Creating 3D Viral Instagram Reels (Dan Koe)

in this video I will show you how to create a 3D Rubik Cube just like Denko and this Instagram reel went absolutely viral it had 600,000 views and I thought it was so cool that I had to recreate it and we're going to use some secret techniques to create this in After Effects without using any 3D program and if you want this project file or more tutorials like this join my master class Link in the description a lot of you already joined and it's so nice to see everyone is helping each other in the community so if you haven't checked it out click the link and let's jump into it so if we look at the Reel it's really complicated as you can see I think a 3D program like blender or Cinema 4D has been used for this but again we're going to use After Effects which is really cool some things we won't be able to achieve but I think we can get quite far so basically you see all the cubes assemble and then it changes into the 3D cube and then of course it will light up along the way and then later on it will basically twist and then twist again and then it will turn into like this real cool square and then later on it will go back a cube and then duplicate each other so there will be multiple cubes and then there will be this Matrix effect which won't be that hard to create actually this effect is quite easy but especially creating the Rubik Cube in After Effects won't be easy but there are some tricks to make it more easy and I will show you this of course and then later on it will basically duplicate again and we'll show all these duplicates of other cubes turning around so there will be a lot of layers in this project file and we'll just see how far we can get again I'm trying to keep these tutorials as short as possible and in my master class I can really make videos that go even more in depth and also are just longer but again we'll just try to get as far as we can first I'm going to create a new composition and I'm going to make sure that it's basically in ported so social media portrait will work ideally I'm going to use the IH HD preset 30 frames per second is fine press okay so we have this vertical comp first and now we're going to create the first Cube and to do that I'm just going to go to layer new solid so we have a solid here the color doesn't matter for now I think I'm going to already create it white so we can even change this later on now before we press okay which we normally do we're going to change the width and height and I'm going to see how big we're going to create it I think 200 should be fine so 200 by 200 maybe it even needs to be a bit smaller for our rub Cube we can always skill it a bit up later on but I think this could work uh let's go to our inspiration first actually I think this is a bit too big so press command shift y or control shift y to change these settings maybe I'm going to make it 100 by 100 I think that should be plenty and again we can always scale it up later on now we make it 3D and now I'm going to add a stroke effect to this I'm going to also change my 3D mode to Classic 3D for now so it goes a bit quicker if you haven't done that most of the after effects are on classic 3D and I'm going to add a stroke effect to this and this will all make sense in a bit and this is is already the first trick because using this stroke effect will be different than using the normal stroke and I will show you why in a moment so let's first change the paint style to untransparent now doubleclick the rectangle tool to create a mask that we can use so basically you just double click it it will automatically be the same size as our solid and then if you change the path to mask one you will see that a stroke has appeared and the cool thing about this is that now if we create or make get 3D or we rotate our object so you select the object and press 3D and we rotate it you will see why this stroke is important so as you can see now the stroke on the sides is thinner than on the bottom and top and we don't want that but the cool thing is if we change this mode on to Restoration always so that's this button that's the second button on the white solid then it will basically create a stroke that's like same on the all sides and that's EX exactly what we want if we now increase the brush size on in our like stroke effect we can even make it more thick I'm just going to rotate it back to zero so you really can see it and of course this is really ugly it's not what we want but it's just to show you that it's same like the same width on all the sides and that's exactly what we want so I'm going to make it two now or maybe three I think two can be quite like quite well we can even animate this here which is quite cool if you want that that could be a cool effect but for now I like this and now I'm going to enable the snapping mode which is in the top and if you then select this and now we can duplicate this we can basically start building our Cube but before I do I'm going to change my view CU in this view it's going to be really hard to create a 3D cube so you can go to your active camera there's a button here and we can go to custom view one and then we have a bit of a better overview to create a cube now let's say we duplicate this and we then move this over you can snap it to whatever you want so first I'm going to use the pen behind tool that's the anchor tool or press y as the keyboard shortcut and this will basically move the Anchor Point and why this is important so as you can see it snaps to the to the left which is great and why this is important is because we're going to rotate it now if you now press R for rotation you can see the Y rotation and you can just type it in or you can just rotate it by basically like moving it like this if you want to type it in you're going just type in minus 90° and as you can see it now perfectly rotated our first I would say face of the cube now we can duplicate this and we can use the normal selection tool so basically the V tool and we can move it out and as you can see it will snap and it will snap to the second side then I press y again to move the Anchor Point to the other side press R again then we're going to rotate it back to 0° of course before we do that make sure that you duplicate it by pressing control D or command D on Mac and again press rotate and then I'm going to set it to zero and you can see we have the other side and if I now use the orbit around tool so the orbit around tool it's basically a tool to move around this Cube and you can