Apple Motion 5: Crystal Spheres Tutorial

hi this is simon from tokyo productions and welcome to another tutorial for motion 5 and today we're going to be looking at creating this crystal spheres project so the idea here is to see what we can do in terms of creating 3d looking crystal severes without actually using any 3d so there's quite a bit to do so let's jump in and get started so I've got a new project here it's 1920 1080 24 frames a second and I've made it 15 seconds long and let me come back to the file browser and now what I've done is I've made a package of textures for you to use in this project and I'll give you a download link in the comments so the first thing we want to do is to look for background composite BG composite and well import that and then we'll make a duplicate of it so we'll right click and duplicate and well just hide the duplicate for the time being let's select this layer here come over to the inspector properties and let's set the scale to 825 and 12 in the position here set the Y position to minus 300 and the Z position to minus 15,000 the reason for this is we don't have the mountains away off in the distance okay so now let's come back to the file browser and let's grab the image called sand and let's bring it in just above the that grand composite and it's come to the inspector come to its properties we want to set a Y position of minus 400 and a session of - mm we'll come down and rotate it through 90 degrees on X and then we will set the scale to 200 percent next we're going to duplicate that sand so right click duplicate come back to its properties we're going to set the Z position to minus 105 double O minus 10,500 and we will increase the X scale to 400% and the Y scale to 2 to 5 and I'm just going to rotate it through 180 on Z so the seam matches up better where they join now I just want to alert you to the fact that this floor is not going to look quite the same as we go through the tutorial and that's because when I initially began it I was doing something much more complicated that's always quite clever and it wasn't clever at all so you'll see some strange artifacts on the floor so just ignore those ok so now I want to add a camera so I'm going to come to object new camera and switch everything to 3d and all of a sudden my background mountains disappear and the reason for that is the cameras farplane defaults to 10,000 pixels and we're way back behind that so I'm going to set that far plane to 25000 pixels just to be super safe and you can see my mountains reappear then I'm going to come to the camera properties I just want to set up a quick animation so I'm going to click on the exposition add parameter behavior oscillate and I'm going to set an amplitude on 540 and you'll see that just sort of swings us backwards and forwards like that so now let's move on and create our sphere so let's come to our file browser and look for the texture called glass and bring it into a new group at the top there let's come to the inspector properties just set that scale to a hundred percent I'm just going to turn off the camera click on its tick box just so we can construct this in the center of the screen and then I'm going to take that glass and I'm going to make a new group of it so right click group and I want to make sure this group is 2d so right click untick 3d group and then I want to set this group to fixed resolution by clicking on the fixed resolution box there then I'm going to come to the library and I'm going to look for filters Distortion I'm going to come down and look for sphere and I'm going to apply that to that group then I'm going to select the group come to the inspector properties blend mode and I'll set that to screen now if I turn back on my camera you'll see that that just looks like a flat object and we're not sort of seeing round the sides of it as the camera moves left and right so what we're going to do is we're going to link the glass to the camera movement so we're going to select the glass and we're going to click on the exposition address behavior link and it will drag the camera into the source object well and what we want to do is set our scale here to minus point one to five and now you'll see that's just a little bit more convincing because as we move right we're seeing more of the left hand side and as we move left we see more of the right hand side so this is the front face of our sphere let's very quickly set the blend mode to screen what we need is a back face and to do that let's duplicate this layer so right-click duplicate and I'm going to just come to object send backward just said to move that behind our foreground layer and then I'm going to come to the behaviour to adjust that link and set that scale to 0.125 so plus one to five so it's moving in the opposite direction and now if you press play you can see that those two planes are moving opposite to each other what I might just do is come to the properties transform for this back layer and I'll just flip it on Y so enter a Y value of 180 degrees rotation and now we've got a slightly more interesting result now in this particular project we're not going to be moving the camera vertically we're just going to be moving on the X and the z axis but if we wanted to move it vertically we would also link up the Y position to the camera in the exact same way so we click on the Y position add proud behavior link add it to the camera and we'd again set that value to 0.12 and so on and do the same with the other layer but have a negative value in this case we're just going to ignore that I went to lead that out of there and what I'm going to do is I'm going to use the Y position here to just give us a bit more variation so if you notice I can now drag that Y value and we get a more interesting result doesn't look quite so mirrored then what we can do is we can come to the library filters color correction grab a levels filter and we'll apply that to that 2d group above the sphere come to the inspector just slightly