Element 3D: V1.6 Top Features!

hey what's up Andrew Kramer here for Video Copilot dotnet and welcome back to another very exciting tutorial today we're going to take a look at element 3d version 1.6 so not too long ago we released version 1.5 and it had a lot of great features like animated obj sequences glow with chromatic diffraction and some other great options and today we have an equally exciting update in element 3d version 1.6 so let's jump right in and take a look at some of the new features the first feature we're going to take a look at is in this cheesy example of Air Force One cruising through the Alps for some type of vacation I'm sure one of the things I like to do is combine element 3d with particles so I'm using some trapcode particular here and element 3d is rendering our airplane now if we come up here I've got some particles and just they're streaming off the end of the wing there let me shut off the motion blur here so one of the challenges of working with element 3d is placing other effects on the surface of 3d objects for example if I wanted to place a particle system on the tail wing or maybe some fire coming off the back of the airplane I need to know exactly where that point is in 3d space so I could you know maneuver the camera around a bit and you know maybe switch to some side views to try to find the exact cross-section but that takes time and nobody has time so we've implemented a new feature in version 1.6 to find the exact position of any 3d surface so let's come down to our element 3d layer and here's we have our airplane and we'll hide some of these effects now it will open up the element effect and we'll scroll down and we see an option called utilities and inside we have a new feature called generate 3d position so if we take the 2d position select anywhere on our model we can generate a 3d position null so now we have a null object at exactly that 3d position so we can scale it and see it fits right on that surface and we can do this as much as we want so we can select another surface click generate maybe a wing no right there alright so very handy indeed although maybe not so much for the pilot of this airplane all right let's going to take a look at another new feature here we've got a jet flying by and it's looking pretty cool but what if this jet also had some missiles that could shoot off well let's go and take a look at an example here so I've got this jet and I want to attach another missile that I can maybe animate firing off of the wing what I could do is I could come down here to the element layer open up the scene set up and we have our jet here and we'll scroll down we want to add a missile so we have our projectile weapons pack and let's scroll down to the bottom here and we've got like a Sidewinder missile so we'll select that maybe just the material a little bit bring the specular down and maybe the diffuse color so it's a little darker and let's put this on to group number two so we'll take it off Group one put it on Group two and hit OK all right so this is gonna be one heck of a payload assuming the pilot is alive but let's come over here to group two and what we could do is we could adjust the particle replicator position so we can move it slide it over and you know try to align it to the wing scale it down in the particle look and position it where we want now another thing I like to do is create a null object and then parent the position value to that null object and that way you can move it around in the comp view but instead of doing it manually we have a new option under group utilities for each group to create a group null object so we can open this up we can create one we can delete it and we can unlink it now I'm gonna go ahead reset my group then I'm going to click on create group null so you can see we have a new null object we'll go ahead we'll set this to yellow and now we can adjust the position of this missile right in the comp view so we can rotate it we can move it over we can even scale it down and position exactly where we want now we can even use the 2d to 3d point generator so we could say generate a position let's see let's put it right under the wing so let's create a position right there generate so now we have a null object take that position hit P and we're going to copy that position edit copy and we'll take the group null with our missile hit P select position and choose edit paste so now our missile has been moved right into that location and then we can just move it down a little bit maybe scale it so it matches that other missile so now let's go and name this so we'll hit return we'll just call this missile now the other thing we could do is take our jet which is on Group 1 and also create a group null so now we've got a group null for the jet so we'll hit return we'll call this jet and let's say I want to animate the jet so I want to have it like rolling and doing all this cool stuff well the missile no longer follows it so that's not good well what we can do is parent the missile to the jet and now we can move the jet around and the missile will stay connected to it all right now let's go and move on to some more exciting features like the world position pass so let's take a look at this train example here I have the train from the explosive training series got a big hole in it and it looks pretty good but I want to add some fire I want this to look you know like it's exploding so let's come over here to the project and I've got this element from action essentials called big fire number 3 so I'm going to bring it out into the comp all right so it's a 2d layer so let's make our fire a 3d layer and we'll hit AAA and turn off except lights so now it's a 3d layer but it's not intersecting in 3d space and that's because element has its own 3d space different from the after-effects 3d space so this is kind of a common problem with 3d where plugins but element 3d has the solution here's what we're gonna do we're gonna duplicate the element 3d Train layer so we'll choose edit duplicate and I'm gonna place this above the big fire then I'm gonna go up to the effects