How to Create a 3D Card Effect in After Effects | PremiumBeat.com

hey guys in this tutorial we're going to create a 3d card effect entirely in after effects there's also going to be a free project file that's included with plenty of assets that you guys can use to follow along and build your own card [Music] all right guys as i mentioned we're going to create a 3d card effect in after effects i've seen several examples of this effect on reddit and on twitter so we're going to look at how to build this effect entirely from scratch you can even use these techniques to scan existing cards and make them 3d or even use the effect with 3d plugins in after effects like element 3d now as i mentioned there is a free project file that you guys can download from the blog post and a link for that will be in the description the project file includes many different icons and 3d card scenes that i created in after effects so you can use those assets to follow along and if you want to you can dive into the scenes i created to break them down even further i've even included a project that has some 3d card scenes using element 3d so if you have that plug-in you can explore those as well however no plug-ins are required to create the 3d card that we're going to create today so let's go ahead and jump over to after effects and get started all right let's start by creating a new composition i'm just going to call this my main scene i'm going to have this be a 1920 by 1080 composition at 24 frames per second and a little bit over 10 seconds long now for the background you can create any background you want in the project file with the assets there i have a background image that i'm just going to use someone drag and drop that into my composition you can just see it's kind of a gradient falloff background now let's go ahead and create our actual card shape so i'm just going to right click here in the gray area and go to new solid i'm going to call this the card back and i'm going to have this be 600 pixels by 800 pixels and for the color i'm just going to kind of make this like a darker purple color something kind of like that will work for starting out and then go ahead and click ok however i want the card to have kind of rounded corners here you can see they're sharp corners right now so with my card selected i'm gonna come up here and i'm gonna select the rectangle tool i'm gonna click and hold you're gonna see we get this rounded rectangle tool and once you have that selected just go ahead and double click it and that will automatically add rounded corners to whatever layer we're working with so if i turn on the mask visibility here you can kind of see it just added a mask and it rounded off those corners that's going to look a lot nicer and now i want to create an edge going around this card it's going to be holographic and we'll work on that a little bit later but we need to create another solid here that will kind of act as that line around the card and the first step to doing this is we're actually going to select our card back and i'm going to hit ctrl d or command d on a mac and we're going to duplicate that we'll come back to that in just a second now let's go ahead and let's right click here we're going to do another solid i'm gonna call this the edge matte and i want this to be a little bit smaller i'm gonna have it be 580 by 780 and for the color it really doesn't matter but i'm just going to make it a different color so it's easier for us to see this go ahead and click ok so now if i zoom in here a little bit you're going to see it's just a little bit smaller than our original card we also need to apply those round edges to this edge mat so with it selected just come here to the rectangle tool and i already have that rounded rectangle tool selected so i'm just going to double click it and that will automatically apply those rounded corners to that so i'm going to select that duplicate copy of the card back that we created and let's come up here to layer go to solid settings let's go ahead and change the color of this as well just so we can see this i want to make this kind of a white color again we'll be able to change this later go ahead and click new so now we need to do is we just want to have that edge remain so with that duplicate card back selected i'm going to come here to track matte we're going to select alpha inverted matte now we'll actually look at that edge mat we created so now we're getting that edge around our card and just to clean this up a little bit let's go ahead and select that duplicate hold shift and select the edge matte let's go over here to layer and then pre-compose i'll just call this the edge outline and make sure move all attributes into a new composition is selected and go ahead and click ok now let's go ahead and create another solid for the actual window we're going to use to kind of see our 3d image through so i'm just going to right click here again let's do a new solid i'm going to name this the image window and the size is going to be 500 by 400. i'm just going to make this kind of an off gray color and go ahead and click ok now with it selected i'm going to go ahead and double click on the rounded rectangle tool again to give that some rounded corners and this is optional but if you want to have a holographic outline around the edge of this we need to create one more solid to do this so i'll just go ahead and do that really quickly so i'm going to right click here do a new solid we'll call it window edge and for the width i'm going to have it be 510 by 410. i'm just gonna go ahead and make that a white color go ahead and click ok and click ok again now we can see that i actually want to move that below our image window so now we can zoom in here we can actually see that outline again we're going to need to have that window