see we already created a really cool Cube which I'm happy with this is exactly what we want you can even rename the layers if you want to but this is our first Cube I'm going to select them all and collapse them for now and now now what we can do is when we select the selection tool now we can of course duplicate all these four layers and basically create another Cube now before we're going to duplicate this and make a new Cube I'm going to first move our anchor points again so we're going to use the pen behind tool again so that's basically Y and then move this up to the top and I'm going to do that with everything so all the anchor points are at the top and this will all make sense in a bit basically we do this so the alignment is right later on and it will snap way easier so we can just select these and move them up now we have our first Cube and before we continue we are actually going to make it not see through and the easiest way to do this is to just change your stroke to a unoriginal image now that we can basically see everything and you can do that by just selecting all the layers and just changing it to the original image now what is also important is after you've done this basically we're going to add a fill to this so you can go to effects fill make sure it's above the stroke color we're going to change it to Black this will all make sense in a bit so copy this over we can just paste it here move it up you can also always basically remove all the effects of the layers and then paste it again now it's quite easy cuz we're still having only four layers so I'm just going to duplicate this over and duplicate this over there we go now one thing we need to do is we need to close this Cube up so what we do we just duplicate one side open that up and let's go into to the transform and then change the orientation so we're just going to change it to I think it's 270 so that's the top layer and then we need to duplicate this once move this down to make sure that we have the bottom layer so now this cube is fully closed we have our first Cube congratulations what is important is that these are all linked to each other and that's important for later on if we want to basically rotate it we can also link it to a null object that doesn't matter so first what I'm going to do is make sure that our Anchor Point is set well it doesn't really matter which layer you pick but I think the bottom one makes the most sense just use the pen behind to to change this Anchor Point it will snap into place like before if it doesn't you can always turn all the layers off and then it will it will snap on 50 and then we move it over and it will snap on zero so now this is centered now what we can do I can move this down just to make sure that it's a bit easier to see basically and then we can link all these layers to the first White solid now that's a way to do it but also what's an easier way to do this and this is actually a really good trick is to precompose this first Cube it will make things easier so you can just select it all press command shift C or control shift C and move all attributes into new composition you can call it Cube press okay and as you can see it will turn into a square again but if we now press the roriz button it will basically be a 3D again and now we can even turn the 3D option again and then we can duplicate this over and this is really cool cuz later on we can even animate it but before we move it over we need to use the pen behind tool again to snap it into place and then use the selection tool to basically move this over and as you can see now we have created our second Cube now you can just duplicate this same thing third Cube now what's important is that we're first going to make our base layer so our bottom layer and this will all make sense in a bit so we can now just duplicate this over move it out like this it should snap into place we can do that again it should snap into place and that's great now select the middle Cube and we need to adjust this Anchor Point so I'm just going to turn off all the other cubes just to make it more clear as you can see the Anchor Point is now like on this point we need to move that around use the pen behind tool and it should snap if it doesn't just make sure that it's set to 50 because we created a shape layer that's 100 so the half of that is 50 and now we can just move this over sometimes it doesn't really work perfectly you can turn off snapping and hold shift then it will basically go in increments of 10 and then just set it to 50 great so what happens now if we press R for rotation and we move this around you can see it rotates perfectly on its own axis and why this is important if we now turn everything on by selecting everything turning the eye icon and linking everything except the middle Cube to the middle Cube and we press R for rotation we can rotate everything on the axis and this is exactly the effect that we want I'm really happy with this of course now one thing to do is to duplicate this two more times and just making sure that the rotations are set differently I will show you in a bit how to do this so we're going to select everything press command D to duplicate it or control D to duplicate this again I'm going to move this up so we have all the layers together now you don't have really have to do anything just make sure that you have the selection tool selected zoom in a bit so you can see the see what happening and then just move it up and basically move it manually and just holding shift and then you can wait till it says 100 and then it's also perfectly aligned as you can see we can do that once more just make sure that all the layers are selected when you do this you can also just move the one that's parented now one more time select all the layers press command D or control D on Windows and move them up just make sure that basically it's a bit more clear then we're just going to select number five Move It Up by 100 so hold shift and there we go we'll load a bit and we have our Rubik's Cube what's really cool is we can basically now collapse everything we can call this one top we can call this one middle and we can call this one bottom and now we can even move the bottom top and middle to the top there we go press R for rotation and now we can rotate first the top then the middle and then the Bottom now this is all cool but for the first animation I basically want to have them all come together and to do this we just go back to our active camera or devault View and as you can see