and we're gonna come down here to the output we're gonna set the show output to world position okay so now we have this black and white mat so what can we do with this well let's come down here and take a look at some of the options right now we're looking at the mat output of the world position pass we can do some cool things we can rotate this mat and we can move the position of the mat and the cool thing is no matter where the camera is the mat will always stay in place let's go and undo that I'm gonna set the feather amount to 20 all right check this out we're gonna select our fire layer and set the track mat to luma inverted mat so check it out the fire is now intersecting with our 3d train model in After Effects 3d space so this is very very cool now if we go back to the world position mat we can control some of the options for example we could turn up the feather amount so this is gonna change how much blending we see between the layers we can take the fire and we can move it around and just gonna intersect perfectly with this model alright so everything's looking pretty good here right we're looking at our 3d ops curation and then we go over to the back side and then all of a sudden everything is just messed up it's kind of inverted or something well if we look at the mat we can see that everything looks pretty normal here but because we're now behind it the mat should be inverted so what we've done is added an option to the mat controls to invert from the back so if we turn that on what's going to happen is the mat is gonna automatically switch as you cross that plane so if we turn that on you can see it happening here so this is pretty handy but we didn't stop there we've got a couple of other cool features so we've got the feather amount right so we can feather this but notice how it feathers off into negative space well what we can do is change the expansion slide that back over so that the feathering kind of happens right in the middle so that way things like this fire blend really nicely and just a quick compositing tip so here's our mat right well we can actually add a fractal noise on to our mat layer set the blending mode to color dodge and what you'll see here is a little bit of noise in that overlapping area so if we scale this down a little bit you can kind of see a little fractal noise we can play around with the contrast so if you look closely you can see the fire is a little bit more rugged and not just perfectly smooth so you can kind of see the difference here and of course you can play around with the brightness to shift the position of the mat so just kind of a handy feature for for fire and organic type of effects now coming back to the world position pass we've got another handy utility to create a world position Knoll so what is a world position no and what can we use it for well you see our fire layer here if I move the position of the fire I haven't moved the position of the mat so now we're out of sync we don't want that instead what we want to do is generate world position null click on create so now we have our world position mat so we'll just make this yellow and we'll rename it here and this is the position where the mat is so if we look at it just by itself we can move this around so this is kind of cool we can rotate it now check this out we're gonna shut off the world position pass and parent the world position Knoll to the fire layer so now if I move my fire layer around you'll see that it perfectly intersects wherever it goes including rotation you know I can take the fire I can scale it down you know move it so it's kind of coming out of this little hole in the in the back here and there we go got some great looking fire and it looks like it's coming right out of this hole this is really the power of the world position pass but what are we missing we're missing some light so let's take the utility to create the 3d position and will generate a null right to make it yellow and then let's just create a new point light so we'll make it you know Orange like the color of the fire and let's put it into the position of this null so we can try to move it there or we can just take the position of this null hit P select the position copy it and then paste it into the light so now the light is exactly right by the fire you can turn the intensity of this up maybe move it out a little bit further here there we go so now we've got a little bit of interactive lighting from the fire and we can even take this light we can name it fire and let's also parent this to the fire layer so now if we move the fire around the light is gonna move with it but definitely a cool way to work okay let's take a look at another scenario to use the world position pass so we've got these chest pieces here and I want to put some particular particles in the middle of the game piece so we'll turn on the particular layer and we'll scroll through here and the problem is the layers are not obscuring correctly so what we'll do is create a world position pass now one of the things you'll notice here is I've got some fake floor reflections on and basically what I did is just used a couple copies of elements so I've got the floor then I added the reflection the upside down pieces and then I handed the pieces on top so not real reflections but close enough now I've got another copy of element 3d here and this is just a normal copy what I'm gonna do is make sure it's right above my particular layer and I'm going to set it to world position pass so just like before we've created this nice world position so what I'll do is take the particular layer and set the track matte to luma inverted now the way to think about the matte is if we bring up the options here whatever you want to have in front so the pieces here we want them to be in front of the particular layer so what we want to do is rotate the mat until only those pieces are selected so what we might do is set this to ninety degrees maybe bring the feather amount down and even turn up the expansion a little bit so now the white pieces are in front so then we'll shut this off and right away we've got