edge selected go ahead and double click on the rounded rectangle tool to make those corners rounded so now let's go ahead and select the image window hold shift and select the window edge and i'm just going to move both of these up a little bit here i'm going to hold shift again here to kind of move those just vertically and reposition those on the card just so they're a little higher above center there and now we're at a point where we can add all the other text elements or anything else you want to have on the card that's actually going to be holographic we're going to do some things in after effects it's going to give it more kind of a chrome reflective look but now we can go ahead and add all of those layers at once on your card so i'm going to select the text tool and i'm going to zoom in here and click on the top part of the card so i'm just going to type extra life and let me go ahead and select the selection tool here and let's go ahead let's change the color of this to white just so it's easier to see and i'm going to scale this down a little bit on the size and if you need to align a little bit easier you can always open up the align window from the window menu here and i'm just going to line that up to the center there make sure it's perfectly centered now i'm going to add some secondary text down here kind of descriptive text and once i have that typed out i'm just going to go ahead and align that text here with the center here maybe reposition it and if you want to add any other extra text like you know copyright stuff down here any other icons like if it's a rare card or any other elements you want to have on here that you want to be holographic feel free to add those i'm just going to add these two things for now just so we can kind of get through the tutorial the examples that i'm going to have included in the project file will be a little more intricate so you can always dive in and check that out as well now let's go ahead and pre-compose all of the holographic elements that we're going to have on our card together again it's going to make things a lot easier so for this i'm actually going to move both of these text layers below the image window and so what we want to select here is the edge outline i'm going to hold shift the window edge and both of our text that we created and again any other layers you want to have that are holographic so with all these selected let's come here to layer then go to pre-compose now i'm just going to title this hologram area and go ahead and click ok so now all of our holographic areas are on one layer i'm going to toggle that on and off if i want to just to see that now let's go ahead and make the card and the other elements actually 3d it's almost like the image window here and you're going to see we have this 3d icon right there so i'm going to check that on to be a 3d layer and do the same thing for the hologram area and for the card back so all three of these are now 3d now we're not actually going to rotate the card itself we're actually going to use a camera and a null object to kind of rotate around the card this ensures that everything's going to work later when we kind of do some 3d stuff so what i'm going to do here is i want to right click let's do a new camera and i'll just have it be camera 1 i'll have it be a 50 millimeter and go ahead and click ok and to control the camera i want to use a no object so i'm going to right click again let's do a no object and with that null object selected it's going to make it 3d as well then i'm going to select the camera and come over here to the pick whip here if you don't see that you might need to hit f4 on your keyboard and i'm just going to click on that pick whip and drag it up to the null so now our null controls the camera and if we have the null selected and we hit r for rotation that's going to bring up all the rotation options and on the y rotation here if i just adjust this we can now see the card is actually in 3d space and we're kind of navigating around the card in a cool way so in the future for the animation we're actually going to use these rotation options on the null to do our keyframes and again to animate anything we want to do with the card for the time being i'm actually going to turn off the visibility of the null object here just so we don't see it on our composition now let's go ahead and add some fake counter reflections to our hologram layers and what i've got here in the assets is this hologram colors image and i'm just going to bring this in i'll place it on top of everything here so we can see it so you can see it's just kind of a rainbow chrome effect here and this is what we're going to use to kind of emulate those chrome reflections for our hologram areas so what i'm going to do is i'm going to place this hologram colors image directly below our hologram area composition and with it selected we're going to come over here to the track matte and select alpha matte and now you can see that hologram layer is showing up wherever that hologram area composition was on our text any other elements we wanted for that if i come back over to the null object hit rotation because that image layer is just a flat layer it's going to kind of work well to kind of create some kind of cool reflections here when we rotate around the card if you want to as well on that hologram colors layer you can select it i'm going to come here to effect and under color correction i'm going to select a curves effect and i might bump this up here on the exposure a little bit if you want to brighten that up a little bit as well one other quick tip here is if i zoom in here and if we rotate around the card you might notice a little bit of moire edging at the top if that does occur that's because the card back is the exact same size as the hologram area