- Hello. Joey here at School of Motion and welcome
today for 30 Days of After Effects. Today what we're going to talk about is taking
a photograph and turning it into a 3D scene inside of After Effects. I'm sure a lot of you have done this before,
but I'm going to show you some tricks maybe you haven't seen yet. How to really, really sell the illusion that
this is a 3D scene, and how to make it look great and fool everybody. Don't forget to sign up for a free student
account so you can grab the footage and the project files from this lesson as well as
assets from any other lessons on School of Motion. Now, let's hop into After Effects and get
started. So one of the things that I love about this
technique is that it's just kind of instant cool. You take a still image, you turn it into a
3D scene like this, and it's not that hard to do, but it's really impressive. If any of you are familiar with the concept
of matte painting, which is used on feature films to kind of extend sets and add castles
to the background and stuff like that, this is pretty much the technique that's used,
and you can do it in After Effects pretty effectively. Now, I want you to notice that there's a few
things that I do when I do this type of thing that I think makes it feel a little bit more
natural than sort of the simplified version of this. The main thing that helps sell the shot is
the ground. If I scrub through this, you can see that
the ground is not... It's not like this hill or these rocks where
it's just this flat image that kind of looks like it's facing the camera. It actually looks like it's oriented correctly
on the ground. And there's a lot of blending going on to
make this feel as seamless as possible. And then I also did some compositing tricks
and some other things that maybe I'll show you a couple of those. The main thing is: How do you set this scene
up so it really sells the effect, okay? So you gotta start in Photoshop, so let's
hop in there. This is the original image I started with,
and I wont go through the process of cutting everything out cause it takes a long time. If you need help with that, you should definitely
check out... There's a tutorial on my site called, "how
to cut out difficult images in Photoshop." And that'll give you some good tips. So, I'm gonna turn on this layer here just
so I can see these pieces on a background that lets me focus on the edges. So these are the three rocks that I cut out. I want you to notice that I spent some time
to fix the edges after I cut them out. A lot of times when you cut things out in
Photoshop, no matter how careful you are, you're gonna get edges that have bright pixels
or dark pixels. These rocks are up against a sky, so some
of the pixels of these clouds would show through, and I took the time to paint those out, so
that you wouldn't notice any of that when you actually composite this thing. I also want you to notice that down at the
bottom of each of these rocks, I feathered the edge of my layer mask so that I could
sort of blend the bottom of the rock into the grass. Alright, so that's the first thing, just cutting
out all the foreground elements. So the next thing I need to do is create a
clean plate, and this is the clean plate that I created. And all a clean plate is, is just your shot
without your subject in it. So you have to use a few Photoshop tricks
to get to this, and I'll show you a quick one really fast that I use all the time. It's amazingly effective. What I'm gonna do is, I need to select all
three of these rocks. So, I'm gonna hold Command and I'm gonna click
on the Layer Mask for this layer and you can see it made a selection there. Then I'm gonna hold Shift + Command and click
the other two. So now I've got all three rocks selected,
and with those three rocks selected, I'm gonna go up to Select... Modify, and I'm gonna expand my selection
by two pixels. And all I did was just kind of push that selection
out two pixels. So now I've selected a little bit of the clouds
behind it. You know, a little bit of the background. That's just gonna help me blend in whatever
patch I need to create. Okay? Now here's the magic part. First let me make a copy of this. It's always, always, always a good idea to
keep a copy of the original image in your Photoshop file. That makes it a lot easier when you're in
After Effects. So well call this, Clean02. And here's the trick, you go up to Edit, Fill,
or you hit Shift + F5, and you wanna make sure it says, "Content-Aware." And this is one of those magic Photoshop features. When I hit okay... Done, right? I hit Deselect, Command + D... Look at what it's done for me? Now, it's not perfect. You can see that this is the ground, and then
all of a sudden it jumps up here. That's not right, but that's easy to fix. But the clouds are almost perfect. There are some little things to fix. So the next thing I would do is take five
minutes, and I usually start by hitting J and using this healing brush, which sort of
automatically figures out for you what to clone in there. Okay? Wherever you see little funky things like