crunch down the black and we'll take the white out and reduce that a bit as well so just getting a little bit more see-through something like that we can adjust all this later you can see that's already starting to look a little bit more 3d so while we're in this group I just want to come back to the file browser and I want to look for my particles move and I'm going to drag that in to this group just between those two glass layers and I'm going to come to the inspector properties and I'm set the blend mode of this to add and that that will just give me these particles fizzing around inside the sphere and this is something I was created using a motion particle emitter okay so next I want to add a light so I'm going to come to object new light and first of all I want to eliminate the background compositor from the illumination so I'm going to select the background composite layer come to its properties come down to lighting and under shading I'm going to turn that off and that turns back on my mountains and they're not affected by the light so let's come back to the light itself let's set a Z position of a thousand let's set an exposition of 150 and a Y position of 150 just move it up to that top corner of the object then I'm going to select the group so that's the sphere group the 2d group and here under its lighting tab I'm going to select highlights turn that on and I'm going to increase the shininess all the way up just adds a little bit more shininess then I'm going to call this 3d group sphere and let's just close it down and let's tidy things up a bit more by calling this bottom group backing okay if you remember we created a duplicate of the background and I'm not going to drag that out of there into a new group and I'm going to turn it on and this group I'm going to call refract and I just want to move it down below this fear so I'm going to select object send backward and then backward and it's now below the sphere and I just want to come down to its lighting here for that group shading and set that to off so what I want to do with this is to use it to create refraction and refraction is what happens when light passes through glass or crystal or whatever and what it does is it bends the end deforms the background image as the light rays pass through the glass and gets deflected okay so how are we going to do that okay so the first step is I want to make a new group out of this background layer so I'm going to right click group and I want to make that 2d and I also want to take the main refract group right click on it add image mask just going to open up that sphere and I'm going to use that it's 2d group inside of it and drag that into the mask source well and I want to turn that group back on again so now I want to select the 2d group I want to set it to fixed resolution I want to come to the library filters distortion and I want to look for bulge and I'm going to apply it to the layer inside that 2d group I went to come to the inspector and I'm going to set the Bulge scale to 3.5 let's have a look how that plays so that's not looking right yet because again it's not interacting correctly with the camera so to fix that we are going to link the Bulge Center to the camera so I'm going to click on that X Center value add parameter behavior link and I'm going to drag the camera into the source object well and here under source parameter I'm going to set it to prop is transform.position X and what I need to do is I need to set up my scale and offset for this link behavior so I'm going to set a scale of minus 0.25 and an X offset of minus three eight four zero so that's twice 1920 if you're wondering where that number comes from okay so now let's play and you'll see that's looking already slightly better you can see how it's being bent around using that bulge and it's moving correctly in relation to the camera or when I say correctly this is obviously all a simulation and it's not physically correct but it sort of emulates what would happen in the real world okay let me just call this group bulge and I want to make a group out of that group so I'm going to right click group again I want to make sure that's 2d so right click turn off 3d and this one I'm going to call sphere and I'm going to make sure that's also set to fixed resolution and I'm going to come to the library filters distortion and I'm going to come down and look for that sphere filter and add that to this new group and now if we play you can see we're getting a much nicer result just want to adjust my glass group so it's looking a little bit more see-through so I'm going to select the levels and let's just grab the gamma and increase that you can see as I do so that just makes it all a little bit more see-through maybe crunch the whites down a bit something like that if we press play you can see that's looking more glossy and see-through okay so there's one of the trick I want to try with this refraction group let's close up that sphere group I want to come to that bulge group select the background composite layer come to the library come to filters Distortion and I'm going to look for glass distortion and I'm going to drag it on to that layer just above the Bulge and I'm going to come to the library content I'm going to click in the search box here and I'm going to type a travertine and I'm going to bring it in to this roof right group I'll Britain at the top there it doesn't really matter I'm going to just turn it straight off and then I'm going to select the glass distortion filter come to the inspector grab the travertine and drag it into the distortion input source well and you can see that that's immediately created quite an interesting effects of this fogged textured glass it's all a bit too strong and that's not really the look I'm going for so I'm going to select the travertine layer come back to the library come back to filters clear that search result come to color correction and look for levels and I'll apply it to the travertine and I'll come to