oh we're going to turn the 2d on in this one but we're going to turn this down so we're going to turn this on the x-axis 90 degrees so there we go and i'm actually going to pull these both below because we do want to make these um the top one is going to be the more visible than everything else all right so what we're going to do is we're also going to create a new null object and we're just going to put this on top i'm going to parent all these and put this here like this then we're going to spin this 45 degrees oh maybe the other way minus 45 degrees and now we're also going to spin this down i think it was around 60 minus 60. and you can kind of see what's happening now and we just make this a bit smaller so this won't work unless you parented everything to the box i think i see here it's a little bit too close to the edges but we're going to fix that up later on uh after effects is kind of not great for 3d in terms of like really covering those edges like you will see the gaps between the 3d so that's just something to think about all right so now we're going to duplicate the top and what we're going to do is grab the bottom layer and we're just going to pull this down as you can kind of see the guides are kind of taking you down um taking you down you can kind of see it as we're dragging the the z the z or the z widget it'll actually bring that down just on the axis here so that just makes it a bit easier for you to see just trying to get it as close as you can doesn't have to be 100 but it would be good we're going to bring that layer down at the bottom and we're going to go to the bottom layer and we're going to hold down alt and then replace it and click it in there and you can't see it but we've just replaced the bottom layer with the top layer so i mean the bottom the top layer with the bottom layer okay so that's all our side set up [Music] so that's kind of the uh technical part all kind of done but what's good is that now that we've set this up um it's very it's a lot easier to basically go through and iterate things as we go along because we just only need to change the sides and we don't have to fiddle around with perspective as much so i've got a little bit of um you know what he call a bit of stock footage that i kind of dug through and i found out what kind of works and what doesn't work so i tried to find stuff that was from the top down a bit like drone footage so we can kind of muck around with the perspective that way it's not perfect but it does work well enough so as you can see here i was looking at stuff like this where it's like just straight down as you can see here if we jump into the top view and we just drag this in you can kind of see how it would kind of work so you can kind of see here you know we've already created that box which is kind of cool um but the only thing annoying about this is that there's no land in there i mean i like the waves but there's no land so that is a problem so what we're going to do in here is we're just going to see if we can find with land and we did so i had this one so here we go we're going to jump in here and we're just going to drag this in here and replace it with that and we'll just leave that one you go we've got our first side done now the other thing too is we want to sort of create the water that's as you can see here we the idea is that the water is here like comes to about this side and then fills up this side a bit like a fish tank so what we do is we go to the left side here and i'm just actually going to grab the top we're just going to grab this footage here i'm going to press command c or control c copy it and we go to the left side and this is just going to be used as our guide we're not actually going to use this footage in here we're going to do is we're going to rotate this just 90 degrees i'm holding down shift and w while i'm doing that and just pull this up just to touch just so we've got an idea of where the line of the water is going to press command r control r so we can bring up the where the edge of the water is just for our own reference [Music] actually if you look in here you can kind of see what's happening here it's kind of cool though right like that's kind of cool um look we could uh we could almost be done here if we just went to the right side and we just pulled in our own uh you know another one here and just look at this we're done it's a box we're all done we're all done with this now i mean obviously not but you get the idea so that's how easy it is to basically create this kind of cube looking thing and maybe that's all you're looking for but we're going to go a bit further than that today obviously so all right so what we're going to do is we're going to try and create this sort of sand kind of ridge here like this so i got a few images here um i was looking for a sand texture that was just kind of nice this is a very large sand texture but i'm gonna shrink it down because we don't need that much i'm actually gonna i'm actually wanted to try and fill the edges of the screen here so what i'm going to do is i'm going to add a filter um to it called reptile so cc reputal and we're just going to drag that on there like this and what we're going to do is we're going to expand to the right just so we just fill out the rest of the frame as you can see you can kind of see the seam of the reptile there so what we can do to fix those is go unfold and that will just mirror it now you can kind of see the mirror there but because it's such a you know it's just a texture that we're going to be using i don't think people are going to look too close so as you can see here we've already marked out where the edge of the water is going to drop off so that's where our bank is going to start so we're going to draw a sort of sandbank that goes down like this so what we can do is i'm going to do is create a new shape so i'm not going to draw a mask on the footage because i'm actually going to i'm going to show some other stuff that we're going to more advanced techniques on how to manipulate that footage in a second so what we're going to do is we're going to just quickly just draw a fairly sharp embankment it's probably not this sharp in real life but you know in this instance we're just going to do it this way i'm actually going to let it drop off quite sharply into so it just goes to a flat so this is just a way we're just going to draw the mask obviously