Glossy 3D Metal Logo in After Effects (No Plugins Required) | Greyscalegorilla

in today's video you're gonna learn how to make a metal 3d logo in After Effects using no plugins let's go hey everybody it's Nick here from grayscale guerrilla and today we'll be making this metal logo animation entirely in After Effects and you won't have to download any third-party plugins to be able to pull this effect off in fact if you have a Creative Cloud subscription you have everything you need to pull this off and if you really want to follow along you could actually download the scene file down below we'll link it up here on YouTube or we'll also have it available at grayscale guerrilla if you want to follow along with this and other After Effects scene files alright with that let's head on into After Effects and let's get started alright here we are in After Effects let's get started we have a new composition we need to make you could either use this button down here or just click new composition and we're gonna make it 1920 by 1080 24 frames a second somewhere around 5 to 10 seconds is fine let's just open this up and get started alright now if you want to follow along with our logo at the grayscale guerrilla logo you could download the project file down below and it'll come with the logo and also the HDR we're gonna use a little bit later if you want to use your own logo you could do that or if you want to use type you can just go up here and type in whatever you want and it either way it's what this will work in any type of text or logo you want in this case we're going to use our grayscale gorilla logo I'm gonna double click in our project window and head on over and grab our grayscale gorillas logo that was made in Illustrator and once we bring this in and drag it into the project you're gonna see it's pretty small and if your logo small you could scale it up or down depending on the size of it and I just want to fill the screen for now and you can see it's not quite black so we could see our logo here but it's also a little bit low res so the first thing we want to do is click this button right here which will snap it into high resolution it'll just give the pixel data as much to work with as possible here and the next thing we need to do if you're working with a low is right click on your illustrator file and click this button right here it says create shapes from vector layer boom now After Effects just made outlines out of your vector logo which basically means you could delete this from the scene file and you have this much more usable piece of vector footage rather than having this illustrator file now if you're just following along with the text you don't have to do this and there in fact there's just one more thing we need to do if you're using a logo just come in here and go to your contents open up the group and if your logo is not white like mine go to where your fills are and just change it to white okay now no matter where you're following along you should get to this point where you have some white text that is filling the screen now from here you want to make sure that first of all that your layer is 3d now we make any layer in 3d any After Effects layer 3d by clicking this button right here but you can see if I rotate around that it's not true 3d it's just this flat 3d plane but we're gonna make this chunky 3d and the first way we're gonna do that is to make sure we're using the right 3d engine so what I want you to do is come up to composition go to composition settings head on over to 3d render and make sure that this says cinema 4d there's total uses for these other ones I use classic 3d all the time but for this chunky 3d you want to make sure you're using this cinema 4d then go to your options and turn down your render options way down and all this is doing is making sure that the 3d effect that you're looking at is rendering as fast as possible while we set up our scene and then later when we go to render it we could turn this back up so let's just go all the way down to 1 let's click OK and now let's make this text this chunky 3d text and not just this flat 3d layer all right I'm gonna use a keyboard shortcut that we're gonna use a lot in this tutorial and that's hit a twice a a on your keyboard with any layer selected it's going to open up your 3d layers now from here you can open up this extrusion depth and just turn it up you can see as soon as we turn on our extrusion depth it's making our logo 3d so let's just make it a little bit 3d so you can see it in the viewport here and we're gonna do one other thing while we're here which is turn up the bevels so go to your bevel style go to convex and let's just tone this down a little bit we don't want to go too crazy depending on the scale of your logo you could dial it in to taste but we're just adding a little bit of bevels and you'll see why here in just a bit okay so now technically we have this 3d logo but if we click off the layer you can see it's not there's no reflections there's no lighting and texturing and lighting are always key when it comes to making 3d look good whether you're using After Effects or any other 3d program so how do we make this look way better well there's a couple ways to do it if you followed some of our other After Effects tutorials you may see me come up here and grab a light and while that is a good way to do it you end up with a slightly different effect than what we're trying to make today so there's making a light really simple you can move your light around you can see we have our nice little bevels here happening we have some depth going on that's all good but what we're really trying to build is this reflective glassy logo and so to do that I'm just going to turn off our light and instead import this HDR now it's it's a it's technically a dot EXR we won't get in all the technical details but what this is if you're not familiar with an HDR image is a reflection map that you can use to relight your scene and this is from our one of our HDI packs we sell at greyscale gorillas and you could get this for free if you just download the