the inspector and I'm going to drag the black value drag it all the way up as you see as I do so it just thins out that effect so I'm just getting the just a little bit of of texturing on that glass we could come back down to the glass distortion and maybe increase the softness value up to two or something like that just to soften it off even more not entirely convinced that I like this look I've left it in there just to show you what you can do you might like that completely frosted look for example I think possibly for this scene it's probably best left off but let's leave it there for now okay so because this refraction is distorting the background image quite a lot I think what I want to do is I want to sharpen it up because image tends to be very sharp so I'm going to select that sphere group I'm going to come to the library filters I'm going to scroll down to the sharpen group and I'm going to look for unsharp mask then I'm going to add it to that group just above sphere and I'm going to come to the inspector let's reduce the amount down to 0.5 so I think that just helps to keep the sharpness of the effect okay so this is one other thing I'd like to point out about the refraction before we move on and that's if you are wanting to move the camera vertically you'll need to duplicate this link on the Bulge layer so we'd come to the inspector let's right-click duplicate and we need to swap out these values here so the source parameter is going to be properties transform position Y and it'll be filters bulge Center Y the scale will leave at minus 0.25 the y offset would need to be minus 0.2 1 6 0 and that's obviously twice 1080 and that'll move the refraction correctly in relation to a camera that moves vertically but we're not going to be doing that so I'm going to delete that so let's close up that group and move on and the next thing I want to do is to create some specular highlights so I'm going to come to object new group and then I'm going to come over to the library look for generators and I'll look for lens flare and I'll bring it in to that group I'll come to the inspector properties and we'll Center it up because don't forget the any objects you bring in if there's a camera inherits the cameras current position so let's Center that up by hitting the reset button then I'm going to come to this group that I've made come down to the lighting section here and turn off shading and that means that the lighting doesn't director these lens flares and they can be nice and bright so I'm going to select the lens flare I'm going to come over to the View menu and show overlays and I'll come back to the generator and I'll come down here and select adjust item and that now I can move the center of the lens flare up to around somewhere like this I just want to increase the size to 150 and the intensity to 3 will just increase the fall-off to 5 now you'll see that that lens flare is spreading out beyond the sphere itself so what we're going to do is we're going to select the group right-click add image mask and having done that obviously it changes the blend mode of the group so we need to come back to the group properties set this to linear dodge and then what we're going to do is select the image mask open up that sphere group use that 2d group and drag it into the image mask for our specular group and that'll just limit the effect of the lens layer to this this area let's call this group specular so now I want to make a copy of this lens blur so right click duplicate and well just move it down to the bottom left-hand corner here and let's reduce the size down quite a bit it's one to be a fairly subtle one bad 20 will do I think in this case I want to increase the streak intensity and I'll come up to about point 4 point 4 5 somewhere like that and then I will duplicate this one more time so that's right click duplicate and I'll grab it again and drag it up to the top right hand corner above the other one now I think I've made that main flare a little bit too strong so let's select that the bottom one there let's reduce the size maybe down to 120 or even down to 100 and maybe let's reduce the intensity down - yes that's looking better ok so you can see how much that's really improved the look of this now if we press play you'll see that doesn't really move quite correctly so what I want to do is add a little bit of extra realism by having that track the camera movement so what I'm going to do is I'm going to select the specular group come to the properties and again I want to link the exposition to the camera so click here add parameter behavior link and drag the camera into the source object well and what I want to do in this case is apply it to properties transform rotation Z and I'll come down here and set the scale to minus 0.125 and then I'll just rotate the X offset so it's lining up with my son over here as 600 is doing that and you can see that now rotates rather nicely and follows the angle of the Sun so that's really quite a nice interactive effect now there's another nice thing we can do to make this a little bit more photorealistic and that's to simulate the way this light would hit the floor because these are very bright and they would definitely hit the floor and interact with it so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take that specular group right click duplicate and I'll call it specular floor and then what I'm going to do is come over to its properties and I'm going to set an X rotation of minus 90 and a Y position of minus 400 and what I want to do is I just want to turn off the image mask so it's looking like that and then I want to set the blend mode to add and then let's reduce the opacity down to 50% and now if we play you can see that that's hitting the floor and looking looking really quite nice I want to reduce that a pasty down even more probably down to about 30 so it's not too strong now I don't know whether you've noticed but I've been caught out by a really annoying feature of the image mask