edge here so it's kind of multiple layers stacked up and that can kind of create a more effect sometimes so one quick tip i would give you for this is select your card back and hit s on the keyboard for scale and just scale this down to 99 percent it's just going to make it a little bit smaller but you can't notice it because again it's hidden by the card edge there but that can help reduce some of the moire or aliasing edging you might get around the card now let's start creating the actual 3d window area itself and so for this let's come back over to our project panel here and we're going to create a new composition now i'm just going to name this the image window comp i'm gonna have it be a full hd comp just as before same frame rate go ahead and click ok now let's come back over to our main scene composition just for one second we're gonna select our image window i'm gonna hit ctrl c command c on a mac and we're gonna copy that later come back over to our image window comp control v to paste that command v to paste if you're on a mac and this is going to kind of work as a guide for us as we create our 3d scene i'm going to hit t on the keyboard with our image window selected i'm going to lower the opacity of this to 50 because we're actually going to delete it but just again serving as a quick guide for us the next thing i'm going to do i'm going to right click here i'm going to do a new solid and this is just going to be a quick background for us i'm just going to title it bg make sure it's comp size and for the color i'm gonna say this to be completely black for the time being go ahead and click okay and just move that very bottom of everything now let's go ahead and add in our icon or whatever image we want to use with our card i've included quite a few assets with the project file i'm gonna use this 8-bit heart so i'm going to drag and drop this into our composition the first thing i want to do is i want to check on for that to be a 3d layer then i'm going to hit s with it selected for scale and i'm going to scale this down maybe about 45 let's go ahead and reposition this up a little bit here so it's kind of in the center and let me right click here we're gonna do a new camera and this is just gonna be a temporary camera for us but it's gonna allow us to kind of navigate around here so i'm just gonna cycle through and select the orbit tool here and just look around this now so in order for us to get a little bit of a parallax effect it's going to kind of give that card that 3d depth we need to move this heart a little further back in z space so with the heart selected here i'm going to hit p for position and the very last number group here is the z position so i'm just going to increase this up a bit you can see it's moving behind that layer now i'm going to set this to be 100 and now if we kind of look at this from the front window now we can kind of see it has some depth to it and that's really kind of the secret for creating this effect now let's go ahead and add in some sparkles you can create these yourself but i've also included a layer for that i've got these sparkle shapes here so i'm going to drag and drop this into the composition let's go ahead and make that 3d then we'll hit s on the keyboard for that to bring up the scale scale is down to 50 percent and we're going to do a few copies of this so i'm going to move this back in z space a little bit as well so it's behind the heart here so if we orbit around we can see that i may need to reposition it up a little bit as well i'm gonna hit p on the keyboard for position i'm gonna set this one to be 200 so again it's just a little bit further back behind the heart gonna create more parallax for us and let's create two more copies of that so i'm actually going to duplicate that ctrl d to duplicate it and for position i'm going to move this back to 300 and i'm going to move it over a little bit to the side and let's go ahead and control d to duplicate that again we're going to move that another copy over to the other side so we have kind of multiple copies behind us here if you look at this from the front we can kind of see it's creating some nice parallax with all those sparkles and the heart there kind of behind everything and this just kind of gives you a general idea of how you kind of create that depth through the image window of the card now what we need to do is i'm going to come down here i'm going to close all these up and we need to select our image window i'm going to turn off the visibility for that because we no longer need to see that we just need to see our actual kind of 3d scene here we've created now let's navigate back to our main scene now you can see we still have our image window layer in our main scene so let's come up here and let's select our image window composition that we just created we want to place this directly below that image window layer and we're going to set our image window composition here under track matte we're going to set that to be an alpha matte so now it shows up through that image window layer now if we go to the null object right now and hit r for rotation if we start rotating around this you're going to see it's not exactly honoring the 3d scene that we created in our other composition there's one simple thing we need to do to fix this we scroll down here to our image window composition you're going to see we have this option here which is called collapse transformations and it basically tells after effects to honor the 3d scene we have in our other composition so what we're going to do is we're just going to turn that on it's little sun icons what it kind of looks like there and now once we have that turned on if we come back up here to our rotation for the null object we rotate around we can now see we're getting that 3d depth and parallax