How to Create 3D DIGITAL COLLECTIBLE CARDS ! NFT Art Tutorial - Adobe After Effects No Plugins

[Music] what's going on guys welcome back to another video this one's going to be very quick and easy i want to talk about how you can create these 3d trading cards using only after effects so plugins is going to be optional i will also show you how you can implement the element 3d plug-in if you want to take it a step further the reason why i want to talk about this is recently the boom of nfts has been taking over the digital art world i'm not going to get too far into nfts i want you to research them on your own come up with your own decision on if you want to get into it personally i've been selling some of these 3d cards i've made around four thousand dollars off of it which has been awesome but just because i said that i don't want you to dive into it you could be paying 40 bucks just to post an nft and if you make zero sales that means you're minus 40. so so again look into it make sure you have a plan if you have any questions you can ask me in my discord link below also all nfts are making money aside this is a tutorial where you can learn some really useful skills in creating any kind of digital collectible look for fun commercial project or whatever it is you are creating so don't get too wrapped up in trying to do this just for a profit this tutorial is going to be a very easy version of this this was created all in 3d if you want to see a part 2 where i get into more of the 3d lighting and cinema 4d other than that guys let's hop right into after effects and get started alright guys so let's get started here i want to mention that there's three different ways where we can create our card the first way the quick easy lazy way that's the main way i'm going to be showing you it's just going on google images and finding a template for your card the second way is going to be using shape layers within after effects to put together the card in the shape that you'd like and then the third way is by using photoshop that's definitely the best method if you're trying to add intricate detail or you really want to dive into the design so starting off with way number one all you need to do is look up trading card template on google images if you click tools here you can search for color put it on transparent so we can find a png image and that just means this here is transparent so we could place things behind it the design of the card doesn't really matter all you really need is the shape you can change all of this in after effects add text images whatever it is so let's right click on it and we'll save the image once you've saved that just click this little arrow show in folder and we're going to drag this straight into adobe after effects so we'll select that layer i'll click s to scale it down and we'll just center that in the middle of the screen to quickly brush up on the other two methods again you can use shape layers by using the pen tool rectangle tool and just not selecting a layer and drawing you can round the edges you can shape everything the way you'd like or in adobe photoshop you can go and change this from pixels to centimeters and for a card i like doing something like 40 by 60 centimeters so we'll click create and then from here you can use photoshop to shape add different images add different text and graphics onto your card once you finish that up in photoshop you don't even have to save it as a png you can if you'd like you can always just save it as a photoshop project file and then you can bring that project file into after effects as a layer so that's also an option before we start to customize let's first set up our window and how we're going to get that 3d perspective so what i'm going to do first i'm actually going to go up to my toolbar here and i'm going to grab this rectangle tool and without selecting this layer because we don't want to draw a mask over it i'm just going to draw a little square around this window section so that we can have a nice reference as to the size that we're trying to create so with this shape layer 1 i'm going to rename this to window reference and we'll actually hide this layer for now so i'll just click the visibility button let's actually select that window reference solid and we'll click ctrl d to duplicate it and you'll see why we're going to do this in a moment we're going to right click on that second window reference and we're going to pre-compose it i'm going to name this new comp window and this is going to be the composition where we actually place things behind our card so we'll double click into that window comp and again here's our reference we want to place things within the size of this square so this is where you choose what you want behind your card so as an example what i did was i just looked up doge meme again you can use the google image tools you can put your color on transparent if you want to find some pngs so i ended up going with this gif right here transparent background and we have some movement in there which is nice so i'll click and i'll drag that into after effects like this and then i'm going to click v on my keyboard just to bring up my normal pointer and we'll position this inside the yellow window now what we want to do here is we want to set up some of our 3d depth and the way we do that is by clicking toggle switches and modes until we can see this 3d cube here and you want to enable the 3d layer for both of these so check so that there's a little cube and now what we can do let's create a little camera so that we can just see a different angle not just this forward looking 2d angle so we'll right click down here and we'll go to new and i'll create a camera and this is just temporary this is just so we can look around to control your camera you click c on your keyboard to cycle through these different camera controls you have your panning you're zooming in and out and then rotation so we'll just rotate a tiny bit and then i'll select the gif here and whenever we select this you'll see this three pronged axis this is your z-axis so this will move it back in z space let's grab it and we'll move it back a little bit in z space and then we'll also hide the window reference layer