Element 3D Demonstration

[Music] hey what's up Andrew Kramer here and welcome to another very exciting tutorial for our brand new plugin element 3d now we're very excited to finally show you how it works and you know we've been very secretive about it we know but today we're going to reveal the mysteries and hopefully show you how it works and what it can do for you so the basic idea is it's a 3d object based particle array system so you can do some really cool things with 3d objects and right inside of After Effects so how it compares to a 3d program is it doesn't a 3d program you know can do anything it's you know 3d max cinema 4d they're made to really handle anything but render times can be you know pretty slow with ray tracing all that so we wanted to build a 3d system that instead of doing everything it does a lot of things really fast so that was the idea we want it to be fast and look really good so we built an entire OpenGL based render engine that takes advantage of you know mid-level graphics cards you know obviously if you have a high-end card it'll be even faster but you can pretty much use any card within the last you know three and a half years ATI Nvidia and you can use most versions of after-effects from cs3 cs4 cs5 5.5 and I'm actually using cs6 so we'll post all that technical stuff let's just jump in and take a look at how this plugin works so I'm going to create a new solid and I'll hit OK because I'm tired of all these 2d layers I want some real 3d so I'm going to take the solid we're going to choose effect Video Copilot element alright so we've got the plug-in in our comp let's crack this baby open we need to add some 3d objects so we're just going to click on scene set up and here we are in the element scene setup interface so this is a custom interface that we designed and we designed it to appeal to 3d artists and we also designed it to appeal to non 3d artists so we really focused the attention on tasks and what you're doing and we really just tried to streamline as best so here's how it works we can import some 3d objects so you can load an obj file we can also load a cinema 4d file that's not animated and what's cool about that is that you don't have to export your cinema 4d files to open up inside of element you can just save it natively and you have to worry about conversion issues so for this demo we can take a look at some of the built-in models of elements so we have some primitives over here and these are just some object files that you know make it easy to get started we can click on the sphere here and so now we've loaded it into our scene you can see over here we have the object we have a base material and we can go inside and we can start adjusting all of the settings so we can play with you know specularity we can turn up the reflectivity now we can also turn on the environment in the preview so this way we can kind of see what it looks like we can come over to the presets and we just have some different basic materials that we can apply so it's cool about this so you can just get started really fast with with some of these shaders and you can also go in and edit them so once you add them they're fully customizable so you can do anything that you need to kind of get the look that that you want that's like the basic idea and you can go through you can add different objects to you know create some cool scenes now I'm going to go ahead and delete that because I've actually set up an object for our demo and it's these headphones so I clicked on it and here we have some nice-looking headphones now we can use this object as our particle so let me show you how that works if I hit OK we now have those headphones inside of After Effects so we can now create a camera and I can go ahead and orbit around the headphones so we basically have a 3d object inside of After Effects so and it's also quite fast we can set this to off this is 720p so this is how fast it's rendering inside of After Effects so very very cool now let me point out something really quick so if I go back into the scene I can make some more adjustment so let me just show you a few more things here so we have some built-in lighting setups so these are just to kind of help you get a sense for what your model looks like and you know you just can play around with these and you can move the lighting around you know to see how they look and you can tweak your settings you know while you're while you're working you can shut the environment off you can zoom in right now we have draft textures on we can turn that off and you can see you know the detail is is really nice now the reason this is already set up is because I've already pre saved it but what if you're going to just bring in your own model well no problem you just click import open up the obj file and it's going to come in I can go ahead and reset my view here it's going to come in with no textures because obj files don't actually have textures and there's not really a unified standard but what we wanted to do was make it as streamlined as possible so if you click on the material you can basically take any texture and drop it right into the diffuse slot and there we go we've also got the specular which I can drop right onto the specular I can turn up my reflectivity and my you know shininess and I'm pretty much good to go and once you set it up the other cool thing you can do you know zoom in on this or whatever say it's a logo or something that you have to do a lot and just right click on the object save as model preset and hit OK and now that object is saved with all of your settings and it uses the original obj file so if I were to delete all of this I can just click on it and I've loaded it again and it's ready to go so here's what I'll do I'll go ahead and just load our headphones as our particle and the one thing I'll point out is the one here we're using Group one so let me show you how that works right now well ok alright so we've got our 3d objects now what can we do with it well let's start out by adding some after-effects lights so we'll choose new we'll do new point light here we'll do blue and you know we'll turn it up and let's add another ambient light to do an ambient light it's white maybe 20% intensity and then let's add another light and this time let's do a parallel light so maybe really bright 200 and then the parallel light works like it's coming like the Sun so let's move it around here and we'll turn up the intensity here so this is looking pretty good we've got our headphones here and you know we can take this blue light and maybe duplicate it maybe put one on this side and let's make it like a really you know dark blue color so it kind of highlights our our background color that's really cool so this is looking nice so what can we do now with this one object because there's got to be more right right so here's what we have we have Group one so remember this object is on Group one pretty straightforward so then we go into the group one settings so we can