nothing's happening so what we have to do is we have to go okay alpha matte it'll just pull a matte from that now all right so if we come up through the comp you can kind of see that it's that is the slope that we are creating there and that is that one side that we have completed so that is pretty much that easy all right we're going to just quickly do the bottom as well as you can see here i'm going to solo this you can kind of see this is just the bottom plane we're going to turn this into sand so we're just going to find something that looks a bit more like already obviously i've obviously already done this but what we're going to look is for something that is sort of um the rippling like this ripple like what i was looking for was like the ripply sand that you get at the bottom of the ocean uh it wouldn't look flat like this it would definitely have more ripples i couldn't tell you the scientific reason why that happens but that does happen so if you have gone to the beach again this is not supposed to be like 100 accurate but you do want to kind of make it seem like what you're looking for so there you go that's the water that's the sand at the bottom of the water we're going to try and create a bank here as well just to kind of make that feel a little bit more uh like it's co you know like a 3d object all right let's go to the right side too so obviously we're not going to use this i actually looked for underwater footage to kind of make it feel a little bit more like we are actually underwater so footage a bit like this now we're not going to use this straight up um we're going to use portions of this so i'll show you what i mean so what we're going to do is we're going to i think it was this one i think either of these is fine but the blue one i think it was this one drag that on i'm just gonna delete that and you know that's not too bad it actually looks pretty decent so uh what i wanted to get with kind of like the rays and stuff which is kind of cool right it's a little bit wobbly so that's a bit annoying but we can't do much about it but we don't really need all this a little bit of the caustics is kind of good as well um so that's kind of nice now we're going to slow this down as well because this footage is far too fast for something this big so like if the ocean was as big as we have it in this scene right now that footage is far too fast uh for what we're doing so it looks too it looks too the scale like when things get bigger they should be a lot slower right so we're going to make this 200 percent um there's this little stretch tool here called 200 which says 200 percent uh if you don't know where it is it's probably here you've got to expand it but you can look around you could toggle these switches and you can find it um alternatively if you can't find it you can just right click here and just go columns and just look for it here um all right so um that should be enough but just to be sure i'll duplicate this and we'll just bring this over here and just loop it so we're going to set some keyframes it doesn't actually have to really match we're just looking at the movement we're not looking so much at the um we're not looking heaps at the the actual footage itself it's just more the movement that we're looking for and i'm just extending these two guide layers so they don't come through um all right and what i'm going to do is drop the opacity to both of these um to i think it was around actually no i didn't do it in this level okay so that's kind of what we're setting it there and i'm actually going to drop the opacity here because i actually thought it looked better on this level you could do it either or but i just dropped the opacity here so as you can kind of see um i just wanted a little bit of those you know some of that coming through or one thing i forgot to turn on here was um the frame blending so right now it's just as you can see i'm scrubbing through it's actually just playing every second frame which is kind of not good um so what we're going to do is we're going to get after effects to interpolate this first so this little thing here it's called frame blending we'll just turn this on and this automatically turns everything on by default that has a frame blending so now as we go through it actually creates frames in between um for us i think it's actually frame blending what we want to do maybe is want to do um pixel motion instead actually that looks more like pixel motion more processor intensive but it does look a little bit better in the final render it doesn't have to be on the whole time but just keep that in mind that maybe something you may like all right likewise we're going to do the similar thing here we're going to take the water texture and put it on this side of the box as well so what we're going to do is we're going to jump in here we might copy both those and we'll just jump into the left side and we'll do almost exactly the same thing but this time we'll actually drop the opacity just a touch we don't necessarily need to this one i'm just varying the angle just a touch just because of the way that we have structured the box [Music] i probably need to put that above that there you go all right so and these ones i will actually drop the opacity to i think 62 we had for the other one just so that we can kind of see through to the other side and this one i gotta drop 262. um so that'll be a little bit opaque as you can see so we've got that so we've got that nice blue box going around everything now so which is kind of nice so we just play a little bit back and you kind of see that is what is happening [Music] all right so the most obvious thing here that's quite jarring is the fact that this is sand does not match this at all so we're gonna have to do a little bit of color matching with the sand um and just mucking around with a couple of layers to kind of just build up some of the layers as well like i'm assuming it's not sand all the way to the bottom right i'm assuming that's how the world works it's not just like sand up the bottom right that's not how beaches work it's like a layer of sand layer of rock layer sandstone who knows that's not how the world works so what we're going to do right now is we're going to jump into the left side and we're just going to pull in the footage that we had before um where is our guide footage oh yeah here we are so this is what the this is the