the particular layer is now being obscured okay so this is looking pretty good but what happens if we rotate the camera to the other side well first I'm gonna take my particular layer and I'm just gonna lower the particle count just so this can speed up a little bit faster turn it up so that'll render a little faster and what I'll do is I'll bring the camera around to the back side and oh it's all messed up again what do we do what do we do well we can't use the same trick as before because the particles are not a flat layer they have volume they have three-dimensional volume so what are we gonna do well let's go to our new matte layer and there's an option called face camera so if we turn that on the mat is gonna rotate towards the camera so if we shut the rotation off and then choose invert matte now as we rotate around the mat is going to update so that the white is always in front so if we take a look the particles are behind the pieces we come over to the side here we come over to the back and the particles are also behind the pieces so now we're getting an accurate obscuration from all around the chess pieces let's go and take a look at one last scenario with the world position pass so I've got this jet and some particular smoke and I will just turn these two layers on so right now they're not intersecting correctly the particles are just rendering on top so I've created a world position pass already and I'm gonna scroll down and I just need to rotate it and then I'm gonna move it to the back here maybe feather it a little bit basically I just want to create a little bit of feathering at the back then I'll take our particles and set the track matte to luma inverted so now the smokes gonna render behind the jet so this looks pretty good but what happens when we come behind the smoke alright we've got another problem here so the mats inverted we can click on our world position Pass come down here to the matte options now we could try the invert from back but that's not going to work because the particles have volume they're not a flat layer like the fire layer from earlier so instead we have this other option called invisibility and what we want to do is make the matte invisible from back so if we turn that on you're gonna see the particles are now fully rendering from the backside and if we go to the front side there now rendering behind so this should work for a lot of scenarios now here's the tricky part is once we get to the side here this is when we're gonna start to see things fade out if you take a look at this example same type of thing we've got the particles are gonna fade on just at this point so we're gonna see the matte everything's all good then we get behind it it's gonna fade out to allow the particles to render over the car all right so that's a lot of matte situations but what kind of fun things can we do with the world position pass well we've created sort of a elevation fog or kind of a haze that rises up let's take a look at this let's break this down so we've got a single element 3d layer and it's got some fog on so we've turned on some fog in the render setting so we could turn that off and see what that looks like so we've got these basic mountains we've added a background layer then we added some fog so it gives us a little more depth and then we added another layer that has this sort of 3d haze so if we shut off the first two layers we can kind of see what this looks like very interesting looking first of all and what it is is a duplicate copy so what I'll do is I'll just delete this layer so I can show you how to do this yourself so we've got our mountains inside of element 3d so we've just got this elevation map with some displacement and we've imported it into element 3d and now I'm going to go ahead and duplicate the layer so choose duplicate and then we're gonna go to the output and set it to world position but don't worry we're not going to do any more matte so what we're gonna do is we're gonna come down here we're gonna rotate the matte a little bit so that it's flat so we'll set it to ninety degrees then we're gonna move the position of the matte down so check this out and slide it down so this is pretty cool what we can do is set the transfer mode to screen and then we're gonna add a color correction tint and we'll tint it a little bit of blue for example let's get rid of that curves effect so if we look at this we've just got some blue tint that we're putting on top and so this kind of looks like a little bit of haze so let's go and refine this let's bring the feather amount down and let's bring the position of it back up so it's very cool it creates it's kind of like an elevation effect that only affects everything up to a certain point we can also add our own curves adjustment to make the fall-off a little bit more natural we can you know tweak the settings here a little bit change the color or whatever but the nice thing is it's fully three-dimensional so anywhere we move we're still gonna see that nice kind of fall-off so this is looking pretty good and the other thing I did I took a couple elements from action essentials to basically some atmospheric elements just some you know smoke machine kind of elements and placed them in 3d space just to give it a little bit more distinction in the beginning so that we can tell that we're looking at some kind of fog or haze and of course always be thinking of new creative ways to use these features to solve your own technical problems while working with element 3d ok let's go and take a look at another fun feature this is called planar mapping so we take a look at this animation you can see we have some cool things going on sort of this cascading effect well what I've done is I've taken this gradient image and I've mapped it along the surface of the balls so let's go and take a look at how this is set up what I'll do is select our element 3d layer now I've taken our gradient and I've selected it as a custom texture map inside of the element drop-down so we've selected the gradient layer and what that allows us to do is access it from inside the scene setup so