Apple Motion 5: Light Art Tutorial

hi this is Simon lobster and welcome to another tutorial for motion 5 and today we're going to be taking a look and this project now this was inspired by seeing a man doing light art using a fluorescent tube and it looks something like this so I I thought I'd see what it would be like to try and recreate it in motion so over in motion I just want to point out third I'm working in 1920 1080 24 frames a second and I've chosen a duration of 15 seconds so the first thing I want to do is to build our room and to do that I'm going to import two pieces of artwork I'll put a link to this in the comments along with the finished project now you're probably aware that when you bring in images that are oversized they get scaled to fit the dimensions of the project so we just need to make these both a hundred percent now what I've done is for my walls I've made an image that's two thousand pixels wide by a thousand pixels high and for my floor and ceiling so that it matches I've made that two thousand by two thousand so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to make a group for each of these and it'll become obvious why shortly call this no etc and let's call this walls and I'm going to make a clone of each of those so right click make clone layer for the floor called white element floor for that walls group right click make clone layer makes another group let's call this walls that bit in there okay I just want to move these possibly a little bit confusing so dost want to move these master groups down to the bottom there and turn them off so now we've got two groups one with a clone of the floor and one with a clone of the walls so let's turn off that floor group to start off with and let's concentrate on walls so the first thing one to do is build the sidewall so I'm going to enter a value of 90 on the Y rotation and I'm going to move it to negative a thousand on X then I'm going to duplicate that and move it to positive a thousand on X duplicate it one more time this is for the back wall zero out that x position and have a Z position of a negative a thousand and obviously we don't want that Y rotation so now we've built walls let's call that master then let's take our floor and first of all we want to rotate it through 90 degrees on X and then move it up 500 pixels on why you'd turn that group on in order to see what I've done so that's made the ceiling and now I duplicate again negative 500 on wine makes the floor now this doesn't look very much like a real-world room and the reason for that is that in the real world in all of the corners the light gets trapped and it creates this effect called ambient occlusion and that's just a darkening of that area there where the light just can't find its way out so it makes it also a shadow effect so I'm gonna make that using our original groups let's just call this law etcetera master close that up as this one up close those two up so we can concentrate on our original so as a floor here what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my rectangle tool and I'm going to draw a rectangle and I'm going to reset its transform come to shape geometry now you remember that our floor is two thousand pixels wide so I'm going to set that value to two thousand I'm going to come to style brush color let's make it pretty dark like something like that let's set a width of 400 sorry with the 40 I mean and then come to filters blur Gaussian blur and set that amount to 100 so I'm going to turn on our floor and walls so he can see the difference that's made so if I turn that rectangle on and off you can see that that's put in a little bit of shading along the floor and ceiling so we just need to do the same thing with our walls so what I'm going to do is select that rectangle hold down the option key and drag it into that walls group above my image and all we need to do is just adjust that geometry so as I said mm wide by a thousand hi now I think I probably haven't made that rectangle dark enough so I'm going to command select both of those so I can adjust that color simultaneously as we look at it I think I'm going to go really quite dark somewhere like that so now if we turn those both off you can see the difference that's where we were and this is where we are and that's immediately without any putting any lighting in that's looking like a real world room because of that ambient occlusion effect okay so the next thing we need to do let's close up some groups is we're going to make a text object so we can trace out our light heart effect so I'm going to make a new group here object new group I'm going to take my text tool and I need to type the word light be in capitals and I quite like this condensed font that I've got here I'm gonna make the size 400 so it's fitting quite nicely within our scene reset its transform so it's centered up just want to come back to that text and reset the baseline to negative 100 so that it's centered up it's going to come to properties and I'm going to make this quite faint so let's go for 20 so we can just use this as a guide for drawing our light path so now I'm going to select the paint stroke tool that's what this one here and I'm going to open up the hard adjust to set it up so we want a width of 20 pixels so you can adjust that using that with control there we want this to look as though somebody's actually drawing it by hand so I'm you're just going to draw with my mouse I've see a little pen is going to give you a much nicer results but I'm just going to use the mouse just draw down quite freely like that to create an L just want to give it a little bit of sort of human quality as I draw each letter and always coming and tidy these up later or what we want to win to do is introduce some kind of that organic flow in quality so what we're gonna do is we're just going to go in and maybe just give them a little bit of a tweak so let's zoom in there if we select all edit points tool from the menu down here and turn on the overlays we can just fine-tune those and T is