now we can hide the visibility of our camera this is again just so we can look at it the only use of this again is just so we can look at it in 3d space so we'll hide that and we'll pop back into our main composition and we'll show the window layer and now back in our main comp let's go back and click toggle switches and modes and we're going to enable 3d for all these main layers so make sure this is showing here this 3d layer switch enable that for everything and then again we're going to create another new camera so right click new camera click ok and if we click c here let's do the same thing let's rotate this hasn't really backed up in the window and the reasoning for doing that we need to enable this collapse transformation switch for any reason if you're pre comping and you're not seeing the 3d that you did always make sure collapse transformations is on and you'll see right when i check that on it's following the 3d that we set up earlier so now you can see 3d little doge here is a little bit behind our window so we have our meme in there but we don't have a background so let's go ahead and add a background so pop back into window you can choose whatever you like you can use some sort of iridescent holographic background like i like using you can create some little animations in after effects using anything you know how to do or any other tutorial also if you have any overlay objects you could just drag that behind there's a bunch of free ones on my website as well as i'm going to have this little motion graphics starter pack for sale on my website if you're interested so i could place that behind the gif i could scale it down again using this window reference you always want to keep it in the shape of that yellow square or whatever color your shape layer was now if we come back to our main comp here's what that looks like so you can tell we're immediately doing something wrong here and that's because we haven't made that background a 3d layer so popping back into window you always want to make everything in here a 3d layer and our doge is gone so let's click v and just drag the z-axis back a bit and back to our main comp now you guys can see our background fitting in well now it's kind of hard to tell just because this is a black background and it's kind of mixing in here i'll turn on transparency there's some parts in here where our background isn't really showing so to fix something like that you pop back into window click s and just scale it up now if you do something like that you see now it's kind of going around the outside edge so we're going to set up a little alpha mat just to cover up all these outside edges so to do that what you want to do is take your window reference layer that we hid before drag that above your window we're going to click toggle switches and mode so that we can see this little track matte drop down here and we're going to change our track matte to alpha matte window reference and now you see how that's staying within the set box that we created if for any reason it's messing up always select your window reference here and that's how you can change the size of it so if for example this is too small you may need to take your window reference that we're alpha matting and make any kind of adjustments but pretty easy we now have our little 3d extrusion within our card and of course if you guys don't want to use this background you can always go back on the internet look up iridescent texture if you want that sort of holographic look or just like a holographic texture try and find something that's royalty free save that and just drop that back into after effects so we'll drag that below our stars and then maybe we'll change the blending mode of these stars just so we can get something a little bit different if you're dropping in anything new always make that a 3d layer and take the z and move it behind everything so that's looking pretty cool again you can grab your camera you can check out how that's looking if you ever need to pop back in the window just scale things up the alpha matte takes care of the rest if you want to change any colors just look up a little hls effect drop that on there for some reason this changed to darken blending mode let's put that back on normal all right so creating our camera animation is pretty simple let's select our camera that we've been using just to rotate and check out what we've been creating so far let's go to transform and at the beginning here let's just reset this so it's at the default position here so what we're going to do is again at our very beginning of our animation we're going to click on these toggle animations and just drag down to keyframe all of them so we have eight seconds here let's move maybe about two seconds so just paying attention to the time code there so at two seconds i'm gonna click c on my keyboard to grab my little camera rotation i'm going to swivel that to the left so if i press play here is the animation i just created where it swivels to the left so let's move another two seconds so that we'll go to four and we'll just click this reset button now you'll see it'll swivel to the left and then go back to normal and now let's go another two seconds around six and let's swivel that to the right alright so we now have our camera movement if this is a little bit too slow for you you guys could always pull that in so maybe you want to do it every one second we'll drag the keyframe in there two seconds drag your keyframes in three seconds dragging your keyframes in closer is just going to make this a lot more of a fast animation so now when i play it through you'll see every one second creates a swivel just like that also if you guys want you can play around with the smoothing of these keyframes so you can select all of these right click keyframe assistant you can easy ease i don't like doing it in the middle here but you can do the same for here keyframe assistant if you really want to go down the rabbit hole with it you can change to your graph editor how smooth these animations are you can add some ramping that's all up to you guys we're just going to talk about the basics here all right so at this point you guys have the essential skills for creating something like