color of the sand so i'm just going to pull this i'm just going to just actually i'm just going to want to do i'm going to just just chop this a little bit we actually may use a portion of this footage as well to blend things in but just for right now we're just going to see if we can color match it so this is an old trick that i've used before and this is where we can apply things like curves so i'm going to use a plugin called what do you call fx console which is from video code but i recommend you guys get it because it's way easier to pull up your effects this way so i'm going to press ctrl and spacebar it's going to pull up this little dialog box that you have here i'm going to type in curves and actually just applies the curves otherwise you just go in here and just look for curves yourself but we've just applied the curves effect all right so what we're going to do now is we're going to press alt one or option one and we're going to jump to the red channel as you can see here like we're trying to what we're going to try and do here is trying to match this layer to the sand layer up here which is very red so if i just turn it off you can kind of see the difference in colors is quite stuck so we're going to do is we're going to color grade per channel so i'm going to press alt 1 or option one and i'm going to the red channel and obviously as you can see it's very dark so we're gonna do is we're we're just gonna try and match roughly where you know so it sort of looks like they sit together even though they don't really but you're gonna get the idea option two will bring up the green channel uh or command two we'll bring i mean option two or alt two right the command uh the green channel and we're just gonna look here i'm trying to match this portion here a bit more um and then we'll go to the blue channel and option i'm sorry option or alt 3 we'll bring up the blue channel and as you can see this is like quite dark so maybe just a bit higher all right if we press option three and bring it back and kind of see it's probably a bit more in where we want it to be uh contrast wise i feel like it could have a little bit more red in it so maybe i'll just pull the reds up just to touch now i'm just doing it by hi i know i just told you to do one thing and now i'm telling you to do something else terrible i'm a terrible teacher um all right so that is probably a bit better um it's going to be a little bit more i also feel like there's going to be a bit more of like a gradient that goes down the bottom as well so what i'm going to start off these bottom layers here what i'm going to do is i'm just going to create a quick solid so go new solid let's create a bit of black and um i'm just going to throw this over the top we're going to do here is just give it a bit of a you know just a bit of a gradient and not much just a teeny bit of one just to kind of give it a bit more of a finesse so to speak so it doesn't look so uh even so this week because like you know the world is just not that even just giving it a bit of variation as you do all right so we jump in here you can see it looks a little bit better already that's probably too dark so let's just drop that opacity just a touch all right so there you go that's kind of already looking a lot better now we just based on this footage because i've been looking at it a million times the lighting is actually coming from this direction so it's actually pointing you can kind of see actually it's coming it's kind of pointing that direction actually if you kind of see where the shadow is but for the most for the most part to make it easy for ourselves we're just going to say it's coming this direction all right so what we're going to do is we're going to darken this edge anyway so we'll just put a slight curves adjustment on this one so again i'm just going to i'm going to bring up fx console and apply curves i'm just going to bring this down just a touch and that'll just be our darker edge of the thing now one thing you can kind of see we can still kind of see through things so that's fine we can kind of put stuff behind that as well which is going to be kind of fun all right now what we're going to do is we're going to just build up these layers on the left side just a bit more so what i'm going to do is i'm going to just quickly jump and find another layer so i've got a couple of one here so we've got this little stone looking layer which we can kind of throw on top as well this doesn't have to be as doesn't have to be as as close it's actually quite a nice texture as it is and again people aren't going to look too close so i don't think you need to worry too much about like whether it looks correct or not like how many people really know what stuff under the ocean looks like maybe there's probably look i know there's probably a few of you out there probably like that's not correct well you know i'm i'm not here to tell you how to do your job if you know how to do it better than me then please please by all means do a better job all right so what i did was i just duplicated that mask layer on the top and put it on top of this one use this use it as the alpha layer and hopefully that made sense it's not that hard i'm just trying to keep the um the planes it doesn't have to be i know it doesn't look realistic we're going to fix that in this we're going to fix that a little bit later um but we're just trying to get the general shape of the uh what do you call the layers in place first so what i'm going to do is duplicate both of these and this is another trick that i like to do which is just replace stuff so i'm just going to hold down alt option and replace that grunge with another texture and what i'm going to do is i'm just going to again because i wanted to keep the general slope the same but i just wanted to change where the layers come in in the process so let's see let's make this a bit more like this and there you go i actually think that this rock would fall off a little bit more here right like it wouldn't be there it'll be more there uh likewise i feel like this sand i feel like it'd be all sand wouldn't it it wouldn't just be the sand would sit on top there's no way it'd just be rock it'd just be sand first then rock that's geology for you guys all right so we're just gonna apply a couple of um curves adjustments on all these just to kind of make them look like a little bit more like they fit