Create Fantasy Style 3D Movie Titles (After Effects)

alright remember this should because it was only a month ago but if you haven't seen it you know link there down there but at the end of that sketch we showed you this title and asked if you guys would like to see a tutorial on it and it was an overwhelming yes so now we will do that but first I want to thank domain.com for sponsoring this episode they of course have all your website needs including dot-com and dotnet domain names attitude of website builders so you can take the first steps in creating an identity online and no domain extensions gonna help you tell your story like a.com or.net domain name if you want to brand yourself online domain.com is over 300 domain name extensions fit your needs from that club two dots base are reliable affordable and they're making it even more affordable by giving you 15% off when you get domain names web hosting and email just use that coupon code film riot at domain.com check out and you know money savings but now we actually do the thing know um with the show since this is a title there's no footage to start with so we're gonna jump right into After Effects which is how we created the text if you don't have the font or if you want custom font for this you can either start with a similar font and then on solid layer using the pen tool you can mask around certain details such as feathers and claws and the vein of the official fantastic beast title or you can create the full title from scratch using the pen tool giving you complete control over each letter and the overall design usually for the 3d text we jump right into element 3d but for this title we want to closely match the original which as you can see here has a chiseled bevel much like josh to achieve this Josh bevel will need to do a few extra steps so once you've finished your title you'll want to export it as dot PNG file with an RGB plus alpha channel for this to work now we're gonna head into Adobe Photoshop CC and import the title PNG file click on the 3d tab and select a new 3d extrusion from the selected layer which has now created a 3d version of our title and the properties window you can see we have multiple shape presets giving a variety of options for the bevel we want we selected the style called pillow inflate extrusion depth controls the depth of the title which for this we want to keep it zero then click on the cap tab to bring up the bevel options such as angle and strength we only want the front side of the title to be beveled and we boost the width until the bevel becomes chiseled and sharp again just like Josh I like this episode this is a good episode I like when you say things nice to me now to export go back to the 3d tab that export 3d layer for the 3d file format select wavefront obj and click OK to export the next step we need to head over to blender which is a great piece of free 3d software we talked about it on the show a few times before but we want to get more into it in the future because it's really powerful software that is completely free now Photoshop did a nice job creating the 3d text but it's currently one solid 3d object what we want is to have all individual layers separated for the animation that we're going to do so we've imported our title into blender and with the title selected choose edit mode then click the face select mode as well as the limited selection button this is so any faces we select are also selected on the other side of the title now hold down ctrl and right click and drag to create a selection around our first letter then hit P on your keyboard to bring up the separate options click on selection to separate the letter from the rest of the title and do this for each individual letter until they have all been separated then export as a wavefront obj back in after-effects create a new comp and call it element title then create a new solid and apply videocopilot element 3d plugin and go into scene setup then we'll import the separated title that we've just exported from blender and the material we use videocopilot SPRO presets tube material called clean metal life then we altered the level of the glossiness texture to make it more reflective we then changed the environment map to one with more detail and color tweaking it to get more interesting reflections then we scrub forward in the After Effects timeline to the point where we want our title animation to finish an element click on Group one particle look multi object and tick enable multi objects this will utilize the letters we separated add a keyframe for the size Y rotation Z rotation rotation random and displace and scatter Multi highlight those keyframes in the timeline and hit f9 on your keyboard to set them to easy ease keyframes now we're going to scroll to the beginning of the timeline and now alter the settings of each of the keyframe parameters we want the title to look like the letters are bursting out from the center so we just altered it until it looked like we want it it's a bit slow in uniform right now so to increase the explosiveness of it we can highlight the keyframes and click on the graph editor and here we could tweak the speed of the key frames to create faster motion at the beginning and have it slowed down over time if you need to you can stagger the end keyframes in time until you have an animation you like next turn on motion blur for the lair and for the comp and an element under render settings you can turn on ambient occlusion to create the illusion of shadows when the text is close together and now you should have something that looks like this next we're gonna create a camera and make key frames at the beginning of the timeline for the position and point of interest then scroll through the timeline and alter the position and point of interest to have the camera move away from the title over time we use the graph editor again to have it slowed down toward the end and for the background we use this cloud stock footage from Adobe stock again we've been talking about Adobe stock a lot but that's because we are using it constantly stock footage really is a great way to get things like this on the fly when you need them so you don't