come down to the particle look and we can scale it we can rotate it you know we can animate it do all that good stuff and then we have the particle replicator so we can move the replicators kind of like the emitter except element doesn't emit particles it creates array particle so let's turn the particle count up to 25 now nothing has changed because our shape is a point but what we can do is we can change that to pretty much anything we want we can do a 3d grid we can do a sphere we can do a layer alpha we can also do a 3d object so what I'm going to do is just choose a sphere so now we've got our head if I'm able to turn it down to 16 maybe even less so we've got our headphones here and it's looking pretty good so we can turn up the size of the shape so that's cool we can also rotate the particle so let's go to particle look and let's turn up rotation random so that's going to randomize the direction of all of the particles in the replicator so pretty cool we can also do a size random I'm not sure why you would but you could it's kind of cool and it's looking good let's let's just take a look at a couple of other things like once you get started you know it's hard to really focus because there's so many possibilities so let's skip the animation engine for now because that's going to blow your mind but let's jump into the render settings so in the render settings this is where you can do a lot of cool things so first of all you turn the show background on so that gives you your 3d background ready to go we can also use a layer and load it directly now we also have our fog system which is really cool sis and I love this system because it does so much so let's just pick a blue color and let's turn on turn the opacity up and then let's change the start distance set to zero meaning the camera plane let's move it forward and then we can change the range we can kind of tighten the range and it's practically real-time so let me show you some speed so we're going to zoom in here we're at full resolution and this is 720p and I have it set to adaptive resolution off which means every frame is a full raster 720p and you can see I'm dragging through this and looking really good so let's go ahead soom out here let's take a look at some other things that we can do so we can turn on motion blur so let's animate the camera really quick and what I'll do is take the layer that has element turn on the motion blur and then turn it on for the column so now I'll go ahead and scrub through this and again these are full 720p raster's that we're seeing because the adaptive resolution is off so let's just go ahead and hit zero or purge all and I'll hit zero and that's how fast is rendering with the motion blur at full 720p pretty fast it's pretty fast now some other things to point out is that you can do things that will slow it down you can do things that are really you know powerful features that we just had to include like depth of field so depth of field is one of those things that there's not really any good fast way to do it but we did include a couple of fast ways to do it so let me let me show you what I'm talking about so to get some really good depth of field we have the pixel blur and we have the multi pass but to just get some preview depth of field we have the preview and the continuous blur so we'll turn those on and let's go in here let's go to our camera and we'll turn the depth of field on so probably just need to crank this up a little bit and so right now we can see we're starting to have some depth of field now let me turn up the samples to like 400 and go back in here and we'll turn the aperture up so now we're starting to see a little bit more of the depth of field you can kind of zoom in here and see what that's looking like see what's in focus right there so now this is not perfect depth of field but what it is is extremely fast so it's great for doing you know previewing or temp comps when you're working and then when you're ready to do the final render you can turn on you know the full quality one now in a lot of cases it'll probably work okay but it you know just you just want to be able to understand what the limitations are you know now the pixel blur is really good really nice looking depth of field and it's a little bit slower so remember we're doing full raster so this is about full raster speed here now if I set it to adaptive resolution we can actually get some decent responsiveness with what we're doing and you can see that the depth of field you know it looks amazing we can you know let's see we'll set the focus distance a little closer maybe even turn the aperture up even more you know it looks amazing and the responsiveness is really good it's just not as you know real-time as some of the other effects but remember with the real 3d program you have to render it out and then you have to render out the passes and then you have to add you know depth of field and use the passes to you know do the depth of field so that's kind of what the plug-in is doing right now but it's doing it internally so it's a lot faster because it doesn't have to kind of sample two images and go through all those steps now even though the depth of field is fairly fast here just keep in mind that you know the more complex your scene is you can slow things down but in most cases when you don't have depth of field on things are going to be pretty snappy so depth of field and motion blur are the two things that can really add to your render time but the cool thing about that is you can turn those on at the end alright so this is the basic idea of how the plug-in works but let's just dig a little bit deeper so I'm going to jump in to the scene set up again alright so we've got our headphones here but let me go ahead and load my stopwatch model so here we have it I'm going to go ahead and reset the viewer options okay so you can see it's got some nice reflections now remember it's not real ray tracing so it doesn't reflect other objects but what it is is real fast so it's a it's a nice balance so what I can do is turn the environment back on here and let me show you this environment option here so if we click on that we have an environment slot that we can go in and change it and comply we change the way the reflections look so it's really handy and it also gives you some some really cool controls now this is not a preview option now we can go back in there we can try out some different looks so we have you know a warm version of that studio we've got this cool underpass and you know this warehouse you know we can shut the background off just you can see how the reflections look you can also go to the objects and you can turn the settings down so you can turn the reflectivity amount down make it more make it less one other thing I'll point out is you see this object has two materials that's because this objects been saved out of a 3d program with more than one material so element just says hey there's more materials let me just show you what