um i feel like they should be a little bit your yellow uh just pull the blue down just a touch add a little bit of red and likewise i'm going to copy this effect and chop it here that's probably a bit too red now um but i'm going to drop the rgb down in general just so that is a darker layer so we just have a bit more build up on the layers you can add as many layers as you like obviously i'm not going to tell you how to run your layers but you know you do ubu you do you all right here we go and there we go we've got our little layers built up there it's kind of really dark anyway so you're not gonna really be able to tell so that is um basically setting up those layers in a nutshell all right guys i gotta talk to you about something really important and that is our sponsor for the day the lyric video creator kit now i know a lot of you know you can create mad lyric videos with this kit but there's a secret you can use this for other things other than lyric videos i know crazy right sometimes you just want to add a 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black put it underneath and i'm just going to draw a quick sort of rough box around the edges of this thing we're going to create a little bit ambient occlusion around the box for those 3d aficionados it just means that as objects get closer to another object they create a shadow so that's all we are trying to do um it doesn't have to be a very very dark shadow just something that is a shadow so we're just going to drop it here um don't it doesn't have to feather too much the the more the feather the more the further it looks like it's floating and we don't want that um so just a very light shadow just around things um just to kind of give it the impression that it is sitting up against something and that is mostly all we need to create for that now the other thing too is we want to also create also i'm going to duplicate this and i'm going to create another box which is a bit more directional um and this one is going to be more of going this direction so more of a directional light a directional shadow so just in this instance and that only works because we know this is the way that we've determined where the light is coming from it's coming from this direction um now it is sunlight technically so it should be a hard shadow um but we're going to cheat it a little bit and fake the shadow just a touch so we're just going to draw another mask we're going to subtract it and i'm just going to feather this one just so that it is we have the hard shadows there but um oh i don't think the shadow is particularly accurate but we're just going to do it that way anyway we'll just sort of smarten up these edges just to touch just so they look a bit nicer but you'll feel you know you feel free to do it however you want to do now here's where we can add some reflections as well so what we're going to do is we're going to select all these excuse me select all these and we're going to duplicate them and then bring them underneath the shadow layer and what we're going to do now is actually we're going to delete the bottom layer just for just to make that a bit easier what we're going to do now is we're just going to flip it so we press s for scale we're just going to flip it upside down and make it minus 51 oh sorry i think it's actually which one is it is it minus 51 on the x is this it is this the right one yeah that's it minus 51 and the x-axis um and that way we can basically give ourselves a little bit of a reflection here as well so that just makes things a little bit easier and what we're going to do is we're just going to put another white solid above that and just to kind of really just to give it a hint of a reflection we don't want it to be like a very obvious reflection just just a hint of one and likewise we're just going to put an adjustment layer just above that just above the the null um and i just press command what did i press option command y or control alt y will give you that and we're just going to add a gaussian blur just to give it a little bit of something something but nothing too much actually might make it just a vertical blur um yeah it'll do just to make it feel like it is there that's actually a bit too much still i think i might actually just just bring that up just a touch there you go so now it feels like it's there now another thing that um benny productions did was add a bit of grunge to the floor just to make it feel a little bit more uh like it was in place um so where is the grunge this was a grunge layer that i had before um so you can kind of see here you feel free to um use whatever grunge texture you like i mean honestly you could just go out and just run and get some a photo of just a dirty looking thing um but anything obviously that has a little bit of schmutz on it will work it doesn't have to be as 3d i just like mucking around the planes this way but you can absolutely use whatever you like to really make this work i'm just going to make this a multiply so and now what we're going to do is we're just going to drop the opacity just a touch and i'm just going to draw a quick little circle around everything because it's not going to it's not for everything it's just to kind of give it a little bit more character press f and we'll just draw uh we'll just feather it out so it just sort of has a bit of a fall off on it as well and that is pretty much it in terms of giving it that feeling that it is in a space pretty easy if you ask me not too many steps but uh you know you do need to know what it is you need to do if you want to achieve what you want to do i'm actually just going to bring me all the way in because i don't like the feathering in this very much there you go run the edge perfect that looks a lot better all right now we can do the same with um basically we're just going to see how these edges right here are quite hard and boring and vector-like so what we're going to do is we're actually going to try and roughen those edges up just a touch so what we're going to do in here is we're just going to figure out a way to basically you know really gobble up those edges so we're going to go in and create a new thing called a fractal now i know you don't know what that is but it doesn't matter because i'm going to show you exactly how to create one so we're just going to go um it can go for honestly you can go for as long as you like it doesn't