have time to go out and get your own assets tumble over to Adobe stock and grab what you need but now that we have that we're gonna drop it below the title and turn it into a 3d layer then scale it and change the position if needed for your scene and because this footage is a sped up time-lapse we slowed it down a lot so that movement is more subtle then we turn on frame blending for the layer and comp and now we have a nice Potter esque sky background then to make it match the official title even closer we use the curves effect to lower the brightness and change the color now to make the title stand out even more we're gonna add curves and boost some of the muddy areas then we added one of my favorite plugins from red giant which is color ISA first we're gonna boost the saturation then we're gonna boost the effect called pop to 100% this pops the highlights and detail which works really great for titles with a subtitle we created a new text layer and altered the structure until it matched the original title then on a new solid layer apply element 3d and on your custom layers custom text and mask choose our new text layer then open up the scene click extrude to create the 3d text and again we're going to apply a metal texture this time clean metal light to get more detail from this texture we scrolled down to the text layers UV mapping and changing the UV repeat to 4x4 now on the material we change the reflectivity color to a goldish hue and once again change the environment matte to a different texture in the render settings you can change the rotation of the environment map to try to get different angles of flexions highlights the best match your scene we again enabled multi objects and made a keyframe for the Y rotation near the end of the timeline we go to the beginning of the timeline and alter the Y rotation until the text is side on to the camera when you preview the letter should turn to face the camera like so then we're gonna change the element world transformation properties to line up the text in the right position with the rest of the title we added another instance of color ista to give this text some pop and use curves to boost the brightness further red giant universe also has a great chromatic glow which we use changing the setting to make the text have a subtle magical glow then the final step for the text is to keyframe the opacity to have it fade in over time at this point we rendered out the title so that we wouldn't have to keep free rendering each time that we added something new we drag this render to the top of the comp and click the I off on all the other layers and it's a good tip that if you have unused layers in your comp that are distracting or making it look messy you can click the scheie option for each layer and enable the hide option for the comp hiding any layer that you don't want to see so you can clean up in a non-destructive way for the magical effects we use multiple assets from our extinction sci-fi and magic sci-fi packs which you could get in a link in the notes below we set the blending mode of each layer to screen and built up the change positions of the different layers until we had a magical explosion like this which in color gives it sort of a nanny mcphee vibe but if we want to resemble the fantastic beast title we need it to be white so first select all the asset layers and go to layer pre-compose and then click OK set the blending mode to screen then go to effects color correction tint to make it black and white then add color ISA to boost the brightness and add pop to add some pizzazz now it looks a lot similar to the official title to take it a step further duplicate this layer by pressing ctrl D then use curves to boost the brightness even more and fast box blur around 5 now precomposed this layer and select move all attributes into the new composition we call this comp energy displace map create a new adjustment layer below the energy comps layer and call it displacement go to effects distort displacement map and change the displacement map layer to the energy displacement map comp and altered the displacement values to your choosing you might notice this can create a gap around the edge of your cop so a way to get around this is by going into the comp and applying the unmould effect from red giant universe which turns any black pixels transparent which gets rid of the displaced border next at a compound blur effect and for the blur layer again select energy displacement map comp this creates a blur for only the parts directly below the energy effects giving a sort of cloudy look and the blur automatically decreases as the energy disperses now the original title has some glints on various parts of the text so a simple way to achieve this is by creating a new adjustment layer above everything and applying the Magic Bullet Looks effect inside here we can apply the anamorphic flare effect and change the colors to look more like the official title which is on the warm side then alter the size and threshold to minimize the players to only effect the smaller areas for our color grade we used our drive let from our cinematic let's pack link in the notes for that as well then we used a curves effect and tint effect until we were happy with the look overall and finally to tie everything together we created another adjustment layer and added the red giant universe glow effect changing the settings until we had a nice even glow and that's it magical title of magic but that brings us to the end of today's episode as always social media links for me and the team and the notes below along with links for everything that we talked about today and I'll see you next time when I go off to fight a fire for a lot less money than I could have got from the other draw [Music]

Channel: Film Riot

Views: 149,334

Keywords: film riot, triune films, ryan connolly, filmmaking, tutorial, how to, adobe, film school, fantastic beasts, harry potter, vfx, visual effects, motion graphics, titles, movie titles, film titles, fantasy, graphics, magic, after effects, blender, photoshop, video copilot

Id: EAVo8RyU2E8

Length: 10min 55sec (655 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 18 2019