this, you just paint over them. And most of the time, Photoshop can just kind
of do the work for you. I mean look how quickly that happened. It's crazy. Then what I would do is grab my Rubber Stamp,
with the S key, and I would take the time to fix all this stuff, and paint it back so
it looks correct. Okay? But that's how fast you can make a clean plate
in Photoshop. It's pretty crazy. Now, I also got rid of, I don't know what
the heck this thing is, it looks like a dead animal, and then there's like some pipes or
road or something over here that kind of drew my eye. So I got rid of all that. So here's my clean plate, and then I have
the rocks. The next thing that I did was, I took that
clean plate and I separated out the ground, and I feathered the edge of the ground a little
bit, and then that hill. Right? And basically I was looking to separate out
things that are on different planes. So that ground is one kind of plane. It's facing straight up and down. But then this hill is kind of at an angle. And then the sky. And if I turn the hill off, you'll see I also
extended the sky down here. I did the same trick. I actually cut the sky out, and then I selected
the hill, and then I used that "Content-Aware" fill and it painted in those clouds for me
and I cleaned it up and it took like a minute. So those are all my layers. I'll show you from the bottom up. You got your sky, your ground, the hill, and
then you've got your three rocks, and that's it. Okay? So once you've prepped the Photoshop file,
then we go into After Effects. So let's start a new scene here. We'll call this, RocksScene. And I imported the Photoshop file with all
the layers, and here it is. So what I'm gonna do is, I don't need this
clean layer, but I do need the original, so I'm gonna copy all of this stuff into my new
scene. And then I'm gonna parent everything to the
original for a minute. Just so I can scale it up and position everything
so it's filling the frame. Okay. I just wanna set this up where I like the
framing of it. So that works for an initial framing. Now here's the thing with this technique,
you kind of have to decide ahead of time... What kind of camera you wanna use. If you don't know a lot about different focal
lens and why you might use one over the other, Nick Campbell over at Greyscalegorilla just
did an excellent tutorial for Cinema 4D about that topic, so I'll link to it in the notes
for this tutorial. But in general, what I usually do with images
like this where I'm not gonna move the camera too much, is I'll use a 50mm lens on an After
Effects camera and I will tell you why in a minute. But... If you're going to do a wide-angle lens, like
a 25mm or 15mm lens, to get some crazy effect, you need to add that camera before you start
setting the scene up. Otherwise, it won't look right, so that's
just something you need to be made aware of. So what I'm gonna is unparent all these things
from the original cause I don't need them parented anymore. And I'm gonna turn my original layer on, but
I'm gonna set the mode to Difference. You'll see the whole scene turns black and
this may not make sense now, but what the Difference mode does, is that it looks for
pixels that are the same and it turns them black. And then the brighter the pixel, the more
difference it's detecting. So you can see that all the edges of all the
layers I cut out are slightly different than the original image, but for the most part,
everything's identical. We're just gonna leave this up here and turn
it on and off occasionally to check that our 3D scene matches the original photo. This is really neat easy way to make sure
that that's happening. So step 1, let's first position the ground. Okay? So I'm gonna turn all of these layers into
3D layers. Now the reason we're seeing this weird kind
of three quarter view here is because my camera's set to Custom View. Let's go back to Active Camera. When I'm doing this, a lot of times I like
to switch between Active Camera, which is your comp camera, and this Custom View because
with the Custom View, if you hit the C key, it brings up your camera tool, you can kind
of move around it and check the 3Dness of your scene. So we're gonna jump back and forth between
this view and your Active View, and the hotkey for that is Escape. Really simple. So the ground... The first thing I wanna do is I need to make
the ground actually oriented like a ground. If we look at this custom view, right now
the ground is this flat plane, and that is not the way a ground works. So what I'm gonna do is grab my anchor point
tool, which is the Y key. I'm gonna move the anchor point to the horizon
line, like that. Then I'm gonna rotate, and let me go to my
Custom View so you can see exactly what I'm doing here. I'm gonna rotate this on the X rotation, and
I'm gonna rotate it negative 90 degrees. So now what I'm doing is setting up my floor
of my scene so that it actually is oriented like a floor, and this is what's gonna let