okay the this one we can probably just deleting points is a good idea just to tidy it up a bit the G maybe we can delete that point there this one here give it a bit more of a flow around that corner there L maybe I got lil there carried away with that so that's probably quite good okay so I'm going to turn off my text guide there and that's really not looking too bad it's got a nice organic feel to it so well we're in this group I want to make a path that includes all the letters so for that I'm going to use the Bezier shape tool so again opening on the hard let's go for a pixel width of 20 and I'm just going to follow exactly what I did with my paint stroke tool so I'm going to not going to worry about making it organic this time what I'm doing you see is I'm doing continuous path for the light and I'm going to call this path and I'm going to drag it out into a new group like that this I'm going to call text that group there that's turn off that path group right this text group we're going to turn into a clone so close it up right click and make make a clone that layer and then having done that turn off that group there we're going to make a replicator so object replicate what we want to do is select a line from the shape yeah and we want to turn on 3d that's 0 at those values there and I just want to open up this end here so I can access the EZ value and there I'm going to type a value of negative a thousand and I'm going to set the points that I'm being to thirty what we're going to do now is create a bit more transparency in between all of these so I'm opening up the opacity gradient there let's make a new opacity tab by clicking on that top there and two more like so so I'm going to click on this one here I'm going to set its actual opacity value to 5 and its location there to 5 this one here passes you value 5 location 95 so what we've done is we've made the middle of this replicated object much more transparent than the beginning and ends you'll see we've got stepping here but we'll increase the number of points later on to take care of that so I'm going to call this replicator main and then I'm going to duplicate it right click a duplicate and I'm going to call this replicator glow because the glow is going to be an important factor here it's too much of it right I don't need all these points in fact I only need two for the glow to work so I can reduce that number down to 2 then I'm going to come to filters blur and add a Gaussian blur and what I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate that 4 times so we end with five all together so I'm going to use command D one two three four so the first blur amount I'm going to set to 64 the second one two one two eight which is twice sixty-four the third one to two sixty four which is twice one to eight the fourth one to 512 which gain is doubling it and the last one to 1024 which doubles it again so we want to progressively reduce the mixed value of these so I'm going to set the mixed value of that one there to ten this one to twenty this one to thirty and this one to fifty then I'm going to take this replicated low object and add some color correction to it add levels like that here I'm going to select instead of our GP I'm going to select alpha and if we grab this white value here and drag it down quite a lot you'll see that we're getting this really nice glow effect so there you go that's that was quite easily achieved what we're gonna do is we want to colorize this overall thing so you have right at the bottom here we've got a clone of our text group and what we're going to do is we're going to add a color curves to that or you could use levels if you prefer and what I'm going to do is take the blue value and just bring down the white like that so next let's add a light so add object light now I don't want to switch to 3d because I want to selectively enable the 2d 3d group so I'm going to keep us 2d and what I want to do is this group here which has got the light on unit don't want that to make that 3d but I do want to make my room or rather my two rooms here I want to beat make both of those 3d and you'll see they've now been influenced by the light but my light art is still looking nice and bright because we haven't made that 3d so I'm just going to make my base light here a little bit blue so we can get some nice color contrast so we've got our yellowish lighter on our nice cold Blue Room I'm also going to add another light so I'm to that I'm going to duplicate this one and this one I'm going to make yellowish like that I'm going to increase the intensity of this quite a bit let's go for 300 it's really nice and bright but let's increase the fall-off to 10 so it's not actually spilling around too much okay so the next we want to do is we want to get our text to write on so I'm going to select all of these text objects in that group all five of them behaviors shape I need you use right on then I want to come to two seconds on the time line like that select all of these right on behaviors by command clicking them and then I'll hit o on the keyboard and those will all be shortened down to two seconds long and so this we're all now writing on simultaneously so what we'll need to do is we'll need to open up the video timeline and video timeline we've been called that and what we're going to do is great we're going to shift all of these so one starts after the other so do you select and move that one along move that one along so it starts I'm leaving slight gaps being too pedantic about this you might want to decide to have some letters write on a little bit quicker slur than others but I won't waste your time with that so now those are all writing on sequentially that's really good so no we want to do is to get our yellow light this one here to follow along as the text is being drawn on and to do that we're going to use this path that we created if you remember that you know group there and we're going to use that to get the light to follow that path so what we're going to do first of all is select the path