have to go for that long at all actually we're gonna create a new solid i'm gonna go okay and then we're just gonna add our favorite fractal noise plug-in which you know if you if you've done after effects for a little bit now you would know what this plug-in is all right so we're just going to go dynamic and we're just going to go contrast it just a little bit contrasty and that is pretty much all you have to do just leave it at that that's it that's the fractal all right so we're just going to bring this into our thing just so we know what is going on what is the 4 1 1 and we're just going to bring the fractal in here and we're just going to leave it there for just a sec when we just turn it off all right so what we can do now is we can actually go and um apply so we're going to go to this light we're going to go to the layer that actually this is the map for this layer here so we want to gobble this edges up just a bit now we could use roughen edges which i think actually would actually work quite well um let's try roughing edges first actually doesn't look too bad that actually doesn't look too bad at all we can probably use that instead you know what let's forget about my fractal thing let's just use it let's just use this instead um head sharpness scale yeah let's just edge we'll just use edge roughness that's i think that works just as well i think i think i was going to tell you to use this really complicated fractal thing but in fact i think this is just as good all right we're just going to apply that to all the other layers just to make things feel a little bit more jagged and not so uh you know so there you go you can kind of see it doesn't look as as neat and that's all we kind of wanted all right so as you can see here it's still it's jagged it's better but it still feels like i need to blend these in a little bit more and so let's go in here and let's try and muck around with this we're going to apply some gaussian blur just to kind of make it feel a little bit more like it doesn't it doesn't quite give you that straight edge we can muck around with the um you know we can muck around with a whole bunch of these things as well just to really kind of give it a bit more of an edge so to speak um all right let's also put the gaussian blur on this one so some of these things kind of bleed into each other and likewise we'll do it on this top edge as well because obviously when you're underwater it's not going to be like that straight in edge so um i feel like still this still feels too bright so i'm going to just drop i'm going to pull the i'm actually going to pull this below everything just make this feel let's even do this i'm going to just make this an alpha for this one so that it does only affect just the sand down the bottom here because i feel like everything else feels very bright and it shouldn't feel that bright um yeah i'm going to duplicate this one more time bring it to the very top so it covers everything but this one doesn't need to be as bright this one could just sort of sit on top yeah now i feel like everything is just too dark [Laughter] it's a lot of give and take so i i was just like just mucking around to feel like it feels right for you and that feels a little bit more uh sitting in i could probably put a bit more stuff in there i reckon what we can do is try to make it instead of just making it feel see this feels this section here feels way too flat so i'm going to put some more we might go and find the grunge texture and then um see if we can add a bit more of that in there as well just to kind of make it feel a little bit less uniform if you know what i mean because that's the issue right it feels it to me it feels too uniform um so i want to make it feel like a lot less uniform so to speak yeah maybe maybe overlay maybe make it multiply yeah that feels a little bit better like i feel like that feels like see there's a little bit of degradation and weathering on the edges there which is kind of what i was looking for it's not always very subtle but to me that's the things that kind of make it feel a bit more special so we want to kind of make it feel that way [Music] all right so one thing that we were doing and the one thing that i was trying to sort of solve was in the original one that i had you can kind of see here the edges are not straight now how do you carve out those edges out of the thing but still kind of keep everything moving and the other thing too was i wanted to make it feel like the waves were kind of like hitting against this like glass wall as it was coming through so they had to kind of deform up and down as we were doing it so one way i kind of devised this was to actually make the top layer just a little bit bigger so we can actually carve away at the edges it's an illusion obviously it doesn't work really when you start moving the 3d around but it does work so what we're going to do is we're going to go to the top layer and just make it slightly bigger than than 1080 by 1080 so i made i think i just made it 100 pixels wider on each edge um all right so there we go and now i know that the edges are slight so if we go back and kind of see the edges are going to overlap the top of the thing here as we see so we do want this actually to come up just a little bit higher of the edge of the frame and you can kind of see here now overlap so the idea is that now if we do decide to for example carve out a little bit of the um oops oh sorry just make this again we could invert this so if we do carve out a little bit of the thing kind of see it kind of looks a little bit like we've actually got a bit more of a shape to i don't know if you can kind of see but it kind of looks like we have a bit of a shape but we're not going to do it this way i'll show you how to do it the way that i just figured out but that's the general idea so i'll just delete that for a second so what we're going to do is we're going to create a just for a guide we're just going to create a new um shape as well so we'll go to the box tool up here and we're just going to pick a color real garish color like red and we're just going to double click on here and we're just going to make this shape a 10 exactly 1080 by 1080 so we'll go 1080. by 1080. and now we know where the boundaries are for uh what we can we want to make sure that we could have created this sort of organic shape that this is the edge that space the table