click on that and here we have our ball with our texture now I'll go and just delete this and show you what I did so I went down to my primitives and I selected an HD ball so sphere HD and for the material I set the color to black and turn up the reflectivity a little bit as well as the the fernell so we've got this nice black material then for the illumination map I've set the texture so instead of loading a texture I'm gonna use the custom layer number 1 called gradient hit ok there were to scroll down and turn the illumination up to 100 so now we've got this nice-looking texture I can hit OK and we can take a look now if we click on the object this is where you'll see the new feature basically under model and surface mapping but now we've got a few new options like planner and polygons let's come over here to a more complex object like a sound and music object so let's just pick some headphones here it's my favorite model to use for whatever reason and instead of using this material I'm going to use our new material that we just created so we'll drop that on our headphones so this looks pretty messed up the UVs are not going to help us so what we'll do is click on the object scroll down and change the texture mapping to plane XY so what this does is makes the texture two-dimensional so one of the things we can do is turn up the repeat amount so we can turn that to 2 for example and this creates a really interesting look we can change the offset another interesting thing is that it works on all types of models so for example the metropolitan pack right has a bunch of cities and buildings well we can load up a really complex model of a city and instead of using all these city textures we can just take our new material drop it on there right now this is gonna look a little funky at first but once you set the texture mapping to plane XY you're gonna have this sort of interesting look here so let's let's set the UV repeat amount up to like 3 so get some nice detail I'll hit OK and let me just move back here and I'm just gonna go ahead and reset the groove so now we have our little mini city here maybe we add a little bit of contrast so then as we animate through time we get this kind of funky color effect so definitely some fun things that you could do with this here's another fun feature we added to the animation engine so you can see we've got this nice cascading animation effect that happens circularly so it happens around this shape and here's another example we've got kind of like a domino type of effect so this is a pretty simple animation they both only have two keyframes let me go and show you how this is set up basically I've got a fresh copy of element here with a simple plate and I'm gonna go inside a group one and set the replicator to a ring we'll turn up the particle count and let's turn the particle look size down so particle size scale it down and right now we can do some fun stuff so we can rotate them we can even change the rotation point so right now they're rotating around the middle but we can go inside of the scene set up and if we turn the grid on here we can see the anchor point is right in the middle but we can change that and set it to say at the bottom so now the anchor point is on the bottom and we'll hit okay so now if we rotate this and rotate around the bottom point now all of this is already in version 1.5 but what's new in version 1.6 is the ability to animate sequentially so real quick we'll go into the scene setup I want to go ahead and put this onto Group 1 and group 2 so we can use the animation engine we'll hit OK and let me take group 1 copy all the settings by hitting copy go to group 2 and paste all the settings so then if we go to group 2 we can you know we can move these up and you know maybe go to the particle look and rotate them or something you know just to give it some variation so then if we come down here to first of all let's go to the render settings and turn on a little ambient occlusion just so this looks a little better turn on the illumination influence down to zero since the material has a little bit of an illumination okay give it a little more depth there nice so that's an unrelated step but we'll go into the animation engine turn it on enable it so what I want to do is keyframe the animation from 0 to 100 and as I do that we're gonna see the particles animate from one state to the next so already this is pretty cool we could turn the motion blur on we could speed up the animation bring the keyframes closer together and we get a cool sweeping kind of animation but this particular animation is happening from right to left so it's happening from right to left now if we come down here to the animation engine options we can control that so here we have our smoothness we can tighten that up and make it quick or we can you know randomize it a bit so that's really cool turn this back up to like 50 but one of the things that you could not do before is animate them sequentially in order of the particle count so what I'm gonna do is set the animation type to shape order so when you do that now we're getting an animation that happens sequentially so we can turn the smoothness down and now we get out there's definitely some cool things that you could do with it some cool animations you can also change the shape order offset so change what particle starts you know the domino effect is kind of the same thing they're all rotated forward and you know kind of just creates sort of a fake domino effect alright well I hope you guys enjoy this video element 3d version one point six is a free upgrade we've really been working hard to try to find better ways to work with element 3d and hopefully the world position pass and some of the other great new features will help you along your journey my name is Andrew Kramer thank you again for watching and we will see you next time

Channel: Video Copilot

Views: 418,814

Keywords: video copilot, after effects, 3D objects, Andrew kramer, world position pass, 3d utility

Id: dSN2OpbV18g

Length: 28min 11sec (1691 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 26 2013