scene file and if you want more of these types of HDR as we sell them over at our site but you won't need to do that to follow along today so just let's install this or just let's open it okay I'll come into our project and let's bring it into our composition and you can see it just comes in as a regular image now we're not going to use this as a regular image we're instead trying to wrap this around our object remember I said these xrs and these HD RS are light and reflection data that we can then use to relight our object and the real way to do that is to right-click on this HDR and we want to turn it into a I always forget where this is there it is environment layer so click environment layer and now your HDR is affecting the environment so remember I said that lighting and texturing go together to make 3d look good and we have the lighting setup but we don't have the textures in other words our grayscale gorilla logo or whatever logo you're using is set up to catch lights right now and not reflections so let's go into our logo remember if you don't see these settings you could hit a a really fast on your keyboard AAA it'll open up your 3d settings here and then you can come down here and say reflection intensity let's crank it all the way up we went to 100% in intensity and let's click off of our logo and check out what we got we now have a fully reflective logo and don't forget these bevels are what makes this look good if we did not add those bubbles in fact I'm just gonna turn them off if we did not add those bevels look at the difference right those bevels made all the difference in in this logo so let me undo that here's our nice logo and you can now you can grab this logo I'm gonna hit W for rotate on my keyboard and you could rotate around and you can see now that this is a fully 3d logo that has nice reflections and all this stuff going on and now we can animate this the same way we would any 2d layer or any fake 3d layer if you've used this before in After Effects to create a flying logo or logo flying in from the screen or just moving anywhere you could rotate it around and that's what we're gonna build so from now on now that we have some reflections some logos we're just animating this to create our logo animation and so if you're familiar with animating in in After Effects you can imagine the possibilities with this and remember this is all built-in here so what are the other we could do to make this look better and start to build our animation well one way is to effect the reflection sharpness right now you can see that everything is fully sharp reflection almost like it's a mirror and if we reduce the reflection sharpness more to like 50% you could see that you're gonna get more and more blurry reflections now we might have to grab our logo and rotate it just a little bit try to catch a little bit of light and and you'll be able to see the difference now Oh almost grabbed it let's rotate it around oh it's trying to catch it right in the middle here there it is okay so see now the gradient from no light to light is blurry if I if I put this back at 100 you're gonna see it's gonna be a sharp edge okay and this really helps sell the 3d effect in fact if I go all the way to the side here and I start to see these reflections you'll really start to see this so let's go to 80 80 % see what that looks like that's a little bit blurry let's go to 50 okay and so you can see more and more blurriness will make these kind of blurry reflection effects in your logo now it's a little bit grainy and the way we're gonna fix that is when we go to render we're gonna crank up the render settings and that will allow us to get this a lot sharper but we're gonna animate this with gonna low render settings and then at the end we'll we'll crank it back up so how do we get this thing animated okay so let's hit R on our keyboard and find our final resting place for where this logo is going to be so I'm feeling pretty good right here let's go ahead and animate this logo going from where it is now towards the camera and and make this like flying animation so the first thing I want to do is is make a camera so let's go ahead up to layer new camera and in your camera settings you want to make your focal length something like I don't know let's go with like a 40 millimeter lens and what this is doing is creating the type of lens that you're using to look through that sounds kind of obvious but there are big differences between a 40 millimeter lens and 100 millimeter lens especially when you're using in an After Effects with 3d now there's 40 is gonna make things look a little bit wide it'll allow us to get some really cool effects as the logo gets closer to our camera so let's go ahead and find our final place where the logo will will kind of settle down and to me I think the logo first of all needs to be a little bit smaller so I'm gonna grab s4 scale on our logo and just scale it down almost everything you could do with a regular 3d layer as far as moving it around you could do with this 3d layer so let's call that roughly where we want it to end okay and then I don't like how thick this logo is so I'm gonna hit AAA and turn down our extrusion a little bit and that'll make it I think more readable now let's go ahead and grab our logo and set a position and rotation keyframe somewhere around three seconds and so for that I'm gonna hit P on my keyboard and then I'm gonna hit R and set orientation keyframe okay that is representing where the logo ends up so now let's go all the way back to the zero position and give it a start frame so in this case I'm gonna grab the I hit V on my keyboard to grab my arrow tool and I grabbed this z position on my 3d logo and if you don't see this you could just highlight your logo and I'm dragging it up into the right and that's just making the logo go towards my camera okay so I'm just gonna keep going until it disappears and you might get lucky you might fly through a letter or in this case I'm just barely going under my logo and I'm still gonna grab it and move it a little bit further boom okay that automatically