top is the edge of the frame so we kind of see here that's exactly where the edges will meet up so we know that's where they are now so we don't want to create we don't want to create stuff that goes too far past that line so what we're going to do is we're going to create a matte out of this shape as well so i know this is going to look kind of odd but we're going to do is we're just going to just do we're going to use the pen tool and we're just going to grab a corner and then we're just going to go a slight curve up and just go to the slight edges here and then likewise we're going to come curving down and then to this edge here like this and so there's going to be a slight gradual drop off so we don't want it to we want to make sure that we hit those corners it's really important that we do all right and we'll just continue going around and really get those we'll just give us a little bit of latitude when it comes out to the edges here but not too much we just want to have a slight you can sort of vary this as you go and i'll show you why in a second um but we really want to but the important thing here is you want to hit those corners because if you don't hit those corners and this effect will not sell so um here we go [Music] all right so now we've done that shape i'm actually going to pull this down below and we're going to turn on this thing called a track map and that basically just takes that shape and now we're going to go back in here and i'll show you what happens so kind of see the corners have now kind of conformed to those edges so that what we've how we've managed to sell the illusion is now that we know that those corners do meet we can kind of muck around with those edges and it doesn't really matter now that we've got those edges in there we can go out as much as we can or go in as much as we can and it will still look kind of cool so what we're going to do is we're going to use our technique where we had the roughened edges thing and we just grabbed the roughen edges here the roughen edges um tool and we're just going to apply that to this this shape and right away you can kind of see that you can kind of get those nice rough edges now actually i am going to use my fractal technique because i get a lot more control over it so we're going to bring the fractal in here turn the time to freeze frame it doesn't really you don't have to but i'm going to and i'm just going to make this exactly make this a bit bigger i'm actually going to make the same size as the comp so 1 1080 by 1080 and we'll go okay and also we're going to make sure that this is actually the same size so we're going to go uh layer solid settings and then make this the comp thing it matters i know this sounds really dumb but you need it now we're going to put a displacement map on this so we're going to look up displacement map and we're just going to drag that onto the layer at the bottom and so what we're going to do i'm actually taking the roughen edges off and watch this so we're going to turn the fractal noise on as you can see here really really messes up those edges which is kind of what we want so and we get a little bit more control over this technique you kind of see here it gets really jaggedy according to how we've used the fractal basically um it's actually displaced it a little bit too far over the edge but that is okay so if we go back in kind of see it's really jaggedy now which is kind of perfect of kind of what i wanted [Music] now right now the um it doesn't move which is good but we do want it to kind of move on this edge here so what i found out which was kind of fun was that so i kind of tracked the wave as we were going through right um so what i did was i just brought this one back just a touch just so that we've got a bit more edge to play with and i made a circle and i put it into this shape here and animated it as we were going through so i started at the edge here and i just put a keyframe on the transform and i started it within the shape so it doesn't affect anything but what happens is as i'm following this edge of this wave here right so what we can do is we can sort of start the keyframe i'm going to press up u and i'm just going to follow this this wave all the way to the end and it just sort of breaks there so oops and i'm just adding i'm just moving this circle to about here and what i want to do is have the circle push out and then push back in right so around here um we want to want the wave to kind of push out a bit here so it makes it feel like there's a bit of a shape and then still be out here for a bit and then come back in so and the resulting feeling is that it feels a lot more like this volume on the edges of the frame so here's what i'm showing so you kind of see here the wave look it looks like it's coming up and i know it's really small but i feel like that detail kind of really sells it a lot better uh feeling like there's volume in the space so and you can obviously make the edges a bit uh wider if you want to get kind of more more of that that bump going up but i mean just for the sake of this we can kind of make it feel like this for now uh likewise i did the opposite instead of using a shape though i did use a mask this way because i wanted to actually delete sections of this as we were going through so i drew a mask here so i started it here and i turned it to subtract and i put a keyframe on the mask path and i just followed the same mass trajectory as we did with the other one so i don't want to get too close to the uh actually let's see where this ends up i think it was we wanted to end it like somewhere here so it's gonna make sure i just don't chop off too much yeah i think that's about right yeah because i think it just drops off there and you kind of see it is coming through a bit too much so obviously i went too far but you kind of get the idea you want to just sort of chop out a little bit um yeah i went too far i went too far but you get the general gist is what i'm trying to say um you know we could fudge this a little bit so one thing we could do is actually bring everything up just to touch just to kind of fudge it a little bit um sorry it won't it will clip through for like a second until we fix this issue and that's quite easy to fix so actually i know we can't do it that way all right so the only way we can kind of fix this all right nick edit point to hope you remember do this all right