Create Stylised 3D Text in After Effects | After Effects Tutorial

hello in this after effects tutorial i'll show you how to take some standard 3d text and turn it into this cool outlined illustrated style [Music] okay so in after effects i've already got my composition set up i've made it 1080 by 1080 at 25 frames a second and it's just called 3d pre now i'm going to be building this effect using this live text layer but you can also build it using shape layers right so the first thing we need to do is just make this 3d so select our text layer and hit our 3d switch here then we just need to make sure that we're using the cinema 4d 3d engine and to check that if you're in the latest after effects version you'll have this drop down here that appears when you turn on the 3d layer and we just need to make sure this is set to cinema 4d however if you don't have this option go into your composition settings go to 3d render and in this drop down just make sure you're set to cinema 4d okay and so that we can see what's going on with our 3d text let's go and select our full views and now you'll see that we have a top front and a right view as well as our active camera view and now what i'm going to do is just go to our text layer and fold it down until we see geometry options and then what we want to do is go into this option and to give our text some depth we are going to increase the extrusion depth and if you look in the top and right view as we increase this value you'll see that our text is being extruded backwards so i'm going to set this to around 80. and one thing about doing extrusions in after effects is that the extrusion goes back in z space so if we want to animate our text to sort of be growing towards camera what we need to do is just go to our scale of our text layer we'll un link the properties and on our z scale just set this to minus 100 and if we go back into our geometry options you'll see we're extruding forward now instead and then the rest of the options here we can just leave as default now currently our text is flat white and we can't see any of the detail of the extrusion so we need to add some light to our scene so let's go to layer new light and what we're going to be doing is actually building an array of lights around our text because in the step later on when we come into adding our outlines we actually need to be able to see the individual faces of the extrude of the text so by creating an array of lights on each of the different sides of the text then we can highlight them in different colors and that will give us nice defined edges and hopefully this will make a bit more sense as i start building up the lights to our first light let's call it front and we're going to leave it as a point light and i'm going to set the color to white and then we'll leave the intensity at 50 and everything else same and hit ok now let's just position this in the center of our scene so select our light and hit p to bring a position and we'll just set this to 540 540 or whatever the center of your scene is and the z position you can just leave where it is for now and we may need to fine tune it later okay so then let's duplicate this light and we'll call this right and this light we're going to make green and you'll see why a little bit later on and then what we're going to do is just move this light to the right of our text layer and we just want to set it be hot slightly behind our text and you see now we're starting to get these green edges so now let's duplicate this and we'll just call it left and then we just need to move this over to the left of our text and then we can go back to our front light and let's duplicate this again we'll call this bottom and this one we're going to make red and we're just going to move this to the bottom underneath our text okay and by looking at the top and the side views you can get an idea of whereabouts your lights are positioned and finally let's just duplicate this one more time and we'll just call it stop and we're just going to move this to above bother text now we've got an array of lights which is basically lighting our text so that our front face is white and our side faces are green and our top and bottom faces are red and later on when we want to colorize our text to whatever we want it's going to be really useful having our different faces different colors now one other thing we can do to this to help give our text a more even lighting is go to the material options in our text layer and we're basically going to set everything here to zero apart from diffuse which will set to 100 and this is basically going to get rid of any potential reflections or specular highlights and that kind of stuff from the lights and we're just going to purely have a um a flat texture so we'll set this to zero we'll set the fuse to 100 and we'll set everything else to zero okay so now we can just go back and reduce our view to one view now let's add a camera to our scene layer new camera and you see we already have this set in but basically we want a really really long focal length and i've set mine to 500 and what this will do is i'll it will give our text a really nice sort of flat 3d look okay and to be able to easily control our camera let's create a new null and we're going to make this 3d and then i'm just going to parent the camera to our norm let's call the null cam control and now if we go into our cam control rotation and now we can rotate our camera and we'll be able to move our text into a nice position and if you want to get a bit closer into our text we can go to our camera and in our position let's just increase this so we zoom in on our text some more okay so now we've got our text in a nice position and rotation that we're happy with and as you can see all the faces of the geometry of our text are nicely separated with the different colors so what we can do now is start styling this so let's grab our 3d pre comp here and let's drag it into a new composition and i'm just going to call the new comp main and what we're going to do is separate this text into three parts we're going to have our outlines we're going to have our front face and then we're going to have the extrude so let's duplicate this a couple of times we'll call the top one outlines the second one face and the bottom one extrude and let's start on working on the outline so let's just hide our face and extrude layers and so what