come to behaviors shape and add a write on behavior and if we come to the last frame of that animation so you'll need to find that for yourself somewhere around there we want to with the right on selected hit o on the keyboard to shorten that down so it's only running for that duration then we're going to come to our light behaviors basic motion motion path and under the path shape we're going to select geometry and then we're going to drag that path into the source for the shape so that's following along that motion path but again we need to come to the end of the animation there and hit o on the keyboard to make sure it's shortened down to be the right length now if you're eagle-eyed your spot that's not really following along perfectly because obviously we've got these extra power bits that it needs to follow but it's kind of good enough for the purposes of this and if you really wanted to get fancy about it what I would recommend is you select that right on behavior and you do come to object convert to keyframes and then you can fine-tune exactly how that right on is is happening so it's it's perfectly timed but I'm going to stick with that for now rather than waste your time I'm showing you how to do that so next let's add a camera so add object camera and let's set the angle of view to 75 so it gives us a more dramatic effect and let's give it some animation so behaviors basic motion throw let's come to properties here and to set that exposition your next initial exposition to native 360 and what I needs to do obviously as I need to turn that light art group back to 3d and you'll notice that in doing so what happened is that it's now being affected by the lighting so let's just turn that lighting off calm down - they're shading off so it's being affected by the camera but not by the lights so open up this throw velocity let's just work out how far we want to push it on Zed let's come over to there let's say I want my initial Z position to be quite a long way out so let's increase that cuz our room is quite big let's make the most of it something like that we're at about 550 on Zed and then we can use the throat push in if we enter a negative value on that so now we're getting that sort of camera move you can see how badly that light is not quite matching but so that's our animation you'll see that those steps will need to be added to just to smooth that out but there's one other thing I want to do before we look at that and that's to create a much more realistic effect of the light hitting the floor and this is the really the fancy part I think so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take that path and I'm going to make a clone of it so right-click make a clone layer and I'm going to drag that out to a new group at the top here then I'm going to come to filters stylize min/max set the mode to maximum and the radius to 40 that's created a blocky version of it so I'm going to come to properties zero that out I'm going to set a X rotation of 90 and then a wide position on from negative 499 and now it's sitting down there on the floor now might just just do is push it back a bit on Zed sets around about there so where were you - 500 and I might even use the scale to scale it up on Y so 200 on Y so what we need to do is we need to add a blur so blur Gaussian blur the value of that 300 is going to do this we need to turn this group to 3d like so probably pushed back a little bit too far on Zed let's Center it up more maybe negative 250 is good okay so this is not looking particularly impressive as it is but we're going to do something really fancy now what we're going to do is we're going to take our floor texture all the way down there at the bottom and I'm going to alt drag it into our group at the top there let's zero it out and what we want to do is we want to rotate it through 90 degrees and bring it down to negative 499 so you can see it's effectively sitting in the same position as our original floor and what we can now do is add a an image mask to this clone layer so right click an image mask and we're going to use that floor and ceiling drag it into the mask source and set the source channel to luminance and we're not going to see if great deal at this point because we need to add a filter to that ceiling texture to make it push through so it's levels and what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag the white down quite a bit like that bring the black in and now I think you can see what's happening is that we've got this really nice light effect and this is God's called a specular map so just the raised areas of the floor are being illuminated and the kind of rough that patches in between or not and that really makes for a very sexy result I think so we can do exactly the same thing with the ceiling so let me call that floor suppose this is a reflection really even though it isn't strictly speaking let's duplicate that and call it ceiling reflection and we just need to change some of these values so the floor texture needs to go up to $4.99 the clone itself needs to go to positive $4.99 and now that's on the ceiling there and you can see how well that's working so there you go that's the effect now you'll probably see I don't know whether you can see in the playback the texture is sort of crawling a bit and looking a bit noisy and when you render it out you're going to have to set the render resolution render quality I should say to best in order to avoid that and the only other thing obviously you need to do is come back into the light art group that main replicator for the bit in between we need to crank that those points up probably 50 will do that's that's really not too bad [Music] so there you go that's how to build this project I hope it's been interesting one thanks very much indeed for watching and I hope to see you again another time

Channel: Simon Ubsdell

Views: 23,886

Keywords: Apple, Motion, light art, tutorial, text

Id: yNP-bpRR2gk

Length: 23min 21sec (1401 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 06 2019