so what we can do to fix this is to kind of just um really we need to just quickly check to see what is the edges of this frame here because obviously i didn't do it um let's double check this real quick i'll just take the fractal noise off and i should have done this beforehand this was my bad guys my bad um let's take all the things off let's just quickly draw the boundaries here just so that we understand where they are so we don't want to go past that because that is the very edge of the uh the thingy majiggy uh likewise up the top here as well we don't want to go past this as well i should have drawn these guides up before but that's my bad all right there we go um all right let's turn everything back on oh yeah so it's pretty obvious that i went way too far here so yeah there you go and then we can even come in a little bit more here like right up to this edge and then finish out there all right so there we go um so you kind of see the wave coming up there and then kind of dissipating as we go off so it's like little touches like that that i think kind of really make it feel a bit more organic in that regard so um so that's that part now we want to make sure that we draw the bank because obviously here just like it drops off into nothing here so we need to just sort of draw in a bank that's not very hard to do i'm just going to grab that sand texture that we had from before so um i think it was this this one yeah actually this one so we're just going to go to here just above the bottom layer and we're just going to shrink this all the way down this doesn't have to be in perspective at all it just has to be enough to cover what we are doing and it's not moving so you know feel free it doesn't have to be perfect it just has to kinda but there just has to be something that suggests that there's a volume underneath the wave because it just looks a bit odd and so we're just going to draw a little bit of a thing here and we're just going to apply a curves adjustment to it so that it just does drop into a bit of darkness as well and likewise we are just going to feather that edge just the slightest so that it just doesn't look like it is just sitting there doing nothing and that is pretty much all that is not very difficult at all um actually i think that's actually you know what that feather is too much i'm actually going to have to make this zero i'm not happy because i don't have control i don't like how i don't have a control over that edge i just want control over the edge it's funny hey like you just want to control over a particular section but you don't you know there aren't quite those tools yet in here or maybe there are and i'm just not aware of them but you know sorry there we go subtract there we go now we have more control over that edge which is all i wanted so yeah that's a lot better all right sounds that looks much better except that ugly ugly edge right there which i don't want we'll just there we go that's a little bit there we go i can live i can live with that so right now i've got this guy at the top right hand corner here who has just like taken up a lot of space so i need to get rid of him and we're going to use content aware to basically do it so we're just going to composition and then go layer pre-compose it and we're going to move leave all the attributes in top so what that means is it just receives the file as it is and now we're just going to just chop up um i'm just going to make this 15 seconds just oh 20 we'll just make it 20 seconds and we'll just make it start from zero just so i know what i'm doing and i'm actually just going to select this guy again my goodness it's so basic and um i'm just not very good at this i'm just going to set a keyframe on the mask path and we'll go to around just 16 seconds because i know it's only a 15 second clip but you can do as long as you like obviously um we'll just make it make sure you cover the shadow as well um and there we go that's all we need to do i'm just going to press n to make sure that's all we need to do and i'm going to create generate fill layer fantastic now we have our raced out dude you can still see the footprints walking over there but that is fine it doesn't really matter but for the most part we go back to the top and that guy is gone and we've removed that uh very obvious um you know artifact that makes it seem like it's a very um what do you call 2d object [Music] now one of the things that benny productions did do which i thought was quite clever was to actually try and make you know put objects in the frame basically to make it feel a lot more 3d now um i did create some palm trees uh as well i didn't make these uh palm trees uh where if when i can find them here's one of them um it's very crudely cut out but you know at the same time kind of doesn't matter because you know so what we'll do is we'll pre-comp this move attributes into the new one okay this will be the best-looking palm tree i've ever seen all right so what we're going to do is we're just going to make a new solid and make it black and when we do a track matte transfer what we're going to do is we're just going to just draw a thing around it and invert it just so that the base of it has a bit of a shadow like i said you know things as they approach other objects do get a lot darker so we want that to be a little bit darker at the bottom just so that we know where it is and i'll just show you what it look like when we do put that into the frame i mean we can just make this very it could make this pretty dark as well oops now likewise that's a very sharp edge on the edge of the palm tree so we can probably make that blend in a little bit more so we can actually go to the palm tree comp itself and you know what we could use that edge we could use that fractal trick again that we did for the thing we'll see how this looks first this might be fine but yeah it just looks like it's a little bit more in in the frame now um so we can actually do is we can actually duplicate this turn this into a 3d layer move the anchor point down to there and look you can just sort of finagle this we feel like as long as you get the general gist of the direction for the palm tree in the right direction we just said it was going to be like this and because it is quite a large palm tree we're just going to just make it a little bit more actually that's going to be too what that's going to be too tall