CC Sphere + CC Cylinder | Effects of After Effects

[Music] cc cylinder and cc sphere are both found under the perspective category i'm going to use my logo as an example to start and let's just go with cc sphere what this effect does is wraps whatever layer you've applied it to around a 3d sphere and it is an actual 3d sphere but it does not interact with 3d cameras or lights like some other effects do you can know that because it doesn't have the little 3d icon up here next to its name but my logo has been wrapped around this sphere and it has some lighting and shading going on so why don't we take a look at the controls and see what we can do with this well first of all we have rotation and underneath here i can rotate it on any axis x y or z and as i'm doing this you can see that this is truly a 3d effect we can see through the back side supporting the alpha channel and revealing what's on the inside of the sphere also in this category is the rotation order which is defaulted to x y z but you can change it to any other combination to change what order these will be rotating in so for example if i have it to x y z then it will rotate the x-axis and the y-axis and the z-axis sequentially but if i went back and rotated the x-axis you see that that's basically rotating the same as the z-axis because i've rotated the y-axis at a 90 degree angle so changing this to something like xzy is going to change which axis takes priority over the rotation so let me reset that back to default and close up rotation and the next option is radius this is simply the radius of the sphere and i can increase this or decrease this now the bigger it gets the longer it takes to render but the reality is you're probably going to want this to be bigger than its default of 200 so you're likely going to want to increase that for an hd frame next up is the offset and this is just a point control that allows you to move this around on the x and y axes i'll reset that back to where it was and then we have the render setting and this is where we can choose to render the entire sphere just the outside or just the inside so if i turn it on just the outside and then i go back into the rotation and rotate it around on the y-axis as soon as we're able to see the back side of it it disappears and this is really useful for if you want to put something between the front and back sides of the sphere you would need two duplicates of the layer but this allows you to do that very easily i'm going to change that back to full close up my rotation and then take a look at the next section which is light and this is where we can control the effect light so first of all is the light intensity increase or decrease that we can change the light color to be something other than white we can change the light height which isn't just on the vertical axis it's basically revolving around the sphere depending on what light direction you have set so if i put this up to an angle of zero then the light height is going to travel from directly above at a value of zero directly behind at negative 100 and directly in front at 100. but if i move that back down to zero and then rotate the light direction then it's basically like it's rotating all the way around the outside edge perfectly in line with the plane that it's already existing on so you can use those two properties to shine this light on any part of the sphere next up we have the shading category and this is where we control how this layer is actually interacting with the light so we could turn up the ambience to not have so much dark shadows basically fill in those dark areas i could turn the diffuse down to kind of balance those two out we could increase or decrease the specular and this will be more noticeable if i turn the ambient all the way down and then diffuse back up but specular is shining in right up here there's not much surface area on my logo here but this is going to make some specular highlights let me just adjust the light height and then we'll see it even more so that's with more or less specular we have roughness which shapes that specular highlight metal which changes how that highlight is blending in with the colors below it so a higher number is going to give us something that represents the colors underneath it already and the lower numbers will be much more washed out in bright white and then finally we have a reflective property and this is dependent on a reflection map and to show this i'm actually going to switch out my source from my logo to this world map so i'm going to bring this out into a new composition and this is really really big it's from nasa so it's a very high resolution image but i'm going to rename that precomp world map and bring that out into this comp and then i'll apply cc sphere to it i'll turn off my logo and now i have this instance of cc sphere with a pretty convincing looking globe on it i can rotate this however i want i think the earth is at like a 23 and a half degree tilt and then it would rotate like that so let's just pick africa and then go back down into the shading so let's turn the ambient up a little bit the diffuse up and the green background's bothering me a little bit so let's make a new solid and we'll just make it black that way it'll contrast with the globe really well and let's get some of that specular back in so there's our specular highlight showing up and i'll rotate the light back and up a little bit okay so that's what the specular highlight looks like on something more solid and now let's jump into the reflection map so like i said this is dependent on another layer so i'm going to make one more solid controller command y and i'm just going to call this grid and add a grid to it but i want to make sure that it's not transparent so i'm going to change it to width slider so it's a nice square grid and change the blending mode to normal so now it is solid and i can shut it off i don't need to see it i just need it to be in my comp and i'll choose that as my reflection map and make sure that i've chosen effects and masks so it looks at the effects i applied to that layer now i'm going to turn reflective all the way up so we can see the reflection of that layer on our sphere and if i rotate this around you can see that it is not mapping it in 3d this is just a reflection that is kind of