process and that's that when you add an image to an image mask it turns the source image off so what's happened is that my sphere group has got turned off let me just turn that back on again and you can see I've got my glass texture over the top so let's close down fear let's go down the specular and specular floor and now let's look at another aspect of the sphere itself so we've got refraction we've got our nice specular effects but what we haven't got is any reflection so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my refract group and I'm going to duplicate it so right click duplicate I'm going to drag it up to above the sphere there and this I'm going to call a reflection let's hold down the Alt key and open that up to reveal its entire contents okay we've got some stuff in here that we don't need we don't need that travertine and we don't need that glass distortion and we don't need the unsharp mask on the sphere and we've also simplified this group structure a little bit by taking that background composite layer dragging it out to the top layer of the reflection group and deleting these two groups that were enclosing it right how is this going to work well first of all we want to come to the Bulge filter and we want to increase the amount to 350 and the scale I want to set to minus 5 and this creates a very different sort of effect where by we're pinching in the middle and bulging out the sides I also want to come to the properties and increase the scale of this so I'm going to come up to 100 forty percent and then I also want to select the link behavior and make an adjustment to that so I'm going to have a scale value of plus 0.125 and an X offset of seven six eight oh and that's just limiting the movement of that fairly considerably so it's being affected by the camera but not not greatly so okay I'm sort of turn off the camera though briefly so we can add a mask to this so I'm going to come down here set select the circle mark tool hold down the shift and Alt key and from the center of the circle I'm going to drag out a mask that's more or less the same size as my main sphere and then I'll come over to its transform and reset the position and we just want to come to the mask tab and invert it what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab the feather and I'm going to feather it inwards and probably stick it around a hundred something like that and then I also want to adjust the blend mode here let's set this to screen and I want to set the blend mode over the reflection group to linear dodge let's turn the camera back on again and you'll see how that works we're getting this fairly nice effect around the edges as they were reflecting our environment and I also wanted to make a duplicate of this background composite layer so right click duplicate I'm just going to come to the filter and just increase the scale up to 400 and what I'm going to do is are going to take that link behavior and delete it so now let's just look at that one on its own you'll see that's blues to the edges it's quite a nice effect so if we turn the other one back on again we get that little animation of the reflection as well so both those two together work pretty nicely what we want to do is adjust the brightness of all this because we've gone a little bit crazy so let's select the reflection group let's come to the library let's look for filters color correction and add a levels to that reflection main group and come to the inspector you just want to grab the white out bring that down a little bit and then I also want to increase the gamma just so that's a little little bit more see-through and maybe also just increase the punchiness of the white and I think that's looking quite nice okay I also would have the effect of this really bright reflection interacting with the floor in the same way as we did with our little specular highlights so how are we going to do that well first of all I need to do a little bit of tidying up of the image mask at the moment that sphere image mask is applying to the entire reflection group I want it to apply to each of these two layers so I'm going to move it on to the topmost layer there and then I want to set the mask blend mode to subtract and I want to invert it and then I want to hold down the Alt key and I want to drag it on to the other background composite layer there so they've both now having that mask applied then what I can do is I can take that reflection group and hit K to make a clone and this makes a new group I'm going to call this new group caustics and I want to come down and look for the Anchor Point tool come to view show overlays and then I want to move that anchor point down to the bottom of the sphere just around about there value of that - 400 and then I want to come to the X rotation set that to 90 degrees and you'll see that that is now sitting on the floor turn off the overlays just so we can see that a bit more clearly I think what we want to do is set the blend mode of this group to screen just fade it off a bit more and let's set the opacity down to 40% so it's fairly subtle and you can see how that adds quite a nice effect now it's not quite linking up with the light direction so let's fix that what we'll do is we'll come to the z-rotation and again we'll link it up to the camera so add parameter behavior link and we'll grab the camera drag it into the source well set the source parameter to properties transform position X and I want to set a scale of 0.1 and as an X offset of 1280 and that'll just line it up a bit bore and it'll follow the path of the light a little bit more satisfactorily okay next thing I want to do is let's just close up some of these groups that close up caustics and reflection and again I want to take that refract group and duplicate it so right-click duplicate and I'm going to call this group edge and I'll move it up above everything I think like that and let's hold down the Alt key and open it up to reveal its entire contents again we