you get that awesome perspective when you move the camera over the ground. Now here's the problem with this: if we go
back to our Normal view, you can see that now the ground doesn't look right. It's squashed visually because we've rotated
it. So now you have to kind of correct for this. So what you do is, first scale that layer,
and I'm gonna scale it on Y so that I can bring it back to the bottom of the frame. And if we look at our Custom view, you can
see what that's doing. It's kind of unstretching the image. Okay? So what you wanna is bring that just until
it hits the bottom of the frame. Now let's turn on this original image for
a minute. And you can see, now ignore all this stuff
up here, but you can see that the grass does not match very well. There's a lot of image showing, and when it
matches perfectly, it's gonna be all black pixels. When it doesn't match that well, you're gonna
see a lot of stuff, and that's what we're seeing. The reason for that is because by rotating
this and scaling it, we're introducing perspective. You see how the ground layer actually comes
all the way out here and all the way out here. So there's image over here that we can't see,
and even just visually looking at it, it looks stretched. It doesn't look right. The way to fix this is actually pretty easy. What you do is, you add a Corner Pin effect. So we're gonna go to the Distort menu, and
you can use the Corner Pin. I like to use the CC Power Pin because it
gives you this nice guide here. And what you wanna do is take the corners
that our outside of the image and just pull them back over. And you can hold Shift and it'll lock it vertically
so you'll only moving it horizontally. And you move this back, and you can kind of
see that the plug in gives you a clue when you've got it back to perpendicular orientation
here. Okay? Cool, so let's take a look at that now. So now our ground layer visually matches pretty
closely to this. Now it's still now exact, and if you want
to, you can mess with the scale and try to nudge things around. But it's matching pretty well. And here's what's really happening... If I hit escape, and we go to the Custom view,
it looks very strange from this view, right? But the key to this trick is that it doesn't
matter what it looks like from this view. It matters what it looks like from where that
camera is, and you can see, as I line this back up, and I hit C a couple of times, I
can use different camera tools like the Zoom tool, and you can see that now if I zoom in,
the ground actually moves and behaves like the ground. It looks correct, and I get that nice parallax
when we're moving. So that's probably the biggest trick, and
a lot of you can probably turn the tutorial off right now because now you know how to
do that. And just to check it, I'm gonna add a camera
to the scene, and I'm gonna leave it as the default, which is 50mm. If it's not 50mm on your After Effects, just
click here and switch it to 50 and you're good to go. So then what I can do is to just check it,
I can just scoot the camera forward and backwards on Z, and you can see that that ground really
does move like the real ground now. So that's step 1. Step 2 is gonna be to start positioning everything
else. So let's do the hill. So if we hit Escape and look at this, this
is where this view really comes in handy because you can actually get a good sense of where
that hill is and where the rocks are gonna go and make sure everything looks right. So what I'm gonna do is switch back here. I'm gonna set the anchor point of the hill
to be the bottom of the hill. So I hit Y to bring up my anchor point tool. Grab the anchor point, move it down here. And I'm gonna parent it to the ground like
this. And the reason I'm gonna do that is because
now I can zero out.. Now this is gonna seem weird. If I change the Z position of the hill, it
moves up and down, which doesn't really make sense because it looks like this is the Y
axis So shouldn't I be adjusting the Y axis? Well, what's happening is because it's parented
to the ground, these coordinates are being shown relative to the ground. And the ground has been rotated 90 degrees,
so... The Y axis on the ground doesn't line up with
the Y axis on the hill anymore. So just be careful of that when you have stuff
parented. But what I wanna do is zero out the Z on the
hill. And that just makes sure that the hill is
connected to the ground. Because if you're not careful... If the hill is like, down here or something,
but then you compensate for that by moving it on Y... Let me turn the sky off for a minute. Visually, it can look correct, but when the
camera starts moving, you're gonna get a gap there. So you always wanna make sure you have your
scenes set up so it's physically correct. So I want that hill to be, like this. Right? Literally flushed with the ground. There's a little bit of a gap there. You can see that this feathered edge of the
ground, it kind of creates this gap. If that becomes a problem, I would just cheat
this hill forward a little bit, like this. But we'll see if that's actually gonna be