they are so that way you can go in and control the parts individually and then we also have a handy solo so that you can kind of see what each piece looks like so that's kind of handy and it actually renders that way so say you have a model with a bunch of pieces you can hide certain parts you know if you so choose so this is the environment thing I wanted to show you that because being it's just a cool way to just completely transform you know what your scene looks like and I'm using you know there's two versions there's usually the standard version and then there's the blurred version so the blurred versions a lot better it's more abstract less specific and it also makes your reflections look a little bit more you know a little less shiny which is kind of cool if you want something not to seem as you know perfectly ray traced all right so I think we've talked about quite a bit and I'm wondering if there's anything else that we should talk about so let me go ahead and just close this out now the last thing I want to talk about is the Video Copilot product family so what we have is the element 3d plugin so that's the plugin allows you to import the models it's got 20 pre-made base materials and it comes with you know a few dozen you know basic objects and things to get you started now the other two cool products that we have is motion design pack and the pro shaders so the pro shaders is 200 more advanced materials and I want to show you that in just a second and then we have the motion design pack which is just a ton of amazing abstract 3d objects to basically get you started right away and then we have our two bundles so we have the probe 3d bundle which has those two and the 3d design bundle which is you know all of those products together so we really want to make this affordable because we think it's something that everyone you know can take advantage of so let me show you what those things are so we've got a quick little material demo here I've just got this object alright so let's take a look at the pro shaders I'm gonna go and click on the scene setup and here we've got an object loaded and it looks like this cool metal and we've got our cinema lighting on we can you know change that around play with some different setups we can even change the environment that our objects are in depending on you know how we want it to look now we'll go into the presets here and we have our materials now we have our base materials so these don't have any textures but they get you start and they can you know give you some different ideas on how to take advantage of the shaders but our 3d engine is really powerful and can do a lot more so our pro shaders probably highlights that the best way so when you install it this how it works you have the pro shaders and you have a whole bunch of categories here's all the different metal shaders and here's how it works you take the shader you drop it onto your object and you have instant whatever that is we can go through here I've got this great-looking metal here and the fact that you can do it inside of After Effects inside element is really cool so now this one has a really cool kind of bumpy looking surface and this brings me to another cool thing the fact that these are all fully editable now once you add them onto your object you can go in there and you can edit all the settings so you can change the color you can you know play around with the intensity of the bump you want to be a little less bumpy a little more bumpy you know there's a lot of options after the fact and remember we don't just have metal there's some really cool translucent objects you know these are sort of just you've got some ice right here we've got some you know bumpy looking water we've got this gummy bear look there's really just you know a lot of different styles you can instantly transform whatever is your doing we've got some different stones we've got you know this really nice bumpy looking surface that could be all sorts of things we've got some organic ones different looking surfaces that you know and remember these are all part of our engine so they render extremely fast cup classic concrete you know it's great for logos and different stuff so really really cool anything let's see the plastic has some really cool ones too so like drop this one on here I mean these are just you know fun fun looking surfaces now let's talk about the motion design pack so basically it's over 200 individual models of some of the coolest things that you know you're going to find now we have some amazing liquid elements so let me just space this out a little bit we can also lower the divider here so here we have tons of objects that you can load these are massive you know objects they look great they have a basic material you know you can go in there change that out now this brings up another point is that we have we have mapping options so if you don't like the way something is math you can go into the object and you can change it so we can do just a quick box mode and if it looks you know it's too close together we can turn up the UV repeat amount make it a little tighter or we can lower it point five and it looks a little bit you know wider of course you know you start losing resolution that way but you can go through and turn all the motion graphics objects into any kind of surface that you want there's orange soda finally I've been waiting to do this how about the gummy bear one so we'll take looks delicious hopefully I didn't run through this too fast but that is the idea of the pro shaders and the motion design pack and just to show you a couple more things in here we have stuff like some really cool three-dimensional arrows and you know we can make it this frosty one I've got the liquids we've got machine parts you know music notes borders just we'll have a whole breakdown of everything that's included but just a lot of cool things that you can use to get started really really fast so I've got this cool sweeping design and you can notice that this particular object as multiple material channels which means you can add a material to individual parts of that so you can really create your own designs and and you know play with things and combine them and with the array options of element of the group settings you can go into the particle replicator and just do some really cool amazing animation so this is the element product family you know it's the plugin is the pro shaders and the motion design pack is that everything I think so all right my name is Andrew Kramer thank you guys for watching this video and hopefully this answers a few questions and I'll be sure to add some more videos and demos soon and you can see all the other things that are possible because remember gotta save some surprises for later so we'll see you then

Channel: Video Copilot

Views: 207,041

Keywords: After, Effects, Video, Copilot, Andrew, Kramer

Id: k4HIKwdybTU

Length: 23min 51sec (1431 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 05 2012