CC Composite & Faux 3D Extrusion | Effects of After Effects

cc composite can be found under the channel category and this is a really great effect if you've never used it before then hopefully i can pull back the curtain for you and show you why it's such a useful effect now i try my best to keep these effects of after effects tutorials as short as possible but i think this particular effect needs a little bit more explanation and some use cases for you to start to really understand the power of it and how it can be useful because it really is a simple effect let's apply it to my logo right here by default it's doing absolutely nothing it's actually doing something we just can't see what this effect does is takes the original unaffected layer and composites it right back on top at least by default you see under the composite original it's set to in front by default what exactly does that mean though well it's exactly the same if i were to duplicate this layer ignore the fact that there was an effect applied to it but it just made a duplicate of the original layer and put it on top that doesn't seem that useful but if i delete that duplicate and go back to cc composite we can change the composite type from in front to any one of the blending styles and these are exactly the same as what we have down here in the layer blend modes and still that doesn't sound all that exciting but let me show you what we can do with this first of all i'm just going to add a transform effect and i'm going to put it before the cc composite what this effect does if i turn the cc composite off for a second is just gives me a layer of transform controls exactly like the ones down here so i'm going to just scale it down a little bit and then i'm going to re-enable the cc composite and it's not immediately clear what's happening and that's because of this checkbox right here rgb only is checked meaning it's ignoring the alpha channel of the original unaffected layer but if i uncheck it my original layer before the transform was applied is back it's composited in front of everything before the cc composite and to make this even more clear i'm going to add a fill effect before the cc composite as well and now you can see that we have this second copy behind the original which is being generated by the cc composite so transform to scale it down fill to change the color and then cc composite to put that original before those effects were applied right back on top and like i said we can change this to any one of the blend modes so if i made this like a bright cyan color and clicked okay and then i changed the composite original to say overlay and i know that's off the recording but it's down towards the middle then i zoom in here you can see that these colors are being blended together using that overlay so if i change it to something like this you can see those colors blending together a little bit better but now why is this useful it's because i can do all kinds of duplicating and compositing all on one single layer now instead of having to make a bunch of duplicates and set their blending modes and add effects to them and in a lot of cases that's really convenient to just keep your composition a lot more clean so let me show you an example of what we could do here i just removed all the effects by pressing ctrl shift e or command shift d on a mac and let's make a glow so i'm going to start by adding a fast box blur and this will let me just blur out the layer and then i'll add a cc composite and apply that now just like before i'm going to uncheck rgb only so it brings that original layer back and now it looks a little bit glowy but i can also change this from compositing just on top to say screen or even add to make it look even a little bit more bright and i can adjust that blur radius to play around with the glow and i might even duplicate both of these again actually let's just add another fastbox blur blur out this version of the layer and then add another cc composite at the tail end of all this uncheck rgb only and set this again to add maybe blur it out even a little bit more and now if i turn those two off you can see that we've kind of just added another layer of glow so that's one application you can stack effects and even use multiple instances of cc composite to build something that would normally take many layers to do all on one layer but something you should take note of is that these blend modes are within the layer only it's basically blending the original layer into the affected layer it's not blending it into anything else in the composition so if i change my blend mode down here to add as well then it's going to blend a lot more on top of that background now this is really bright and blown out but i could go to the opacity of that cc composite and turn it down to kind of control some of that intensity and maybe i'd want to change it to say screen instead of add if that was too intense so that's just one use case but let me remove all those effects again and show you one more example first i'm going to fill this on the background make sure that mode is set back to normal i'm just going to change this to black click ok and then add a transform effect and just set the scale to say 98 percent and i'll collapse that up and add a cc composite uncheck rgb only so that we get the entire alpha of our original layer and leave it set to in front so we almost have a little bit of a drop shadow back here but if i take the transform and cc composite and duplicate them and move them down to the base of the effects stack and then just click on my layer down here and press e so that we can see all of the copies here i now have a transform a cc composite transform in another cc composite i'm going to select all of those and duplicate them again drag them to the bottom and i'm going to do this just a few more times select all of them drag them to the bottom and that's probably enough it looks a little bit weird but if i grab that fill effect now and go all the way to the bottom just before that last cc composite and let go take a look at what i have now it's basically a fake extrusion or a fake 3d look of my logo and all i have to do to control that extrusion is change the fill color i could change that to white or i could get rid of that fill and let's say add a tint again just before that last cc composite set both of these colors to black and then turn the amount to tint down and then i'm getting kind of a shaded extrusion but this is all kind of hard to control because there are so many different copies of the transform effect and being able to adjust that at all i would have to go through and adjust every single one of these but it's actually really simple to fix i'm going to delete everything except for the first transform and cc composite the tint and the last cc composite so i just selected those deleted them and then i'll select those two original ones again and come up to edit copy with property links and then i'll make sure i deselect those effects and then paste bring them back up here and what that did was linked all of the properties of these duplicates to the originals through expressions automatically so if i just duplicate these again move them down one at a time let's say grab all of these at once uh everything right here duplicate move them down to the bottom now we should have that extruded version again and i'm just going to click in here press control or command a to select all and then twirl them all down that way it can get just to the tint to adjust how much of that shading is happening but remember this transform and cc composite are the ones that are driving all of the duplicates so if i go into that transform and say adjust the scale up to 99 then the extrusion is less but here's where it gets really cool if you adjust the position you can control the angle of the extrusion in fact if i change the scale up to 100 then i can kind of get this isometric version of my logo and i could turn that amount to tint up a little bit maybe even change the colors so maybe something a little bit more green like that and i'll link both of those colors to the same color and now i have that 3d version if i zoom in here you can clearly see the steps between all of these so to fix that you really just need to continue duplicating all of these effects so i'm just going to duplicate them one more time drag them down to just before that tint and the steps are still spaced out just as much but my extrusion got twice as thick so i could bring that position back in a little bit and that choppiness won't be as noticeable i have noticed this byproduct it kind of gets fuzzy with all these duplicates so to fix that i'm just going to add a levels drag that to just before the tint switch this to alpha and then just crush the alpha channel a bit so bring these in towards the middle and that will sharpen that right up you don't want to go too far on it but just something that makes that a little bit more crisp and there we go because it's all driven by that one effect i can change all kinds of things about this and make some really crazy looking effects i could even say add a glow effect if i want to adjust the extrusion to glow i could put that right after the tint play with the threshold increase the radius the possibilities are pretty endless but basically you can think of it as working with lots of duplicates of your layer without having to make duplicates of your layer i've found so many uses for this effect these are just a few but if you give it a try i'm sure you're gonna start using cc composite in your workflow a lot more regularly but that's all there is to cc composite hey thanks for watching if you enjoyed this tutorial then check out the other ones here on my youtube channel and if you like my teaching style then definitely check out my longer form content on skillshare and school of motion and if you want to support more tutorials like this one check out my patreon you can find links for all that stuff in the description of this video

Channel: Jake In Motion

Views: 9,502

Keywords: After Effects, Animation, Motion Graphics, Mograph, Motion Design, Tutorial, Adobe, Adobe After Effects

Id: trNkh341o6s

Length: 9min 50sec (590 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/fiveironfreshy]

This is EXACTLY what I've been needing. Thank you@

[u/kurokamisawa]

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[u/Tastler]

Nice, thanks for sharing!

[u/dkdebase]

Thanks a lot, great video