- [Narrator] Hello everyone,
this is Evan Abrams and in this After Effects Tutorial, we're gonna explore a new
feature of Adobe CC 2017 that is the Cinema 4D 3D Render Engine. It allows us to extrude
things and really leverage Cinema 4D rendering power
inside of After Effects without ever leaving the application. But without further ado, let's get some chocolate in our peanut
butter, some peanut butter in our chocolate. That sounds really gross but let's get some Cinema 4D inside of After Effects and open that program now. You can see it looks pretty nice. This is a nice lookin'
extrusion of some letters, some shape layers, very wonderful stuff. If we want to get started doing this ourselves, it's very simple. We just make a New Composition, doesn't matter the settings, I don't care. And then you need to
make a layer of some kind and the Cinema 4D 3D Render Engine we can extrude both shape layers and text. And text is super simple,
we just put some text out there (inaudibly blabbering), I just hammer on my keyboard,
make some text, wonderful. Maybe I'll even make a color of text. What do you think of
that, oh, a fun color. And then all you have to
do is make a layer 3D. So you'll notice up here
there isn't an option to change your render engine yet. We just make something 3D and there it is right up in the corner, woo. Right up there, that's
where you gotta look. And this is where you can choose either Classic 3D, which has no extruding but certainly there are some options and you can learn about it
but there's also the option to use Ray Traced 3D
which is kinda the old, let's say outdated version
of this kind of thing, which allows you to
extrude and bevel text. It gives you reflections, refractions, a whole bunch of things are enabled. A bunch of things are
also disabled though. No blending modes, no track
mats, no layer styles, no mask and effects on a bunch of stuff. You're kind of trading
off the ability to extrude things and have this real 3D stuff with removing a lot of
compositing based options. Let's Ray Trace and then
if you go to Cinema 4D, we throw away a bunch of other things. No motion blur, no camera depth of field, but ya know, it still does the extruding and you'll see how much better it is. Let me just get started and we'll do that. So we enable it, wonderful,
now you can twirl down into the layer and you'll see we have Geometry Options
and Material Options. And these Geometry and
Material Options are things like Beveling so
we can apply bevel to it. We can extrude this thing,
notice we're pushin' that thing back into space. And we can't really sorta
tell what's goin' on too well. So what I'd like to do
is just go ahead and make a new light to really
show off what's goin' on, fairly default settings
and you can see right away, there you go, now this extruded thing. It's got some shading goin' on,
wonderful stuff, good, good. So we can extrude that all the way back. You could bevel this thing so you could give it some beveled depth. You'll need to pick a style though. Let's try Angular because
it's the simplest. And you'll notice that
all bevels are applied to the outside of these shapes. And some of them are applied to the inside which is where this Whole Depth comes in. And you can see, ya know,
Whole Depth of zero, no beveling on the inside. Whole Depth of 100, there is in there. So let's just jack that up
and then you can really see what the difference is so
that's what that's all about. That's extruding, that's beveling. I guess you could make some
titles and stuff out of this. It's very easy way to add a little bit of depth stuff though. And before, if you used
classic method, you would have to duplicate the layer,
push it back into 3D space, do some stuff to it, now
you can do it for real. And it has real live sides on it. What I mean by real
live sides, I mean I can put this anchor point in the middle. I can rotate this thing and
we can look at the end of it. And it has stuff there, it's terrific. So that's what happens when
you extrude these things. And speaking of the sides,
if I delete this light, nothing is really telling me that this side is extruded in some way. What I could do, I mean,
except for it taking up that space, but what I can do is I can go to the text, I can say Animate and then I can say Animate The Side. I'm not really gonna Animate The Side but you'll see what happens. Animate the Color, let's
change the Brightness. And I take that Brightness down. And suddenly I'm able to
put a little stuff on there, put a little, a little
depth just by changing the color of the sides,
it's pretty wonderful stuff. I don't even have a light in the scene and we can tell what's goin' on. And since it's something you can Animate, you can actually go, go
like this and you can actually Animate the sides and the faces and everything changing so that's how we do this with text if we wanted to. So good for us, we did it. If we want to do this with Shape Layers, it is the same thing so we
would go New Shape Layer. You might import some shape layers. You might have some Vector stuff. I'm just gonna double click up here which makes a shape layer,
makes a rectangle, sweet. And I'm gonna do all of
my shape layer animating before we make things 3D. That's helpful to save
yourself some grief. So you want to work with it in 2D and then extrude it, just
'cause you're spending a lot of machine resources
on stuff you don't really need to deal with until later. So I'm just gonna put
these things in an order that will be helpful to you. So what I think I want to have happen is, have kind of a frame pop up. So let's toggle off the
Transparency grid there. And I'd like this, some kind
of like a frame to pop in, maybe like a boxy lookin' thing so what I'll do is link the size together. Let's start at a size of