should have set a position keyframe I'm going to hit you on my keyboard to show all of my animated parameters here and in my we could basically scrub through and now watch this animation and I'm also gonna set the length of my animation by coming over here and grabbing this little nub and pulling it over and then I'm gonna I'm gonna hit 0 on my keyboard you could also hit spacebar to start to see your animation here so now you may be seeing okay this takes a little bit longer to render then a traditional 3d scene especially for not familiar with rendering in 3d you know it definitely does take longer than traditional After Effects animation so what are the ways we could do what are the things we could do to speed up our workflow so that we don't have to wait this long every time we want to see what our animation looks like well the first thing we're going to do is turn our resolution down you can go to half res in this case we can go all the way to quarter ends because all we're trying to see is the rough animation and the quarter res will speed up render times a ton a ton you'll see right away it's much easier to scrub through the other thing you can do is hit shift while you do a Ram preview and what that does is render every other frame here and you may have used that in After Effects before I use this all the time so now watch watch how much faster this animation is going and we're gonna fix all that green enos and all the all the weirdness of what this logo looks like at the end but we don't want to see the final version now because we don't want to wait that long okay so we have our animation it's not the prettiest animation just these linear boring keyframes flying out but we can make that way better so the first thing we're gonna do is also add some rotation so let's just experiment and say on the x-axis we're gonna say move at 90 degrees we're gonna do it a ram preview here and now what do we got well now we have this logo flying out and we got this nice animation happening where it's coming up up from kind of rotating in like it's flying in like a spaceship from from over our camera let's see what that looks like and that's pretty cool you might like that one you can also experiment and say uh instead now what I what I do want to make sure is on my original keyframe in this case I'm gonna say negative 90 and see what that looks like and look this this kind of takes over the frame a little bit more and this is closer to the example you may have seen and what's nice about this is it catches the light over here you see it catch the light on that corner I enjoy that okay so let's stick with this this is this has a pretty cool vibe going on but the animation is still a little bit boring to me so we're gonna add some some more interesting keyframes and in other words we're gonna interpret the speed between these key frames in a different way if we look into our graph editor so I'm just gonna select our last two keyframes click R at graph editor you're gonna see what we have is in our speed graph and you should see the speed graph if you don't make sure you click here and make sure that edit speed graph is on this is my favorite way to animate and what you want to make sure of is that you don't have these linear keyframes and to do that what I what I love to do is grab these these secondary keyframes the further ones down your timeline and drag them down to zero and you can also hold shift and that's gonna snap them to zero and you're gonna see when you let go and kind of pull this move you're gonna get a much more natural looking curve and all this means is upfront your logo is going to animate faster then then at the end in fact it'll speed up really fast at the at the front and then I'll ease in at the end it'll look much more natural and this goes for you know anything that you animate cameras or you know anything 2d as well this type of curve adds a lot more energy to the scene so now you can see it really kind of jumped off the starting gate there and now eased into place much much better loving this already and in fact now as soon as you have a logo animation that you like what I would have you do is experiment with the lighting now right now I just happen to like now I'm gonna turn up our resolution here just we could see the lighting a little bit better I happen to like the way that our HDR came into the scene it's like perfectly rotated but if it doesn't look good to you here's something you could do once you to hit R on your EXR and if you're using your own HDR you could do this as well and just spin the HDR around now you can't see it in the viewport but it's there reflecting on this logo and if you spin it on the y-axis right here and let go you're gonna see the render update and you'll get different lighting as the light moves around your logo so it just as easily could have been rotated toward the front like that we're just looking for a beautiful resting place for our light now I like the way that our light worked I don't think we're gonna change it too much but like I said depending on your logo or your text I want you to play with this because it can make a drastic effect I mean you're seeing the difference as I rotate this around so we're I'm gonna go back because I love this look and now we're gonna talk about how we could take this somewhat simple but you know pretty neat little camera move here and make it look a lot more appealing to the eye okay right now all we have is this 3d text and so how do we start to add the extra things that you could call compositing to help build up this scene into something a little bit more beautiful well to do that I'm going to drop the this composition into a new composition so let's call this 3d logo comp and I just hit enter on my keyboard I gotta remembered it to say what I'm hitting here and I'm out my keyboard and you could type right into it and then you could drag this into this button right here and it'll make a new composition with the other composition in it okay so why would we do that well this allows us to do a couple things it allows us to not worry about any of