disconnected but still wrapped around the sphere itself so you can think of that reflection as if it were an actual reflection on a shiny object so imagine that this was not actually the earth imagine it was a marble or something that looked like the earth i'm just going to turn the radius down a little bit and let's actually make the reflection look a little bit different i'm going to pre-compose this layer with ctrl shift c and i'll call this reflection map and then go into that pre-comp and add two squares that are just white so i'm going to make one right here i'm going to make another one arbitrarily right here and we're going to pretend that these are two big light sources and in fact these are probably too big i'm going to make them a little bit smaller let's position them maybe in the top half of this map close that out and get rid of this grid effect on our reflection map and now turn it off now you can see that those are almost looking like soft boxes in a reflection of this sphere and to maybe shift it around i'll just add an offset effect to that layer and i'll make sure that this is renamed reflection map since it's not a grid anymore and with that offset effect i can shift the contents around to reposition those lights and maybe i want it to look like softer light i'll put in a fast box blur before the offset increase the blur radius and make sure to repeat edge pixels and now it's just a little bit softer just remember that that is not attached to the sphere so i can rotate this around however i want and that light source will remain stationary okay let's go back to the example with my logo to take a look at the last set of controls which is internal shadows and transparency falloff so internal shadows check box what this does is render shadows on the inside of the sphere so i need to turn my sphere around so i can see the inside of it so let's go to the rotation and rotate it around on the y-axis so we're now looking inside of it and i actually need to change the source a little bit because it's just too thin there are too many empty areas so i'm going to grab my logo and drag it into a new composition and i'm going to make it twice the width so i'm just going to grab the width and say times 2. press ok and then move my logo over to one side and i'm simply going to add a solid that is 1080 by 1080 onto the left side of the comp and i'll bring up my align panel and just shift it over to the left side of the composition and let's make this filled with a color so we'll just do white so that it's nice and visible or we could do a mid gray okay so half of my sphere will now be my logo and half will be a solid gray fill so i'm going to swap this out by clicking and dragging while holding alt or option and there we go so i'm going to rotate my sphere around so that i can see into that interior with my logo on the outside and i'm going to need to mess with some of the lighting to get the shadows to appear internally so i'm going to just rotate this around a little bit so that we're casting light this direction and let's mess with some of these controls i'll turn up the ambience a little bit turn down the specular so that's not so noticeable and then check the box for internal shadows and immediately you can see what happened if i rotate the light around a little bit you can see that the shadows are actually being produced internally on that sphere based on the source alpha channel wrapped around this sphere so that's what internal shadows does but i would leave that unchecked if you don't need it because it will take longer to render finally we have this transparency fall off which will probably be more apparent on our world map layer so i'm going to turn that back on turn off the reflection map and make this a little less shiny as well and then we'll zoom in nice and close on the edges so right about here is a good place to look and what we're looking for is right on the edge how the transparency falls off from opaque pixels into transparent pixels so if i check this on it's going to very subtly make those edge pixels slightly more opaque and honestly i can't even see a difference but that is what that checkbox is supposed to do but those are all of the controls for cc sphere now let's take a look at cc cylinder which is very very similar all the controls pretty much overlap i'm going to turn off cc sphere bring in cc cylinder and this does a very similar thing to cc sphere except it's on a cylinder so let's just go into the rotation and i'll rotate this around so we can see my logo remember the source is logo on transparent on one side solid on the other so that's what we're seeing right here we have the ability to increase or decrease the radius percentage which does not just scale the whole thing up or down it literally just makes the cylinder wider or narrower and then we have the position controls to shift this around on the x and y axes as well as the z axis which is slightly different than cc sphere and in the rotation category we can rotate it on any axis as well as choose the rotation order just like before we can also change the render from full to just the outside or inside or both and we have all of the same lighting controls with the light height the light direction light color and light intensity as well as the same shading properties for ambient diffuse specular roughness and metal so virtually the controls for these two effects are completely identical and both are very useful for generating 3d imagery in a very lightweight quick to render way and while cc sphere does do a great job of making a world map or a globe video copilot actually has a free plug-in that is full of amazing features for making just this type of graphic called orb and i'll link to it in the card above so you can go check that out if you're trying to create more realistic planets don't even bother with cc cylinder while you could get the job done with this effect video copilot's orb just has so many more features and it's much more capable but that's all you need to know about cc sphere and cc cylinder 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 [Music]

Channel: Jake In Motion

Views: 3,690

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

Id: Y205itPnJCc

Length: 12min 36sec (756 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 20 2021