zero, that could be fun. We'll move ahead a few
frames, 30 frames or so. And then it can come
up to size 500, sweet. The other thing I would like
is to add another rectangle. I wanna be able to
duplicate this rectangle and have it come up to a size
that is a little bit smaller, maybe like a 450, cool, and
let me just add a merge path to this so I'm merging
these two paths together. I'm saying you subtract
you, is this new shape. And what does that mean,
well, it just looks like this expanding, I'm not
very thrilled with that. So let's have the outside,
I'm just accessing the graph editor here and I'm
going to Easy Ease these. So keep my assistant Easy
Ease or use the shortcuts. I got 'em all wired up to a mouse. It's pretty quick for me
so we're gonna go into the Graph Editor, push
this handle like so, give it a little bit of
a ramp so it starts fast and gets slow and then we've
got the inside of the box here which kinda trails so it
kinda (verbally exhaling) comes up like that,
interesting, interesting. I'm just easing those
so it's kind of an easy wee, comin' up like this, that's okay. Maybe I wanna push it
so that this comes up and then that kinda
snaps up to be with it. Interesting in two dimensions,
sure, I guess, maybe. Let's add that third dimension though. So I'm gonna make it 3D,
if yours isn't set to Cinema 4D Rendering
stuff, make sure you're on the Cinema 4D right there, good. And if you're having trouble with yours, like oh, it's so slow,
well, you can always take this down to Draft Level Detail. You're gonna push it up to Extreme level. So the default is around
25 and that's good enough for most people
for what they're doin'. So this allows us to have,
not only our contents, but also we can have
some Geometry Options, meaning we can, we can have,
maybe we want this thing to have an Extrusion Depth of maybe 50. That sounds like a good enough number. I'm gonna look at this from Custom View 1, so we can kinda see that frame. Oh, yeah, that's a good look. So that's a good extrusion depth. I'm gonna set a Key Frame,
click on the Stopwatch there. I'm gonna go back to the beginning here and set it at zero and what
I would like this to do, I'm Easy Easing them again. So it's gonna come up and
it's just gonna ease itself, kinda like that, that's
not super exciting for me. I'm not thrilled by this. What I would like it
to do is to come up and be too large and then retract back. So how about I go into the Graph Editor and instead of looking at a Speed Graph like we have been doing, I'm
gonna look at a Value Graph. And on this Value Graph,
let me just see here. Zoom to see the whole
thing, I'm just gonna pull this handle here, wee, all
the way back to the beginning so that it's influence, very influential. I'm gonna take this first
one and push it up like this. So what I'm telling the Graph Editor is I would like for this to go
beyond and then come back to 50. So what does that look like? It looks like it's exploding
up and then eventually coming to rest,
everything's comin' to rest. So that is kind of a, kind of a bursting onto the scene look. One thing I don't like about it though, is that it's moving away from the camera. I want it to come towards the camera. That's what I'm, that's
what I'm lookin' for. And in fact, maybe I'll
just go like (audible whine) nah, it's good the way it is. So we'll go like this a little bit, kinda push these things
so it's comin' out. And then comin' back,
good and like I said, I want this to come towards the camera. So I should make a New Camera at least. Make the 50 millimeter preset, cool. And you can see that it's
pushing away from the camera. I could fix this by
rotating this 180 degrees if I wanted to but if I
had a more complex shape that I didn't wanna rotate or
flip or any of these things, I would want it to be
pushing the front towards the camera rather than pushing the back away from the camera, if that makes sense. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hit A, go into the Anchor Point, hold down Alt and Create an Expression
and this Expression, I would like to tie into some
of those values I've changed. So I'm gonna hit AA and
I'm just gonna pull up, so I've got the Anchor Point, it's here. It's waiting to get an Expression. And I'm gonna wanna link that somehow to the Extrusion Depth. So I'm gonna say Anchor Point, how about you be the value that
you are 'cause you're perfect the way you are
except for this change and then add within square brackets 0,0, and then just pick whip
to that Extrusion Depth. So what I'm saying is,
let's use your value, perfectly fine and then
we're gonna add to it nothing for the X, nothing for the Y and then add the Geometry
Extrusion Depth to the Zed which has the compelling
effect of having it now push the front forward because
if we look at this from the top, that's just, it's
making the Anchor Point always that far back so
it's always far enough back to make that happen, good. Let's look at this not
from the top but from the active camera so we can
see what that looks like. I'm just gonna hit n,
just do a little, quick render-ino here, right now
it's not super compelling. It's lacking some stuff,
you know what it's lacking? A new Solid, Solid, so let's
get a new Solid out there. Make it the Comp Size, sweet,
put it behind everything. Make it 3D, now we can't see anything. So now we're gonna make a New Light. So that we can cast
some Shadows so we need to get some light in the scene, boom. And as soon as we get that out there, things are lookin' a little bit nicer now. And now I think we'll
bring this up like so, push it over here, bring it up here. And we see it's kinda
casting shadows a little bit but by default, if I