a problem. Let me turn the sky off for a minute because
the same trick I did with the ground, I wanna do with the hill. This hill, if I look at it, right now it's
just sticking straight up in the air, but that hill is really not sticking straight
up in the air, it's got more like a gentle slope to it. So what I'm gonna do is come to this view
and rotate it on the X axis, and just kind of bend it backwards a little bit, until it
seems appropriate. That might be a little too far, but let's
just try fixing it a little bit. So that feels pretty good, but now we're gonna
have the same problem. We've now distorted the image, and you need
to use a Corner Pin effect to fix that. So here's the trick that I've found. Let me first show you what happens if you
add the Corner Pin effect, and I try to grab these top corners and move them back like
this. You see what happens? It undistorts, but it actually moves the image
down and now we've kind of screwed something up. So let me reset this and turn this effect
off for a minute. What I need to do is first, zero out the rotation
on the hill. Make sure that you can see your rulers. If you don't see them, it's Command + R, reveals
them And I'm gonna drag a guide to the top of my layer. You see where the top is right here? I'm gonna drag a guide there, and then just
in case, I'll drag one to the bottom too. So now, I'm gonna rotate this, and I think
it was 25 degrees. Or was it negative 25 degrees? It was negative 25 degrees. Negative 25 degrees. And then, turn my Power Pin on. And now what I wanna do is, move my corner
pin so that I've got a perpendicular line here and then move it up so it's on that guide. If you do it this way, and then move these
corner pins as well to this guide. There we go. And you can see now you've undistorted the
image, and it's much, much closer to the original. You'll never gonna get it perfect with this
technique because you're kind of cheating by using the corner pin, but it's pretty close. And then you can just come into your Custom
view and take a look at what's actually going on. And I can also see that I've stretched that
hill out... horizontally. So what I'm gonna do is scale that back this
way, like that. And then I'm just gonna move it. I'm gonna cheat the whole thing a little bit
closer, like that. And then let's look through the camera. And I'm gonna move it down just a little bit... Looks pretty good. Alright, I'm just kind of nudging it around
until it looks right, and if you wanna check it, you can turn on your original image, and
get the Difference matte, and you can see that there's tons of black where that hill
is, so we know that it's actually lined up pretty good. And now if we move the camera, you can see
that you've got that hill back there. It's got a little bit of a slant to it. The ground moves like the ground, but the
hill moves like something that's kind of sticking up in the air. Cool? So essentially what we're doing, you can do
this is Cinema 4D using camera projections, we're basically faking a camera projection. We're undistorting the perspective that's
inherent in the image by stretching out the layer and corner pinning it in a way to undistort
it. Okay? So now we've got the ground. Now, let's do the rocks. So, we're gonna, one at a time, and actually
let me turn off the ground for a minute, and I wanna make sure that the anchor point of
each of these rocks is at the bottom of the rock. And then, there's two, and there's three,
and then I'm doing this the same reason we did it for the hill. Because now I can parent those rocks to the
ground, open the position and zero out their Z, and now I know all three of them are on
the ground. Okay? So let's turn the ground and the hill back
on. And this won't look right. Don't worry about it yet. If we look at our 3D view, you can see that
the rocks are not positioned correctly. So what I'm gonna do is use this view to figure
out where in Z these rocks need to go. So if grab the Z axis of this rock, I can
pull it forward, and what I can see is that right here on the ground, this is the shadow
of that rock, so I think that's around the position it needs to be on Z. And then rock two, it looks like the shadow's
probably around there, so let's put it there. And then for three, it's right about there. So that to me looks like the correct relative
position of these rocks, and then I'm gonna go into my normal active camera view, and
now I need to scale these things down and line them up with the original image. So, rock one is obviously way too big, so
let's scale it down, and let's move it over cause it's not in the right spot. And let's turn on that original image. And this is where it gets really, really,
really handy. Because now what I can do is leave that on
and I can scale my rock up and move it over and I can really quickly see if I'm matching
the original image or not. And if I need to move it down a little bit
to cheat it, I'll do that. I'm just gonna get it as close as I can. It doesn't have to be perfect, but the closer