got far too much in there let's kill travertine and let's move the background composite layer out to the top and let's delete that group underneath and let's delete glass distortion as well okay I'm going to turn off the camera again just to Center everything up I'm going to come down and select the circle mask tool again held down shift and alt and drag out a mask that's roughly the same size as my sphere and come to its properties transform position hit the reset button and come to the mask and we just need to invert it now what that's done is this giving us a very very slight edge all around everything just like that just want to feather that mask so let's go for a value of minus 24 and then let's come to its properties and just increase the scale of that just a little bit let's go for something like 102 and what I'm going to do is I'm going to take that bulge filter and let's just play with the scale here let's go 4-5 and let's increase the amount to 400 then we want to come to the blend mode there properties blend mode and let's set that to screen and we must done is just giving us a little bit of sense of the thickness of the walls of the sphere because obviously it's our inside is just air but the outside is glass let's maybe reduce the opacity down to about 90 percent just to soften off that effect if I turn it on and off you can see how that's again helped with that 3d feel right let's close that group on down let's close down backing as well we don't need to be seeing that at this point and the final stage of our construction is to add some shadow detail so that this looks as though it's sitting on the floor a bit more convincingly so then we're going to come to object new group and we'll call this new group shadow and let's move it down behind everything just above the backing okay let's turn off the camera so we can be in the center let's come down and select the circle tool come to window show HUD click on the fill color click on the eyeglass and let's select a dark color off that foreground the darkest color off this floor here and now let's hold down the shift and Alt key let's drag out a circle that's the same size as our sphere and we'll come over to the transform and reset that don't forget it is behind everything which is serwe is disappeared what we're going to do is come to the shape tab and we're going to set a feather of minus 385 then we're going to come to its properties set a Y position of minus three nine nine and an X rotation of 90 you'll see that's popped that down there at the base of the sphere and that's creating that occlusion effect of it just touching the floor we could increase that if we wanted by duplicating this so right click duplicate and then just slightly darkens it down and come to the properties and reduce the scale down to 50% just added a little bit more darkness let's now also duplicate that bottom circle right click duplicate because what we want is to have a shadow that's been cast by the Sun here and is stretching out towards us so let's call this shadow floor I want to come to its properties I want to increase the Y scale to 250 come back the shape tab style and here it says fill mode I want to select gradient and then let's open up the gradient editor let's just set the start and end points for the gradient so the Y start is going to be minus 10 and the y end is going to be minus 385 and let's set the feather to minus 70 now we need to adjust these colors obviously let's remove the left-hand color let's click on the right-hand color again let's click on the color swatch and let's pick our dark color off the floor like that let's set a new opacity tab and move it all the way to the right let's click on the left-hand opacity tab I wanted a pasty of 50% then I want to click on the right-hand opacity tab and set the value to 25% and that's going to create a bit of a fade off of that shadow now let's come to its properties transform and let's set the anchor point to minus 3 8 5 and then let's set the blend mode to multiply if I turn that shadow on and off you can see that it's now pointing towards us if I turn the camera back on again you can probably just about see the effect is having what camera is a little bit close to our subject so let's actually move it a little bit of way so we can see what's going on a bit better and we come back to here you can see that shadow much more clearly extending towards us now again it's not tracking the position of the light so let's again add link behavior to it and we need to link its z-rotation click on the z-rotation add parameter behavior Link and link that to the camera and set the source parameter to properties transform position X we need to set the link scale to 0.1 and let's again set the X offset to 1280 and that's now going to track the movement of the light rather nicely if we look at that that definitely looks as though it's being lit from the Sun over there okay so our final step is going to be to add in the two other instances of the sphere and set up a camera move I'm going to take everything from edge down to shadow and that includes that light and then I'm going to come to object group and group them together and I'm going to call this one Center because it's going to be the one that's in the center of the scene and you might find something that I found which is that the specular floor link offset needed to be adjusted once I've made the group and the same thing with the caustics link also needs to be adjusted that used to be minus 600 I've now had to enter a value of minus 3 for a toe I'm sure there's a very good reason for that I can't quite get my head around it and I won't waste your time on that now okay so we've got our center group let's close that up and let's right-click and let's duplicate and let's call this one left and then I want to come to its properties let's set an exposition of - 1600 and a Z position of minus 2500 I'll push it back way back into the back of the scene then let's duplicate this left-hand instance