our 3d layers they're still rendering just fine if we scrub through on this new comp they're all 3d they're all rendering and they're just passing its data in through this comp what this allows us to do is do something more like a traditional comp which is at our background and add glows and layers and adjustment layers on top of this without affecting the original and and it also has another side effect which is it's faster to render this way and that's because any anything that's already been rendered in the comp will stay rendered even if you add adjustments and stuff on top of it okay so let's go to our kind of final position here something like this and start to dress this up a little bit make this a lot more appealing to wear.i so first thing we need is a background so let's go to loot new solid BAM and let's just pick a black background we'll start with that okay nice and boring here start but I promise we'll build something fun next thing we're gonna do is add a new solid and this one's gonna be something like a dark blue yeah not too dark but we're gonna start to give a little bit of atmosphere to our scene so go ahead and grab this layer grab your circle mask and I want you to just mask roughly around where your logo is and now molds also holding shift on my keyboard so I can move this circle around and if I let go a shift I could scale it up and down and let's just make something kind of roughly the size and if it's not behind your logo you can just move your layer now from here once you get F on your keyboard F for feather and crank up the the mask we're just kind of creating a little back backdrop for this logo I'm gonna shrink this down even more and it's way too bright so go ahead and hit T for transparency and knock this like way down I mean 20 30 percent I mean it's it's just a little bit of haze and now you can see your logo is it's kind of popping off the background a little bit more and it's very subtle these layers you can keep them very subtle and they add up as we add more and more of these in fact I'm gonna duplicate that layer move it above our comp I'm sorry I move it above our 3d layer and use this as kind of a little light glow from the top and I'm just readjusting my mask here if you don't see this tool just hit V on your keyboard and you'll be able to grab your mask make sure that new layer is selected I'm just a nice little glow that goes on top of our logo I can go to my transparency maybe this one's a little bit brighter and you can also adjust the color as well okay now you may be seeing this right here on YouTube which is banding okay and you may have seen this in other renders as well that you've tried to do any gradients and banding happens when there's just not enough color data in your scene to recreate a gradient very smoothly and you can see I'm getting banding right now I can see it and if you see this here's a fix so I want you to go to your effects & presets menu if you don't see it you can find it under window but I want you to go find scatter scatter just type it in there and grab the scatter effect and drag it on to the offending layer say no you are not gonna band I'm gonna instead scatter you around just crank this up until the until the banding goes away okay you're gonna see it adds a little bit of grain and that's what it's doing it it's adding variation to this color and this will help when it comes to banding a little effects like that I'll use that effect all the time okay so it's getting getting there but we also don't have any lighting effects on the logo itself so what if you want to add a little lens glow wherever these glints are gonna happen well on this you could actually add a glow effect right to your 3d layer so go to your 3d logo comp or whatever you named it come up here and just type in glow and you could double click it or you could just drag it onto the 3d layer itself you can see we got glow that's not quite the glow Hort going for but instead what I'm gonna do is turn up the glow threshold and this is just gonna go to brighter and brighter parts of our scene and it'll allow me to also set the glow radius and this is gonna make it a little bit more like what I want I want this like glow around this but I don't like all that intensity so I could just knock this way down like point2 and then you can duplicate your glow to kind of layer this up so I'm actually gonna start with more of like a 20 layer something really minimal duplicate it turn up the glow radius and then again maybe turn this up or down as we see fit so you can see it's starting to blow out these highlights and if we turn off our our effects you could twirl these up just turn off effects that will turn them off you can see it's a subtle effect but it's starting to add a little bit of glow to that layer and in fact that might still be a little bit too much so let's dial this down and let's go up here and I'm gonna open up this effect dial this one down to really subtle and you can even animate this to make it more you know brighter at the beginning and then less overtime because look up front we got all this glow happening okay so you could play around with that add some different glows and then go back to our 3d comp and open up our logo we could hit a twice same as before I'm just gonna move up so we could see our examples here and now is a good time to adjust and play with your reflection settings you saw we really cranked down the reflection sharpness I don't think we have to go that far down you can also play with the reflection roll-off which in this case will make the reflection different depending on the angle of your object in this case without any other lights in our scene I do like it with a full width like zero reflection roll-off and in other videos we talked about you know some of the other settings for 3d layers but I want you to experiment with this reflection intensity and the sharpness I'm also gonna dumb our reflection intensity down although we will have to turn our ambient lighting all the way down as well okay so that's what I'm trying to get these nice little highlights here they're