hit AA again to bring up the Geometry and Material
Options, we don't have Casting Shadows on by
default so we're gonna hit yeah, please cast those shadows. So now it's got these lovely,
soft shadows, terrific. And a lot of that is
defined by this light, which we go into the
Light, you can see it's got Shadow Darkness, it's
got the Shadow Diffusion. It's all super good,
okay, we hit OK on that. Now we're just gonna give
this a quick little render so you can see what's goin' on. And yeah, I think that's
lookin' pretty neat. It's kinda coming up off of
the, off of the stuff here. Wonderful, wonderful things,
maybe we, if we don't wanna use the light we could
position it somewhere else. Let's make it a little
bit more subtle, ya know. We could do all kinds of things. The world is your oyster
but when you are working with these things, it's
important to really remember that the more lights you put in the scene, the more triangles you're
asking it to render, the more difficult it becomes
so you might at some point, ask it to do something that
really hurts your machine. You're gonna wanna have
this Adaptive Resolution on to make things a little
bit easier for yourselves. If things get a little wonky
and it looks pixelated, just turn that off so you see what the final version would look like. So when you're working,
keep your detail level low. And keep your Adaptive Resolution on. It's just very helpful
to make things work out. And while this is all very well and good, oh, we've made a square,
whoop te woo, super great. You don't have to just
make basic primitives. For this kind of thing,
ya know, what are we really saving, right, what if I told you, you could make like a
cell phone lookin' thing. So you could make like an iPhone maybe. So what's an iPhone,
well, an iPhone is just a rounded rectangle, isn't it? So if I go to this rounded rectangle and then we just kinda
go like 500 by somethin', I don't know what the dimensions of one of these phones be's. (humming) Let's say we do like this, let's say we go make this a little bit more rounded, kind of a cartoon-ish looking phone. We take this, we take this
fill, we make it black 'cause that's the color
of iPhones, isn't it? Then we could give, go
to this, we could add another rectangle to it, fun, fun. Give it a screen, so
we're gonna wanna punch a hole in this by merging the paths. Merging the paths together
means subtracting please. And then we just wanna kinda
define this a little bit. (humming) And increase this, oh boy,
that's kind of a big screen, isn't it, so let's go,
just tweak our numbers. Tweak, tweak, tweak, make it
all, make it all real good. Super nice, alright, so that could be an iPhone screen, I guess. Why don't we also add to this a Ellipse. An Ellipse, yeah, that sounds better. And move that down here 'cause that's where the button's gonna be at. You gotta have them buttons, it's crucial, crucial to have buttons or else the phone probably won't work. I'm just tweakin' it up, everything's, everything's fun, everything's loose. So if this is the case of the phone, well then, you would want to make that 3D. You would want to extrude that, we assume. So let's extrude that by like 50, cool. Then we can instead of
lookin' at the active camera, look at it like this, that's neat. But I feel like the edges of this thing could use a little work. (audible whine) Touch up those edges, right? Just make this a little bit more, a little more grey, I think, cool. What we can do now, just like we did with the text is we can alter
the edges of this thing. So let me just, we can go to the Contents, pick the group we want, Add Side Color and you see it's adding
this color to all the sides. So what I would like to
do is to pick that color but just make it, maybe
a little bit brighter, you might make it with
a little bit of color. I don't totally know but look at this. Look at this, now it's
got color on the sides. We don't even have a
light, this is wonderful. So we'll call this the case, maybe. But what we can do is
we can create another rectangle out there,
wonderful, make it 3D, cool. I'm gonna make it like a light color. And I think you see where this is going that I'm gonna just shrink this down to be within the bounds of this thing, cool. And then shrink it down,
see if we expand this up like so, oh yeah,
that's lookin' pretty good. Oh, keep goin', keep goin'. (inaudibly singing) Oh, we're gettin' a little
bit of texture ripping and that's to be expected
because we have it right now located right on the surface which we do not want,
change the position here. Put this to 20, lock
this to this, wonderful. So now if we go back to the active camera, this pretty cool lookin' phone. If we go and we rotate
this thing, you would see oh, it's got like a
screen or whatever, oh boy. We're doin' it, it's workin' for real. We've made a thing and you could make like a separate button. You could make the button pop in and out. You could make a pre-comp and
put it where the screen is. That could be fun but little warning, you cannot use Track Mats in here. Track Mats are disabled, can't do those. So if you wanna have ya
know, some defining of where the alpha is for these things. Can't, you can't do that in here. That's, that's a different thing. That's a separate thing,
what you would probably end up doing is precomposing
this kind of thing if you wanted to used blending modes and putting it into a
different composition and then blending stuff there. But that's about it, go out there and start extruding and
making stuff with that. Thank you so much for watching. If you've enjoyed learning this little bit about After Effects and the new stuff in Adobe CC 2017, please
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