so right click duplicate let's call this right come to its properties and this time we're going to set an exposition of 1500 and leave the z-position at minus 2500 now this instances are all identical and we don't really want that first of all we need to fix the refraction for the left and the right so that it more accurately reflects what the background is doing at that position so let's open up the left-hand group let's look for the refraction group and let's alt click it to open up all of its elements and let's select this bulge group there so that's the one that's containing the bottom layer and let's enter an x position for this group of plus 350 and you'll notice that that now moves that refracted image over and that's looking much more plausible so let's do the same thing with the right so close that up open up the right group look for refract alt click that to open it all up and let's look for the Bulge group there and let's just do the opposite so have a will exposition of minus 350 and that's already given us a very different look for both sides another thing we should look at is the specular offset so if we look at the right-hand instance you can see that's not lining up with our Sun correctly so let's open up the right-hand instance let's look for the specular group open that up and let's select that link and then adjust the X offset till it lines up with the Sun like that could do the same with the left-hand one but I think that's not looking too bad probably also want to give we were really getting picky align these floor highlights but I think what we'll do is just generally with those is to reduce them down a lot so let's select that specular group and let's reduce the opacity of that specular floor group down to ten I think just wants to be very subtle let's do the same thing with the left so where's our specular floor group is there reduce that down to ten and I think what we might also do is this caustic layer is too bright as well but for that background so let's reduce that down to ten as well and come over to the right and do the same thing reduce that down to ten so that's all just sitting in a little bit better another thing I'd like to do is adjust the lighting of those background spheres so I'm going to type in these search fields down here light and that brings up the three lights I went to select the light in the left group come to the light tab and I'll increase the fall-off to 6% and I'll do the same with the right and increase the fall-off to 5% in that case and that just localizes the light a little bit more around the error of the sphere so another thing i'd like to do is add some atmosphere to this scenes and let's close up those groups which have opened themselves up again and we're going to do that by coming up to top here object new group come to the library come to generators and we'll look for clouds and we'll bring it in to that group so let's come over to the inspector let's set the width to 38 40 and the height to 2160 let's try up an in gradient let's remove the black color tab let's set an new a pasty tab on the top there drag it all the way to the right click the left-handed pasty tab and set that down to zero let's open up the offset here click on the X offset ad parameter behavior rate and we're going to enter a rate of minus point zero three just move it very gently left to right then let's click on the properties tab come down to the blending a pasty and set that down to 40% and this I want to be running along the floor first of all I'm going to zero at the position and then I'm going to set an X rotation of in ninety degrees and I just want to bring it down to minus three nine six on Y and let's scale everything up to 300% so it's covering the area of the floor then I want to duplicate this layer right click duplicate and come to its properties in this instance I want it to be running vertically in the background there so let's zero out that X rotation let's set a Z value of minus 3000 you can move it back into the distance there and a Y position of 250 and let's set the opacity to 10% and we'll also come to its rate and we'll reduce that down even further to minus point zero five so that's really drifting very slowly in the background there so let's rename this group clouds and close it on down and let's have a look at animating our camera so select the camera let's turn off the oscillate behavior and before that I just need to make sure that I've got my layers in the right order so I want the center to be above the other two so I'm just going to move it move it above the right hands fear there so it's at the top okay so now let's select on our camera and let's look at sorting out our animation so first of all let's come to the first frame let's set an X key frame and a Z key frame for the position and I'm going to enter an X value of minus 1450 and a Z value of minus 3500 and then I'm going to come to 7 seconds and 12 frames on the timeline so that's the middle of the animation and I'm going to set an X key frame of minus 150 and a Z key frame of 500 and then let's come to the last frame and let's set an exposition of 1600 and a Z position of - 3500 we shall assume us back into the final orb then what we want to do is come to window keyframe editor and I want to make sure that animated is selected here so that'll show us the cameras keyframes and if I hold down the Alt key and I click on the transform position Z here that will solo this curve just want to make some adjustments I'm going to turn off the spheres so turn those off turn off that visibility just so we can move a little bit quicker so I'm going to select that Center keyframe and I'm going to drag its Bezier handle just so it's leveled up and then I'm going to come to the first keyframe and I'm going to drag that keyframe handle just above the curve and come to the last one and do the same just drag it above the curve then I'm going to alt click on the X position to solo this curve as well and I'm going to select