Apple Motion: 3D Glow Tutorial

hi this is Simon still I hope you're all safe and well and welcome to another tutorial for Apple motion and today we're going to be taking a look at this 3d glow effect [Music] [Music] so the overall concept of how this is done is probably not going to come as a complete surprise to many of you but hopefully you'll gain something from the details of how I actually went about it so first of all let's look at our project setup as usual I'm using 1920 1080 24 frames a second 10 seconds long so let's first of all set up the background wall for our scene and to do that I'm going to come and import this texture called cement JPEG now I'm going to put a download link for these elements in the comments for you okay so import that so we're going to take this group and we're going to set it to fixed resolution and we're going to set it to 8,000 by 8,000 and then we're going to come to filters and we're going to look for tiling and Collider tile and because my cement element is 1920 1080 I'm going to use that as the width and height for the collider tile so it all mirrors up perfectly 1920 1080 then I'm going to make a new group and I'm going to put this group into it and let's add a camera to see what we've done so I had a camera that's not switch to 3d keep us 2d because I just want to make this enclosing group 3d not not the one inside it and then if we come to our camera you'll see we've got this nice big floor and our cement element has been tiled up using mirroring that's going to give us nice lot of room to play with so let's just temporarily turn off our camera and I'm going to make another group object new group don't want this to be 3d and I'm going to import my shapes that I'm going to be using for this project so abstract Lego shape import that and it looks like this and it's nice and large so you'll see the scales been automatically scaled on to about 30% and it really doesn't need to be large this is a roughly 4,000 pixels square and given that we're gonna be going close in to it you want to make sure your source object it's at least that big okay so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to call this group logo source and then I'm going to make a clone of it right click make clone layer and I'm going to drag that clone into that original group that we made delete this group that was made during that process and I'm going to turn off the logo source so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to colorize this so I'm going to do that by coming to stylize film so I want to go for something that's a little bit yellow something like this and what I see it i'm also going to colorize my floor element so i'm going to select that cement and come to color color eyes set the black to complete black and the remap white let's come down so the opposite direction and let's make it nice and dark i think so then let's come back to our clone layer and i want to duplicate it so right click duplicate and i'm going to delete that fill and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to make a replicator from this so object or a replicate and we're going to switch it to 3d we're going to select a line we're going to zero out the X values there we're going to open up the start point and we're going to set that Zed value to 75 well I message I'm just going to come down switch on add stiff blend very important to do that let's just quickly turn our camera back on so you can see what I've done it's that old trick of using a replicator to simulate a 3d object so obviously we need quite a few more slices here so I'm going to up that points to about 32 and we do have a problem that we you do see the slices when they're end on but we're going to take care of that shortly so what we need to do is come down to the color mode and select over pattern open up the gradient and I think I want to go for a kind of orangey color at the base you can see that and this one the top I'm just going to go slightly more yellow like that and you can see the additive blend mode is giving us this really nice sort of luminous effect to it already so the next thing we want to do is select the replicator and come to filters blur and Gaussian blur and this is going to create the basis of our glow so we're going to go for something like 24 there and you can see it's just softened everything off and it's also helped to disguise any slices that we might still be able to see we're still worried about it we can even go to 32 that's probably even better the more we the more blur we add in fact the more transparent it becomes and that's actually quite nice too so I'm going to select my colored clone layer and I'm going to duplicate that right click duplicate and then I'm going to move it up above our glowing element here and I'm going to come to its position and set that Z position to 75 so now it's got its now it's a face sitting on top of our 3d plrow' and I just want to change this fill color and again let's go for the opposite duration and make it nice and dark dark and desaturate is something like that I'm just going to take this opportunity to do it a bit of tidy up I'm going to call this group main and this replicator let's call glow let's call this this bottom one here let's call floor glow the coolest face and this bottom group here let's call it wall okay I started to be a bit tidier so let's make this look a little bit more interesting by adding some lights so add object light and and immediately I'll see our glow has lost its punch so what we need to do is we need to change some of these elements lighting status so I'm going to select my floor glow there I've got the lighting and turned it off and the same for our replicator glow turn that off and you see we're back to to normal but the rest of the scene is being illuminated by that light we're going to move that light position up to 150 and then I'm going to reduce its intensity down to about 60 then I'm going to duplicate it and I'm just going to move it out to the top left so negative 400 on X and positive 400 on Y duplicated again and I'm going to move it to the bottom right hand corner so positive 400 on X and negative 400 on Y so now it's looking a little bit better this is what we've got those lights are lighting up just enough so I'm just gonna turn off some of these 3d overlays that grid is annoying me and I'm also going to turn off the scene icons which are the lights and just gives us a a little bit more of a sense of what we're doing here okay so next I think I just wanted just that cement colorize it's a little bit too dark so we can just bring it up just a little bit so we're getting a little bit more sense of that floor there I think that'll be better okay so one thing I want to do here is to use that same floor texture as the face for this top edge here what other adit to that face so what I'm going to do is I'm going to copy that come up to my face layer here and then paste so that's on top and then what we'll need to do is we'll need to cut it out and we can cut it out using that face element so I'm going to right click on the cement add image mask and then I'm going to use that face as the source and then turn the face back on again now we need to move this cement up to the same level first of all we need to reset its position because that's been affected by the camera and then we need to move it to 75 pixels on Zed now what I want to try is I want to have the effect of feed face being a little bit see-through