it is, the better. So that one's lined up pretty good. So now we'll do rock two. Rock two is too big, so let's scale it down. Let's scoot it over. That's not bad. Then we'll do the third one. And scale it down and scoot it over. Cool. Now let's turn off the original. Ok, cool. So now if we move the camera back and forth,
you can see that we're getting parallax and we have a pretty good 3D setup. Now one thing, it's not a terrible thing and
you may not even notice it, but look at the edge of this rock. See how there's a hard edge down there? What's happening is this: If I solo rock one,
you can see that I've got this nice feathered kind of bottom to the rock. The problem is, this is sort of extending
down past the anchor point a little bit. So here's the anchor point, that's actually
where that rock is attached to the ground, but what happens is that when this layer intersects
the ground, it creates this hard edge, like that. So I want this rock to sit right there, but
I also still want to see all of that extra stuff that's down there to kind of help feather
it into the ground, if that makes sense. And if we look through this camera view, you
can see that if I come down here, that part of that rock layer is sticking out underneath
the ground. Well I wanna see that stuff, but I still want
this to be correct in 3D space. So what I basically want to do is cheat, and
there's a really cool way to do this. What I'm gonna do is, I basically want these
three rocks to be exactly where they are in space, but no matter what, I do not want them
to intersect the ground. And the way you do it is you insert an adjustment
layer between these layers and these layers. So I'm just gonna add a layer, and the way
I normally name these is just put a bunch of dashes, like this, and that way it's just
a nice visual separator. I can tell where my adjustment layer is. So now watch as I turn this on and off. When it's off, you get those hard edges. When it's on, it brings back all of that detail,
but I still get the full 3D effect. And it's not perfectly correct, but it does
really help blend those rocks into the ground now. And if we look through this, you're not gonna
see the effect of the adjustment layer, but you can really see that we're starting to
build out a 3D scene that makes sense. So then the last thing we need to do is deal
with the sky. So the sky, if we look right now, is really
right at the edge of the hill and that's not where the sky is. The sky is actually very far away. So I'm gonna just push the sky back in Z space
a really good amount, like maybe 15,000, like really far away. Then I'm gonna scale it way, way back up,
and I'm gonna turn on my original image here. Actually you can see I kind of did a good
job. See if I'd made too small, as I scale it up,
right about there... See how it almost turns the whole image black
there? That lets me know that the sky is now scaled
and it's back in its right place. So let's turn this off. By the way, I want to point out: You see how
the rocks are no longer lined up with the image? That's because I've moved the camera a little
bit. If I move the camera back to the default position,
it all aligns back up. So let's turn that off. So now if we move this, you can see that the
sky does move, just not very much, which is what you want. And the last thing I do is, I like to put
a little bit of perspective on the sky because again, the sky is not just a big flat... Thing. Right? It's actually above your head and going back
into the horizon. So what I'm gonna do is change the anchor
point of the sky somewhere around here, and you can see that just by luck, these guides
that I used on the hill layer work for the sky layer. So what I'm gonna do is rotate that sky layer
on X and have it rotate backwards maybe 45 degrees or something. And then I'm gonna use that Power Pin trick. So I'm gonna move the corner pins to undistort
this. I'm using the guides to make my life easier,
and there you go. So now that sky is back undistorted, but if
we look through our 3D camera view, you can see that it's actually got a little bit of
an angle to it. So you're gonna get a little bit of a perspective
shift as this camera moves. Just a little bit, alright? It's super subtle. And that's kind of it, as far as the basics
of setting the scene up. The rest of it is making a convincing camera
move and doing some compositing, so I'll give you a few quick tips on that. What I did for my camera move, I did this
just very simply. It's moving on Z, and I'm also rotating the
camera a little bit on the X axis just to make sure it's always looking at the same
place. Like if I want the hill to always be right
about there in the frame, then I put a key frame there. Let's go forward maybe 5 seconds, and let's
push the camera forward a little bit right to there, and as it's moving forward, have
it rotate down like this, so that way it's kind of always orienting the same way. And you can see, here we go, we got our nice
3D scene. It looks great. The ground is moving like the ground. So from here, it's just a matter of compositing