it's not aligned perfectly uh we can just adjust this by selecting the top middle and bottom those are the only layers that everything is linked to and we can just move this around basically to make it Center now of course we can even create a camera but to do the first effect is actually really easy P or R for rotation it doesn't really matter let's say p and set a key frame we can do this with every Cube we can basically select all the cubes press P for position go a bit further so maybe like 1 second press the key frame selection then press R for rotation you can select a couple it doesn't really matter you can also basically select X and Y then we move to the begin and then I'm going to change my resolution to half so it's going to load a bit quicker and then what you can do is simply just go through it maybe rotate one in the beginning then you can just move it it out like this we can do this with a couple so for example with the other one we can also move this out you just drag it without selecting one of these like access tools and what this does when we play it you can already see it it will basically make them fly to towards the cube we do this with everyone so you can just select it move it out move it out move it out move it out we skilled it accidentally moved it out move it out you can also even change this path by using the convert vertic tool again I'm just going to keep it simple now I'm just going to move all the cubes out like this you don't have to rotate them now we're going to move these move these now one thing you will notice is that because we link them all to these three main cubes I would call them if we move those main cubes it will move all those layers with it if you use a null object that's one way what we can always do is rename this to bottom mover just turning it off so you won't see it anymore and then just duplicating it then linking this one so we're going to call this Cube because this will just become a normal cube of course just parent this to the bottom mover again and turn this one on so basically this is going to be the cube that's not linked to everything and we can just move this over now what's nice about this is that we can still use the buttom Mover to rotate things as you can see but it it's not basically on so it's just a null object I will call it we can do the same for the other ones just call this middle mover duplicate it change that name to cube and select that one or parent that one too turn the middle mover off and then we can move this Cube too just make sure that the key frame is on copy that position over so it's still the same position now there we go we moved all the cubes out now if we play this and basically it will be a bit slow but basically all the cubes will get together and form one Rubik's Cube except I didn't add rotation because the anchor points were not perfect but hey I really like this already we can just select all the key frames and I can even right click and easy ease them so right click easy ease and this will basically make sure that they will end a bit more smoothly now after they're all together then we can move the top and the middle and the bottom and these are our three layers that are also turned off you can just use the standard rotation for this so you can just key frame it is really easy and the easiest way to do a full circle is just just press one will basically just make a full round as you can see and this is such a cool effect look at this guys I really love this now we can of course do this too with the other layers you can even copy this over cuz it's not that crazy you can just copy the Y rotation and paste it for example a couple frames later so first the first one rotates and the second one then the top one for example select the Y rotation and paste it and there we go then the top one also goes now once that's done we can also see it basically light up so when this rotates the middle one it will light up one by one now we can of course do this by using the tint effect that's in this Cube but we can also just use the tint effect and then map the black to white now as you can see there's some interference this line is above the other line and that's because we just created these three cubes they need to be in the right order because this one is basically meant to be under all these layers and as you can see this will fix everything now that we fix that we're going to animate our tint and this is really easy you can just animate the amount to tint press U and then we're just going to basically make sure that I'm going to go a couple frames back then a couple frames further and then change the amount tint to 100% then a couple frames further and change the amount to zero again now just copy this effect over to our next layer which is going to be the one next to it which we can just select in our viewer or you can find it in your layers panel so just make sure that when the other is wide we're going to paste it and this will basically add the effect to it and light up the other one then we're going to go to the next one which we're also going to move on top of the other one paste it maybe we can drag this out a bit something like this by holding alt so selecting all the layers or all the key frames and holding alt to drag them out or just selecting one pair it's also easier cuz then there's going to be a more overlap I really like when there's a bit of overlap now if you you guys really like it I'm going to make a part two on this Fair effect but if you follow this tutorial then you will get something like this it is really cool 3D Rubik's Cube that you can apply in any project and it's crazy what you can do with After Effects and again if you want more in-depth lessons do click the link in the description to join my master class don't forget to subscribe and also leave a comment of what you want to see next and then I'll see you next time bye

Channel: TomsProject

Views: 4,944

Keywords: dan koe, dan koe animation, dan koe animation tutorial, dan koe after effects, dan koe after effects tutorial, dan koe 3D, viral instagram reels, instagram reel animation, instagram reel after effects, instagram reel animation after effects, minimalistic instagram reel, black and white instagram reel, houston kold, tomsproject, iman gadzhi, after effects tutorial, dan koe tutorial, dan koe instagram reel, instagram reel dan koe, how to edit like dan koe, dan koe style

Id: LBJsF3Y53Uo

Length: 18min 23sec (1103 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 14 2024