this the only thing we really need to do now is customize and then i'm also going to show you some tips and tricks to take this to the next level so we'll talk about changing 2d elements into 3d only using after effects we'll talk about some post effects and of course we still need to customize so let's first do that so to customize the card here's your card at the very bottom i'm going to right click on it i'm going to pre-compose it just so we're not messing with our main comp we'll move all attributes into the new composition and i'll name this card always click toggle switches and modes here if anything messes up you want to make sure that's a 3d layer so that you're back to where you were before pop back into that card pre comp and let's start customizing let's just start with the basics let's add some text here so i'm going to grab my text tool draw a little box for our title and we'll name this doge let's go ahead and change the size of this because this is way too big over here on the right just make sure you're in your character tab something like that so i'll name it dogecoin place it in the middle there we'll add a little description apply this card for much wow you can actually turn these all into 3d layers in the pre comp so again click toggle switches and modes pop these on as 3d layers and we're going to do the same thing we're going to create another new camera just by right clicking new camera and again these little cameras in the pre comps are just to test so i'll click c and i'll just give it a little bit of side movement here now let's select our text so hold down shift and select both of them i'll click v just to bring up my normal pointer and then again grabbing our axis we can just bump this off of the card a little bit so that there's a little bit of distance in between there so now it looks a little bit more holographic a little bit more sci-fi turn off the camera and pop back into our main comp and if you're not seeing this happen in our main comp you always want to turn on this collapse transformation switch so that you can see the 3d changes that you did in your pre-comp so you'll see if i turn on my switch now we have a little bit of depth between the text so you can do that with text or you can do that with any other little elements that you want to apply into the card so if we go back to the card say we want to cover this up let's select our card control d to duplicate it and we'll rename this to cover up and i'm just going to go ahead and grab this little section we're pretty much going to be doing like a poor man's clone stamp here i'll click v and i'll cover that and then i'll click m bring up my mask and i'll feather it a tiny bit so now that's completely gone and we can add any other logos again if you guys if you guys use the photoshop route maybe you could follow along here take this into photoshop change it around whatever you guys want to do here so just by doing another google search i downloaded some different elements i wanted to throw in here's an actual little dogecoin that we can pop in there so we'll scale down our dogecoin and we'll use this as our little element type again this is just an example if you guys really put in the time you can make these super intricate i also took the exact same meme we used for the window and i placed it in this little top left corner so i'll click s scale that down and then i found this final little meme here we got a rocket dodge we're going to put that in our bottom right corner so we'll do the same thing we'll scale it down and super easy you can even take the edge of these and align it like so again if these run out of time ctrl d just to duplicate them and loop them now if you press play you have your little rocket doge going on there and just like that we now have some different elements to our card you guys want to if you have all these layers from the loops hold down shift right click and just pre-comp them we'll name that rocket doge always make sure that these are 3d layers so you want to just click and drag down turn it all on for 3d if you don't do that then when you go back to your main comp these might just be all messed up and not applying the way you want but this is looking pretty cool already so now let me show you one of the most useful tricks you guys can use when creating this kind of 2d 3d mix card and that is changing things from 2d to 3d using only after effects and this is super easy as an example we're going to use this little ethereum logo here so i literally just looked up on google images ethereum logo let's drag that into after effects in our main comp since our main comp is all set up with our camera everything's a 3d layer all you need to do is just enable this ethereum logo as a 3d layer and since we have our camera set up if we press play you'll see that this is moving with the camera so now let's just move this to the side i'll click s to scale it down i'll maybe move it over here make sure you guys are paying attention to your z-axis so if you want this closer to the camera you drag that out and now you can see how that's reacting this looks a little bit flat you can tell it's a 2d image let's extrude this to be 3d so to do that all you need to do is right click on the element that you like to extrude and you can do this with anything on your card as well your logo etc let's just do it with the f so we'll right click on here we're going to pre-compose it and move all attributes in the new comp we'll name this 3d ethereum and click ok again make sure you check back on this as a 3d layer those are probably the main little details that are going to mess people up in this make sure you always keep in the 3d in check so we're going to double click in that 3d ethereum layer and what i'm going to do is i'm just going to select the layer and i'm going to click p on my keyboard to bring up position right click on position and we're going to go to separate dimensions so now our x y and z axis are all in a different dimension they're not they're not all in that same slider so we can now keyframe each of those individually go to your z position you're going to hold down alt on your keyboard and you're going to click that little toggle and that's going to set a