it so it doesn't look so still and synthetic. I'll show you guys a couple of tricks. I did some color correction and I added some
glows and stuff like that to kind of make it look a little bit more like gladiator or
something. But a really simple trick... let's come back
here, is add an adjustment layer and use... an Optics Compensation effect. It's in the Distort group, Optics Compensation. And it basically just simulates lens distortion. So if you turn on Reverse Lens Distortion,
you can see that it kind of simulates having a little bit of a wide angle lens where the
edges of the frame move faster than things in the center of the frame. And it's a subtle thing and you can really
easy over-do it, but if you look at the edges, especially with this rock when it gets towards
the edge of the frame, it gives it a little bit of a 3D look. It just helps it a little bit. The other thing that I did was put a little
bit of a wiggle on the camera just to make it feel a little bit less perfect cause camera
moves in After Effects by default are just perfectly smooth when your camera moves, and
we're kind of pretending that there are some dolly tracks and we're doing a nice dolly
move here. Well if dolly tracks are happening over uneven
lumpy grass, then it's not gonna be a perfect move. So what I might do is make a Null, and call
this the Wiggle null. And on the position of that Wiggle, and this
needs to be a 3D layer, I would just Option + click position and type in a Wiggle expression,
and maybe it wiggles once a second by two units. And now I can parent the camera to that null. And it's just gonna do a subtle, subtle, subtle,
subtle little wiggle. Alight? Let me RAM preview this one to one here. So we're still getting the same basic move,
but it's just not as perfect and it kind of helps sell it a little bit. And then I did some color correction. I'll show you guys a cool trick really fast. Cause this something that sort of helps. Whenever I do stuff like this, I stare at
it a lot And I kind of go back and forth and I say... There's something about this that's giving
it away. It just doesn't look totally natural. It just doesn't look real. Especially if you go into full res and we
zoom in here. The edges of the rocks are just too hard. Normally you would see a little bit of the
sky kind of wrapping around and lighting the back of these rocks a little bit. And we're not really getting that because
I cut them out in Photoshop and the edges are just too crisp. So what I did was, it was actually kind of
a pain. I wanted to be able to independently work
on just the foreground stuff, like the rocks and grass, but not affect the sky. And this is one of the reasons I love nukes
so much. It's really easy to do that. In After Effects, you have to jump through
a few hoops. So what you can just do is this: This is rocks
scene. I'm gonna rename this comp, Rocks Scene Foreground,
and I'm gonna turn off the sky, and then I'm gonna duplicate it, and I'm gonna say, Rocks
Scene Background. And I'm gonna turn the sky back on, but turn
off everything else. Then I'm gonna bring both of these into a
new comp. Say create a "Single Composition," and the
background should be behind the foreground. So now, I've got my same camera move, but
I can independently affect just the background or the foreground. So what I want to do is blur the edges of
the foreground just a little bit. So an easy way to do that is to use a Channel
Blur. So we go to Effect, Blur, Channel Blur, right
there. And I'm just gonna blur the alpha channel,
and you can see what that does. I just wanna blur it by one pixel and say
Repeat Edge Pixels so that on the edge of your comp you don't get this little funky
line here. So make sure you have that checked. And if I turn this on and off, you'll see
that it's just super subtle, but I'm telling you, all those things they do help. Let me make sure I can see this whole thing. So now I've got an Edge Blur on there. And then for the next step, I wanna add a
little bit of a light wrap to this. Okay? You can get light wrap effects for After Effects,
and that's a cool way to do it. There's actually a pretty simple way I'll
show you just using built in effects, where you can get really great light wrapping and
really control it. So what I'm gonna do is first is precomp this
again And the reason I have to precomp it is because I have a channel blur on this comp,
and I'm gonna need to use this foreground as a matte to make my light wrap. And if I do that, and I have this effect on
it, it won't actually use this effect when it calculates the matte. I'm not sure that makes a lotta sense, just
trust me. To do what I'm about to do, you cannot have
any effects on your precomp. So let's just precomp it, say "move all attributes
into the new composition," and this will be Rocks Scene Foreground Blurred. There we go. Okay, cool, so now we got that. What I'm gonna do is duplicate my background
layer, and I'm gonna call this, Light Wrap. Okay, and I'm gonna move it on top of my foreground. Next thing I'm gonna do is use an effect in