we're going to actually use for this is the find edges effect and what this is going to do is basically just add a line wherever there is a defined edge and that's why it was quite important for us to make sure that each of these sort of faces of our geometry are separated the color and so we can see a bit more clearly what's going on with these lines let's create a new background layer okay and if i zoom in you'll see we've got some nice lines here but they're not very uniform at the moment so these parts are thicker than the outer edges so in order to fix this let's go back into our 3d pre and what we're going to do is create a background in this comp as well and i'm just going to make it a dark purpley color i'll just call this bg and if we go back into our main comp you'll see now we've got a nice uniform line one thing i've found that helps as well is sometimes this line does get a little bit jaggedy so we can go back into our 3d pre layer and we'll create a new adjustment layer just call this blur and we're just going to go to effects blur and sharpen fastbox blur i'm just going to add a tiny slight blow over the top of this and what this is going to do is just going to soften off our edges a little bit so then when we go back into our main comp our lines are a little bit softer and if there is any jaggedness there it sort of reduces that a little bit okay now then what we want to do is get rid of the white fill that we've got on here and just leave our lines so we can do that by going to effect obsolete luma key and we're going to set this to key out brighter and you'll see that it gets rid of everything and then we just need to increase the threshold and now our lines will start coming back and the amount that you need to set the threshold to is going to vary but you just want to do it until you've kind of got a smooth line back okay something like that it looks good then let's go to effect generate fill and we can just fill these lines black okay and now we've got our fill you'll see that our some of our lines are really really rough and jaggedy and basically this is just an anti-aliasing issue with creating 3d and after effects and an easy way of found to fix this is by using a free plug-in from plug-in everything called fxaa and i've put the link in the description below to download this and if we go to effects plug in everything fx a you'll see that that smooths off really really nicely now to further refine and smooth these lines a little bit more we can go and add a simple choker effect and by duplicating this effect and setting the choke map to negative and positive values we can really smooth and refine this line so i'm going to start by setting this first simple choker to two you see this chokes back online quite a lot now if we duplicate this and we'll set this to -2 the thickness is basically what we had before but if i turn them off you'll see that it's quite a bit smoother and then we can just duplicate this again and make sure that they're both underneath the initial ones and again it's smoother again now you see this line's a lot smoother now but we've lost a little bit of definition the corners have gone a bit blobby and you'll see this area here where we've completely lost the top edge of the dot on the exclamation mark so to kind of fix this and bring back a bit more uniformity in our line we can go to our luma key and we can just tweak the threshold and by increasing it will increase the thickness of our lines and we can also tweak the edge thin value and if we set this to a negative value it will increase the thickness of our line again and tweaking these two values can be really useful if you're using curved layers so if i go back into the 3d pre comp and just quickly change the text to say so and you'll see that now we've got curved letters that our faces on our extrude aren't as defined now so we have these areas where the colors are merged and we've got this blending going on so then when we go back into our main comp we get these areas here which can look quite cool but also you may not want them and so by playing with the threshold and the edge thin and if you juice the threshold down then you can get rid of that you may find sometimes as well you need to bring the threshold down quite a lot and sometimes this can like lead other lines to sort of disappear or get too thin so then you can play around with the edge thin maybe set that to minus two and then bring things back up but basically yeah you sometimes have to tweak these values a little bit to get get it to work especially on these curve letters okay i've just undone all of that to get us back to where we were before i think the lines are looking pretty good now there's maybe these areas here where they're a bit too close but we can possibly tweak that later on by just changing the size of our extrude but for now let's move on and add some color to the face so let's turn off our outlines layer and turn on our face and we basically just want to isolate the front face so one way i found to do that is by going to effect color correction black white now the reason we made our lights in our 3d pre comp red and green is because in the black and white effect we can individually control how black or white our different colors are so we know that the bottom faces of our text are red so then we can tweak how black or white the bottom faces are and the same with our greens we know those are side faces and if we go back into our 3d pre this bit is turned a bit yellow so then we can just increase the yellows and this will make this white too and because our background is purple we can also increase the blues and that will make our background white as well and then what we can then do is go to effect obsolete luma key key up writer and again just increase this threshold until our front face comes back now you may get these little edges here so you can just go to effect map simple choker and you can just slightly increase the mount on the choke mat until those edges disappear and then if we turn our outlines back on we've got our outline layer and we've got our face layer and then we can go on our face layer we can go to effect generate fill and then we can color this whatever we want okay and now finally let's work on the extrude layer so we'll turn that back on now let's just hide the other two for now and for extrude we're going to use the same technique as