little expression here it's going to turn red and pop this up all you need to do is type the word index and click enter or just click away so now that we've done that let's go ahead and set up a new camera so we're going to right click new and create a camera again this is just for testing so we'll click c and give it a little bit of room here now select our ethereum before we start doing anything crazy let's go to our effects and presets and we're going to search for a brightness and contrast and drop that on aetherium we're going to make that dark and you're going to see the reason why but just make that darker and now select the ethereum and just start clicking ctrl d so we're going to spam it ctrl d and every time you see i click it you're going to see how this extrudes more and more and more you can choose how much you want this to be extruded and now we pretty much have a 3d ethereum logo just by extruding with those 2d layers so on the very top logo here after you've clicked ctrl d a bunch of times you click on the brightness and contrast and you delete it so now it looks normal and you have that depth that's why we darken the back so that you can kind of see that depth let's go ahead and delete the camera here because we don't need that let's pop back into our main composition and now you can see it's not 3d yet and that's because we need to turn on collapse transformation so make sure you're always doing that here's the difference you can see all those logos that are kind of extruded now we have a 3d ethereum so that's creating 3d all by just using 2d layers within after effects super useful all right guys so those are the main tools that you guys need for creating a 3d card the last thing i'm going to leave you with is just some post effects that work great for a card like this so of course you always want to be using your after effects glow this can kind of add a little bit of shine to everything we'll place that on our card layer everything looks ugly at first and that's because we need to take our glow radius in our top left effect controls and we need to bump that up so bump down our threshold and then another great one especially for something like these cards is cc light sweep so we'll go to our effects and presets search for cc light sweep place that on our card and this is going to give you this little control here where you can add this little sweep that goes across your card super nice so at this position here we'll just keyframe our center drag a bit and we'll just have our center sweep across you can even just use this little target and pull it down so with the keyframe here's what we created just a little sweep that goes over the card now what you guys can do here is you can bump up the width just to make that a little bit bigger and you can even take this and you can place it above the glow if you want so that the glow will affect the light sweep it's really up to you adds a nice little touch in my opinion another cool thing you can do if you want to match that light sweep lighting with your ethereums with your other logos or whatever you have floating around your card click on that light sweep control c to copy it select everything else so hold down shift and ctrl v to paste it and sometimes the key frames won't match up so if we open them up open up effects open up light sweep maybe just drag the keyframes back and over the little ethereums as well if you guys want to take this a step further and apply some 3d using the element 3d plug-in again you would have to have this but it's extremely easy to add into here so you just need to right click go to new and create a new solid we're gonna name that 3d in your effects and presets of course make sure you've downloaded and installed element 3d from video copilot place that on your solid and then click on scene setup and once you've done that you need to bring in your 3d model i've i made a video talking about the best places to find free 3d models so if you want to check that out i'll link it down below but let's just load in this easy obj i'm going to use auto normals here and then i'll load in one of these pre-shaders pack comes with element 3d and just plop it on there then i'll click normalize size here it's one of these first check boxes and then i'll click ok so all i need to do let's just hide the window layer that we created earlier let's take this element 3d layer and drag it below card extruded and then let's go to group 1 create group null and then click create this is going to create a little null which you can use to control your element 3d layer a lot easier so i'll rename that to 3d control and then if i open up the transform options here i can take my position and i can position it like such and that way since this is 3d you can kind of see it poking through the card it's already tracked because we have our 3d camera all set up previously so you can use the exact same steps and then if you really want to we go to our settings for element 3d i like going to render settings and then i like going to ambient inclusion enabling it and turning on ray trace i can also go to lighting here and then add lighting you can choose any of these presets to get some different preset looks for your 3d just a quick little tutorial showing you guys the tools to create your own cards again i think that one of the big i think one of the most useful things you can take is that 3d extrusion you can do it to the card as well if you'd like and even if you're not using this for nfts maybe you just want to create some cool cards or maybe you want to take the tricks from this video and apply it to whatever else it is you are creating as always guys thank you so much for watching thank you so much for supporting and i'll see you guys

Channel: Max Novak

Views: 130,165

Keywords: nft, create, tutorial, how to, 3d, digital, collectible, card, max novak, art, tut, how to make nfts, rarible, foundation, meme, crypto, pixel, dave hanson, tokens, non fungible, logan paul, pokemon, crypto punks, nifty, beeple, bitcoin express, andrei jikh, adobe, after effects, premiere, mint, amv, glow, preset, pack, plugin, free

Id: tt3YfPec6w4

Length: 21min 19sec (1279 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 21 2021