that Center keyframe and again I just want to even out that center position so we have a little bit of our hold in the middle so I'm going to drag these keyframes out so that handles more or less even and relatively flat and just adjust those keyframes at the beginning and end that handle just a little bit above the curve and drag that handle just a little bit below the curve okay so now let's turn back on our our spheres and have a ram preview and see how that looks so here we go we're zooming out from the first one Center one appears truck across and we see the other one and surely we start to zoom back in again to the final position sorry that Ram preview slowing down a bit so I mentioned at the beginning that I'd made a bit of a mess of the floor and the floor we've been looking at throughout the tutorial is not the correct one I just want to make a little bit of an adjustment now where we finished the scene and I want to put a light right at the back of the scene here just to look like it's coming down between those mountains so I'm going to come to object a new light and first of all I want to come to its properties position and I'm going to set an exposition of minus 500 a Y position of 500 and I want to push it a long way back to minus 12,000 so it's sitting way way back at the back of the scene and you can see how that's just giving me a little bit of illumination there between the the mountains and that's pretty nice what is also doing is making that distant floor and look a little bit to speckly so I'm going to select that sand copy which is the version that's sitting right at the back there and to come to the library filters and I'm going to look for color correction contrast and apply it come to the inspector and I'm just going to set a contrast value of 0.5 and that just reduces the spec leanness there looks it makes it look a little bit more there belongs in the distance not too much detail now while we're talking about that I want to advise you that when you come to render it's very important to set the resolution best if you don't do that then you'll get all sorts of aliasing on the floor as the camera moves around and that looks really bad so definitely select best when you do that and just one other thing before we go I want to look at the clouds here open that up you remember there was a clouds layer that's running across the floor and it's Y value was set to minus 396 I think I just want to lift it up to minus 300 so it's sort of kind of sitting a little bit further above and you can see the difference that makes if I go back to where we were it looks a little bit too close to the floor - 300 it looks a bit more plausible and I also want to come to the generator controls here and I want to set the height to 38 40 so it's going back a bit further into the distance okay so finally let's look at this issue on where these spheres overlap with each other so first of all let's look at the left hand fear so roundabout here it's being overlapped by the foreground to fix that I'm going to make a duplicate of the left hand group so right-click duplicate and I'm going to move it up above the center there and then I'm going to right click add image mask and I'm going to use the center group as the source for the image mask and then I need to remember to turn the center back on again next what I'm going to do is I'm going to set the blend mode of this left copy group to screen and it's a pasty down to 50% and what I also want to do is I want to come to the library come to filters distortion and I want to look for bulge and I want to add it to that group and if we turn on the overlays I'm going to just bring the center of the Bulge over til it's sitting roughly here and I think this is probably enough just to sell the effect now I don't know about you but at this point I'm kind of hitting the limits of what motion can manage so I think I what I might do is just delete a few of the ingredients out of there so I'm going to delete that specular floor for example I don't need the caustics and I don't really need the shadow either and most importantly I don't need to delete the lights because that adding extra illumination that we don't want so list early that as well okay so that's the basic principle of that and it is going to start to slow your machine down a bit but it's probably worth it's just for the extra value that gives okay and we just need to do the same thing with the right hand side find the point at which it overlaps so we can take a call on this so roundabout here it's overlapping I'm just going to call that left overlap and close that down select the right hand group right click duplicate again let's move it above the center come to the inspector properties set the blend mode to screen set the opacity down to 50% as we did before and then right click add image mask and we'll use the center add it to the moss source well turn the center back on again and come to the library filters Distortion grab the Bulge add it to the right hand group again the overlays on let's move that over till it's somewhere around here we just want it in both instances hanging off the edge frame doesn't have to be too accurate and we don't even really need to animate it so let's just call that one right overlap and we just need again to delete those unwanted elements from the group so delete specular floor delete caustics let's delete shadow and let's delete the light so there you go that is the project pretty much finished so let's have a look at a final render so there you go it's been a very long project and lots of elements to it I hope it's been worth sticking with it thanks very much if you have and I hope to see you again on the next one thanks for watching

Channel: Simon Ubsdell

Views: 40,060

Keywords: Motion (Software), Tutorial (Media Genre), 3D, sci-fi, refraction, reflection, sphere, orb, specular, glass, crystal, Space

Id: m9gEwEXU3Oo

Length: 55min 49sec (3349 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 09 2015