not as bright as before and that looks a little bit better to me I'm gonna split the difference and go to ninety percent reflection okay now let's set up our final render by adding our final color correction and setting this up for our final render so go to layer new adjustment layer and we're gonna use curve love curves drag it on to your adjustment layer and just if you're not familiar with curves for now just follow along and make this nice s-curve what this does is it makes the black parts you're seeing more black and the bright parts you've seen a little bit brighter and you can adjust the contrast in that way okay you can see it's really diet letting us dial in this look and something else you may see me do all the time is go grab our blue Channel and tone down our blue a little bit and raise the blue in the in the in the shadow and it's just enough to - to add a little bit more color to that scene now in this case I think our logo is too dark in general there's a couple things we can do we can go back into our 3d comp and try to add lights but while we're in this compositing comp we can just go ahead and try to tint this layer slightly brighter so let's add a curves to our logo as well and just crank up the gamma a little bit and not just that's just me grabbing the middle of this curves and moving it up I'm gonna go below the glow so we don't affect our glow and you can see now our logo is you know not quite as black as it was before so let's turn that off and on you can see the difference there you want to check it at different parts of your render so that's looking pretty good it might be a little bit too bright we could always animate this over time as well so this is a good frame for us to dial in our final render settings and get this ready for composite ok so how do we clean up this blurry reflection well remember earlier we went to composition we went to composition settings we went to 3d render and we went to our options we cranked this all the way down well this slider think of it like this down here your 3d objects will render faster but with more grain and less detail and as you turn this up it's going to be less and less grain but it will take longer to render now i10 to go any higher than around 50% there are super rare cases where you have to get up into these numbers but do not default to go up here in fact there's even warning signs like for highly reflective or layered scenes don't do it this is as high as you should need to go for this type of tutorial and for most 3d I don't go too much higher so let's let's not even go that high let's just go to like you know 23 30% something like that and as soon as we click OK you're gonna see it'll take a little bit longer to render this frame and we may have to just kind of cheat it and move forward a frame a little bit here but wait for it to render and you can see already this is cleaning up it's not quite as much as we want okay oh and I forgot we don't just have to turn it on here but we have to turn it on our original comp so go to your original comp go to composition settings this is where the 3d is taking place and this could trip this trips me up all the time it just did on this tutorial make sure you go to your original comp go to composition settings 3d render options and turn this up let's go to that 30 BAM and now watch it clean up boom right away last grain and it's still not perfect we could still crank it up but I think for this type of render we can now just click around wait for it to render and see what effects we're getting let's see this earlier one oh yeah okay so now let's head on in to our final comp let's look at what this is looking like and if you're happy with it set your set your out frame you don't probably don't have to render the whole thing I'm gonna go use my key frame or timeline line here and hit N on my keyboard to end my animation right here and then we're gonna we're just gonna render this out and to do that all you need to do is hit shift command back slash and if you don't know which one's backslash it's the one with the question mark on it on your keyboard shift command back slash and you do that in the comp that you want to render and it will bring it into the render to you you could of course you can come in and name it and then you can also get your settings you could render out in h.264 if you want something higher res you could change all that here and when you're ready click render and and then don't forget that you know 3d stuff does take a little bit longer to render but that's why we waited until the end to really crank up those settings so if you end up using this effect with your logo I'd love to see the results down in the comments if you have any questions about 3d and After Effects don't forget to ask them down below there's some really powerful ways that you could take 3d objects without any plugins without anything else and create some really fun stuff thanks again for watching everybody and don't forget if you're interested in learning more about 3d animation inside of After Effects don't forget to head on over to our site and download this scene file and other 3d scene files all made with After Effects we're gonna link it up down below and right here on YouTube as well and with that I just wanted to thank you once again for watching our tutorials we have plenty more coming here in this summer and I really appreciate your watching and I'll see you in another tutorial really soon bye everybody so this is like what your logos doing you have to provide your own sound you could use these sound effects I guess

Channel: Greyscalegorilla

Views: 53,441

Rating: 4.9320111 out of 5

Keywords: Cinema 4D, c4d, tuts, tutorials, motion graphics, greyscalegorilla, after effects tutorial, after effects 3D, after effects 3D animation, after effects 3D text, after effects extruded type, after effects 3D logo, after effects 3D tutorial, after effects 3D logo animation, after effects logo intro, after effects reflective text

Id: 6P88g8asFJg

Length: 32min 43sec (1963 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 21 2018