the Channel group called, Set Matte. And this effect is awesome. I use it a lot. And it just lets you use another layer's alpha
channel instead of your current layer. So I'm gonna say take the map from the layer
called Foreground Blurred. And now if I solo this layer, you can see
what it did. This is my background layer, remember it's
a copy of my background, but I'm using foreground as the alpha channel. I'm gonna say, "Invert Matte." Then, I'm going to blur this image, so I'm
just gonna use a Fast Blur, with Repeat Edge Pixels on, and I'm gonna blur it... 30 pixels. And just to sort of give you a sneak preview,
you can see now if you look at the edges of your rock, you can see that it's now letting
that sky bleed over it a little bit, and this works better if you set the mode to something
like Add so it looks almost like, you're just getting some of the light from the clouds
bouncing off and hitting that rock. And you can adjust the opacity of it, but
it sort of lights the rocks from behind and the back of the hill. The problem is that you're seeing this blurred
sky and you don't want that. What you now want is to... Cut out this layer here, this light wrap scene,
so you only see it within the foreground. The way you do that is easy. You duplicate the Set Matte effect, move it
after the blur, and then uncheck Invert, and there you go. So now you've created your own light wrap. Alright, turn it on and off, and you can see
it's very easy to overdo the light wrap too. So you may want to play with the blur. If you blur it too much, you get this really
kind of glowy look which can be cool. And then you can adjust the opacity. And I'll show you one other trick too which
I just sort of figured out, which works pretty well and I think it's pretty slick. One of the things that kind of stinks about
doing it this way, is the light wrap gets applied uniformly to every piece of this. You could mask that out or create an alpha
matte layer for it, but because the camera's moving, you'd have to animate the mask and
it'd be kind of a pain. So I was thinking, it'd be cool if the light
wrap was only hitting the right side of these rocks. Because if you look, the light seems to be
coming from that side. The left side of the rocks is darker. So what I did was I duplicated my foreground
layer, and let's call this, Light Wrap Matte, and let's solo this. And what I did was I used an effect. It's in the Perspective group, and I normally
never use this, called Bevel Alpha. And what it does is just creates this cheesy-like
Photoshop beveled layer look. See how it basically creates white on this
edge and black on this edges? I thought, "maybe there's a way I can use
this as a matte." So what did was, I also added an effect in
the Generate group called Fill. And make sure Bevel Alpha comes after Fill. And set that fill color to black. And look what you get here? You actually get a black and white image where
you can sort of control which edge gets white and which one gets black. So I created this, and then I just told the
light wrap layer, "you use that as a luma matte." And if I solo that, you'll see now we're only
getting the light wrap on that one side. It actually tracks perfectly with the layer. So there you go, if I turn that to No Track
Matte, you'll see I get the super glowy heavily look, which maybe is cool, but if I use that
illuminance matte, it kind of constrains that to just one side of the rocks. And who knows, maybe you can kind of animate
this and have that light kind move around or something, but... I just thought that was a neat way to control
that. So there you go. You've got your 3D scene, and... Let me switch this back to Half res so we
can do a quick render. You have your 3D scene. It hasn't been color corrected, and of course
I would add a little bit of a grain to it because if you're shooting with any kind of
video camera, there's gonna be some noise. So it's not gonna be a perfectly crisp image. And there are a lot of other things you can
do. I added some little kind of whispies blowing
in the wind and that kind of thing. But hopefully, you guys learned some neat
tricks and next time you're asked to do this with a still image, you have a few more bag
of tricks, and believe me, that is very handy when you gotta do 10 of these really quickly. You don't really wanna have to think too hard
sometimes. You just wanna know what you're doing, and
know the steps involved and put your headphones on and get it done. So... I hope that everyone enjoyed this, and I'll
see you guys next time on 30 Days of After Effects. Thanks so much for watching. I hope you learned a new trick or two so you
can make your full 3D scenes in After Effects look really great. If you have any questions or thoughts, definitely
let us know. And we'd love to hear from you, if you use
anything from this lesson on a project. So give us a shout on Twitter at School of
Motion and show us your work. Thank you so much for taking the time to hang
out, and I'll see you on the next one.