and I think this is going to be really nice so what we're gonna do is we're going to set the blend mode of this cement layer to multiply we're going to come down to the face lair and we're going to set its opacity down to 96 and already you can see how that's become a little bit see-through you can see we're seeing through to the underlying structure and that's that's really rather nice I think so I'm going to remove that colorize from the cement layer I'm going to add a hue/saturation and also a levels so with the hue/saturation I'm going to reduce the saturation down to negative one so we've got no saturation and then that allows me to use this really just as a texture and I'm going to use the levels to start to give the effect I want and I think you can see now that I can just get a nice patchy effect patchy see-through effect and I think that looks really or a whole lot better having added in this texture that is that is semi see-through and we're seeing through to the lighting effect and the structure underneath and and that's that's really rather good I think so there is turn off the cam for one second and if we look at the overall scene I think you'll agree that what we need is the for the glow to be appearing to cast a little bit of lighting onto the floor so I'm going to do that using this floor glow element but we shouldn't call that floor glow because I'm going to use it again for a national glow but let's duplicate it right-click duplicate and so this bottom layer here I'm going to come to filters and apply a nice big Gaussian blur so we're going to go for something like 400 and then what we can do is just reduce this level down quite a long way I'm around sort of to 20 15 20 percent there and if I toggle that on and off you can see how much better that looks that really looks as though the glow is kicking out light onto the floor that sort of wall rather than it now let me just turn the camera back on again and let's consider another issue and that's that really what we ought to be seeing is some glow that overlaps the edges of the face which is what would happen in the real world so the way I would do it is to select that main group and come to filters and I would use our very own Hawaiki super glow and that instantly gives a very dramatic effect way too dramatic but what I'm going to do is increase the threshold reduce the amount and you can see we've got this really gorgeous glow that's very very controllable and looks super photorealistic and there's heaps of other controls that make this a really fancy plugin but obviously you want to know how to build all this using only the motion tool set so I'm going to delete that and what we're going to do is we're going to duplicate this entire main group so I'm going to do right click duplicate I'm going to call this new group glow and then let's just open it up we don't need everything in it in actual fact so I'm going to delete my wall I'm going to delete these two floor glows so we're really just interested in the replicator and the face element in fact I'm going to remove that cement element there and I'm going to make the face element fully opaque because really aren't you use it as a mask for the the light source I'm going to use that fill just to make that black so now if we turn off our main you can see we've isolated the glow source and now we can use this group as all glow so what I'm going to do is set its blend mode to add let's turn on main back on again and then I'm going to add blur Gaussian blur and I'm going to increase this amount to something like 16 and then I'm going to duplicate it right click duplicate increase the amount stir up to about 64 duplicate it again duplicate increase the amount up to let's go for 256 now this is all much too strong so what we're going to do is we're going to progressively reduce these mix values so this top one is going to be 10% and this one 20% and this one 30% so now we've got a pretty decent glow really and we can adjust the overall amount using the the opacity of this glow group I'm going to set it to around 50% I think now because our glow group is adding so much extra brightness we're losing a little bit of the subtlety of the internal glow here one looks a little bit solid rather than this is kind of see-through effect that I would like so to fix that I'm going to come to our main group and select the replicated glow and I'm going to reduce this a pasty down to around 20 and that's just introduced a little bit more I put it back up again you can see in areas like this we've got that kind of more interesting transparency on the bottom there let's go for 20 actually on there and that's going to look a lot nicer I think you can see that effect here and now we've added that overall glow I think our floor glow needs to be a little bit more intense so now let's come down to that let's increase that value let's see how we go yeah 35 is probably about right given the intensity of that light I think that's fairly good so IRA as you might will want to change the color of this and let's just have a go at doing that I'm going to make a new group and I'm going to call this background BG for background I'm going to take that wool group there and drag it out into that new group and put that new group right at the back so now we've isolated the wall and what we can do is make an additional new group and then we can put both the glow and the main groups into it and then we can add filters color hue saturation and then our hue control allows us to pick the color of our choice and we can also use the value just to bring it all under control a bit because obviously different difference cues are going to have different luminance values and you might want to just keep them out of control a little bit with the value so now we've got everything set up we can very easily swap out the image source so we can come to our logo source group I'm just going to turn off the original logo shape and I'm going to come to import and I'm going to import an alternative logo shape so import that and as you see everything works just fine all we've had to do is just swap out the the shape within that group now we can also use the motion title tool so we could type some text into this group here go to type 3-d need to make it really big so I'm going to make its 1200 bring it down accordingly so negative 400 and that's just to hide our original logo source and you can see that that kind of pretty much works just as well now the issue though is that with this process if you're using the text tool with certain fonts at certain camera angles you can get really really unacceptable artifacts rendering artifacts I mean seriously very very ugly and you can't live with them and I think I would probably recommend that you render out the text that you want bring it back in as a nice large still and then you'll find it's all lot easier to work with so that would be my advice so here's a full Ram preview I've added in a little bit of dust particles which always think help you can see we've got that really nice transparency which to me that that's what makes the effect is we're seeing through the light source rather than it's a solid block [Music] so I hope that's been interesting things very much indeed for watching and I hope to see you again another time

Channel: Simon Ubsdell

Views: 8,244

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Id: 5rcp2Fc3tsI

Length: 18min 19sec (1099 seconds)

Published: Tue May 19 2020