isn't it so what we're going to do is we're going to just because it's coming over the waves um we might have to just shrink things down just a touch um that's annoying why would you do that why would you do that okay there we go um so we're just going to shrink this down just a touch no biggie there we go and what we're going to do is we're just going to add a layer curves adjustment to the um like curves you know a curves adjustment and we're going to bring this all the way down to that and we're just going to you know bring the opacity out just a touch so it just looks a bit more in play and we can just do this a few more times as well again it doesn't have to be because we're not moving you know the 3d doesn't have to be it just has to look good in the frame so to speak so you know you don't have to be too hung up about whether things are actually accurately doing what they're supposed to be doing because it doesn't really matter in this particular case we just have to make things look correct for what we're doing which is completely fine and i think that is more than adequate in terms of you know just just playing around with shapes and just trying to make it feel like it is you know this palm tree it wouldn't you know this the the when the water goes over it's a little bit it's a little bit funny um we could apply some more effects to it but i think you know depends how closely people are looking at these things so we might not bother with that for now um all right so the edges of the frame here i'm going to leave this one as a straight edge but i'm going to actually sort of dirty up this one so we're just going to do this real quick i'm going to take the mask tool and just start hacking out pieces out of the thing i'm not going to procedurally generate this i'm just going to go in and just pretend like you know i'm cutting out sections of this rock just because you know it'll look better um like little triangles that cutting out of the rock there kind of see what it is uh we'll invert it and you kind of see what it is there so there you go it looks a lot more natural in that respect um we can kind of put a little bit of a dark edge on the bottom or the top here but i don't think we need it i think that's completely fine um now one thing we could do is actually bleed the edge a little bit here so it's not so dark so we can do is go to the top here and go to the animating mask down the bottom here and we just put a slight gaussian gaussian blur on there oh sorry we forgot to put the displacement back on unbelievable all right here we go let's just put a slight gaussian blur on there not much of one but just a little bit just so that we've got a little bit more of a less of a sharp edge that's probably a bit too much um let's start that back it's subtle these guys subtleties all right that's looking a bit better i think that's looking pretty good all right so we're almost at the end here now a lot of other things we could probably add are just really just this is just all flourishes now so what we could do i'm not going to show you how to make these so i include these i'll include these all in the project file but i'm going to i'm just going to add in a flock of birds i'll do another tutorial on how to animate these birds they're fairly easy but i'll just give you the actual file so you can just muck around them yourself um so this this is a flock of birds that i created earlier um which is super easy i did this in another tutorial that i did for josh's channel a long time ago and we're just going to keyframe them uh flying across the screen um just to kind of give them a bit of motion just to kind of give the whole thing a bit of motion you can kind of see here uh they're probably not flying that fast are they i thought we need to fly a bit faster i don't know that's not too bad there you go block of birds um i also had a school of fish as well um so i'm gonna put that on the bottom layer just underneath the bottom layer and turn on the 3d and i'm actually going to um hold shift and pick with this to the bottom layer so it actually matches the perspective of the bottom layer itself um and what i'm going to do is actually pull the put an adjustment layer between the bottom layer and the school fish and um now i'm also going to rotate this like i think 90 degrees oh wait which way does it need to go where are my fish there they are um yeah right so i think they need to go minus 90 degrees just so we can see them when they come in frame actually no no no that's not right there's no they're fine where they are um so there you go they're they're swimming around in the bottom of the thing as well um what i like to do is i actually duplicated it and i pulled this layer up just a touch uh just so it looked like there were shadows and then what i did was i just dropped the opacity of these just a touch that looked like they were shadows um you know the fish were swimming and in creating shadows on the bottom of the ocean as well and that is pretty much how to make this microworld in a nutshell i mean it's it's it's a pretty involving but once you get started and once you have the template all set up i think you can kind of really go through and make your own worlds quite easily you can introduce 3d elements you can introduce photos a lot of photo bashing can kind of help but if you know the limitations of what you can and can't do i think you can really get some really interesting results out of this technique all right guys well that is it for today thanks for watching and if you want to catch up on everything that i'm doing on the social medias go to instagram and go to nick benkoo underscore motion and check out all the stuff that i'm doing there you can also see all the polls that i hold and all the stories that i post it's just a really fun time and a way i can communicate with you directly the audience anyway guys thanks for watching and i'll see you guys next time you

Channel: Olufemii

Views: 10,191

Keywords: bennyproductions, digital art, breakdown, adobe, creative cloud, tutorial, nft, nftart, crypto art, nft art, ethereum, bitcoin, microworlds, 3d software, blender, cinema4d, 3ds max, cinema 4d, houdini, 3d render, 3d art, after effects art, after effects 3d, 3d, mini worlds, mini landscapes, after effects worlds, motion design

Id: awk-XcfFB58

Length: 61min 59sec (3719 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 07 2021