the face by using the black and white effect to basically just control the color of our faces and what i'm going to do is just make our bottom faces black so we go to the reds and we'll just set this all the way down and then we're going to set the our side faces and make these fully white so we fully increase the greens to 300 and as we know we've got that yellow there too and then we'll increase that to 300 too okay so now we have our bottom and side faces nice and separated but we've still got the gray of our background and the gray of our face too so to get rid of this and just to reduce our colors down to black and white let's go to effect stylize posterize and we're just going to set this to two so then we can go to effects color correction tint and we can then change the colors of our side faces and our bottom faces so if we turn on our front face and back on again and so maybe we want to change this black to a dark blue then our white we can change that to another shade of blue okay something like that okay and as you can see we are left with these kind of rough edges here which once we turn on our lines layer isn't going to matter anymore if you do want to get rid of them we can go to effect color correction and levels and we're just going to drag this above our posterize and then we just bring this center point down until the line disappears then the last thing we just need to do is just get rid of the back fill on our extrude layer so what we're going to do for that is just duplicate our extrude and we'll call this matte then let's just delete all the effects from this and we'll drag this down underneath our background layer and we can just call this bg and then what we would want to do on our mat is basically just get rid of our purple background so go to effect king color range and select the dropper and just select our purple background and then you can increase the fuzziness a little bit just to soften the edge and unsolo that and then our on our extrude layer let's go to effect channel set matte and then we're going to select our matte layer as the layer we take our map from and we'll change this to effects and masks okay so then let's jump back into our 3d preload and we can just give some animation to our extrude and let's go into our text layer into the geometry options and go to the extrusion depth and let's just go to one second and then i'm just going to increase the extrusion depth some more just to get rid of this area here so let's maybe let's go i don't know something like 120 and then let's set a keyframe for the extrusion depth and then let's go to start our timeline and what i found is if we set the extrusion depth to say one or two rather than zero we just get a nicer effect when we've got our styling applied sometimes the find edge's effect can look a little bit glitchy i found when we've set this to zero and i found setting it to one or two helps and let's just select these keyframes we'll hit f9 to add some easing and we'll jump into the graph editor and it's just really ramp up and down that the motion okay and then let's just click our stopwatch and we'll just loop this using the loop out expression and then type speech marks and then select ping pong and then this will just loop back and forth between these two keyframes then let's go and see what this looks like in our main comp you may just notice on this top edge there's a little bit of jitteriness going on and this is again the sort of anti-aliasing issue i think and i found the easiest way is to kind of try and disguise it by adding a bit of jitter to the rest of the lines so let's go to our outlines layer and go to effect distort and turbulent displace and what turbulent display is going to do is just really distort our lines but we can tweak the amount and the size to almost give our lines sort of hand-drawn look so i found if we reduce the amount to around 10 and then the size to 5 you get a really small sort of wiggly line and if you're to increase the evolution you'll see that our line starts moving and we can just use a expression to basically change this value automatically based on the time of our comp so let's all click on the stopwatch and we'll just put time times 2000 and what this is basically going to do is take our time in seconds and times it by a thousand and that will define what the evolution will be and you'll see we get a nice sort of wobbly line here and it pretty much hides that top edge too now that we've applied the jitter to our lines i've realized that i forgot a setting earlier if i zoom in you'll see the along the edge of our outlines layer is this light gray line and basically that is the find edges effect adding on a an extra line on our on the outer edge of our outlines comp and that's because in our 3d pre layer on our blur layer i didn't set this to repeat edge pixels and this basically means that we're going to get some blurring going on here on the edge of the comp so it won't be full purple all the way to the edge it's going to fade off and blur to black and that's why we get this edge here so if we just go to blur and we just select repeat edge pixels you'll see that straight away we've got a full purple color to the edge and we go back to our main comp you'll see we've got rid of that gray line okay so that's the basics of the effect i hope you found it useful i know it's not the perfect effect and does need a little bit of tweaking here and there depending on exactly how your text is set up and things and if you've got any suggestions or ideas on how to improve this or make it feel a little bit less of a hack then please let me know in the comments below i'd really be interested to hear that thanks so much for watching if you enjoyed this tutorial then you may enjoy my last tutorial where i created a gloopy liquidy text dissolve effect thanks again and i'll see you next time goodbye

Channel: Mograph Mill

Views: 43,099

Keywords: after effects, adobe after effects, after effects tutorial, after effects text tutorial, motion graphics, mograph mill, motion design, motion graphics tutorial, motion design tutorial, animation, graphic design, after effects text animation, after effects animation, 3d text after effects, 3d text animation, 3d text animation in after effects, animated 3d text after effects, 3d text

Id: sEO4GAGhXNo

Length: 19min 7sec (1147 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 03 2021