effect on our card so now if you wanted to you could just come in here and you could keyframe the rotation of this null object and you could create whatever animation you wanted to there with it looping or however you see fit but that's essentially the basic techniques used to create a 3d card effect like this now let's take a look at a few ways we can refine the look of our 3d card and make it look a little more polished so the first thing i want to do is want to add a little bit of texture here to our sparkles behind our icon so let's dive back into the image window composition here and a quick way we can add some texture to this do a similar alpha matte technique so i'm gonna select all the sparkle shapes i'm gonna hold shift with all those selected let's come here to layer and then pre-compose and i'm just gonna title this sparkles 3d and let's go ahead and click ok now it's going to kind of move those into a flat space because they're no longer 3d but what we need to do is we need to select that collapse transformations option again here so check on that sun icon for that layer and now you can see if we orbit around everything here we're going to see it's going to honor that so now those are still in 3d space so i'm going to come back over here and i'll select that hologram colors image i've got i'm going to place it directly below the sparkle's 3d composition and with it selected i'm going to come over to track matte and set it to be alpha matte so now you can see that color is showing up on those sparkles one thing we may need to do is move our heart icon here whatever icon you're using above everything else just so it shows up above them and the sparkles aren't kind of accidentally being projected in front of them so now when i order around here we can kind of see that and when i move around because of the way this mat is working it's going to kind of change the colors of those sparkles through the movement now if we navigate back over to the main scene and we can use the null rotation here we can kind of see how that looks with the sparkles changing colors now let's jump back over to the image window composition again if you want to add in a background here whether it be a color an image you have a few different options you can do for that as well so one really quick and easy thing you can do is just select your background layer here and we can add in a gradient so i'll come here to effect under generate we can select gradient ramp and i'm just going to set this to two similar colors for our background i like to use kind of darker color tones now we can jump back over to our main scene and you can see now we have a background on that as we rotate around but again you can also add an image as well so let's jump back over to the image window composition and i'm gonna go ahead and turn off that gradient ramp but i still want to leave this background layer on it's completely black just a nice idea to do that so you don't accidentally get an alpha channel coming through when you don't want it now let's come back over to the project panel and i'm going to select that hologram colors layer again i'm just going to drag this in on top of everything here i'm going to solo it because i want to show you a quick technique i'm going to use for this so i actually want to have a little bit of feather on the edge of this it's going to look a little bit nicer when it's kind of rotating in 3d space so with that hologram colors layer selected i'm just going to double click here on the rectangle tool to give us a mask go ahead and turn it on we can see that and under the mask options here i'm going to go to the expansion i'm going to bring this in quite a bit and i'm going to add a lot of feather onto this i just want to kind of feather it out to black here so it's black right at the edge but having that feather there will look a lot nicer later on so i'm gonna go ahead and unsolo that now and let's move this down to the very bottom of everything just above our background i'm gonna turn it on to be 3d and for position i'm gonna hit p there i'm gonna move this back in z space to about 500 or so so it's a lot farther back than everything else in our scene if i go ahead and orbit around here we can see that and let's go ahead and lower the opacity of this as well so hit t on the keyboard i'm gonna set this on something like 60 and another thing you might want to do is add a subtle blur to this so with that selected i'm gonna come here to effect and under blur i'm gonna add a directional blur onto this one let's go ahead and increase the blur length here quite a bit so it pretty much removes all the texture we have just a little bit remaining now if we jump back over to our main scene and we rotate around this now you can see we have a background here and you can see the purpose of that feather is kind of help this fall off when it kind of goes over to this black area because we're going to get to a point where you can actually see around the background and if this happens one option you can have is come back over to the image window comp and i'm going to select the background layer we've got there and hit s for scale and we can scale this up a lot if we come back over to our main scene it's going to kind of help reduce how quick you can kind of see that falling off so now it's just right at the very end there and because we have that feather it looks a little more natural so it's a nice solution you can use for that let's jump back over to the image window comp again and i did want to show you this really quickly because one of the map examples i had kind of shows the map kind of fold in and the way i'm doing that is i've just selected whatever icon i've got here and there's an effects and presets here there's an effect called page turn you can see here cc page turn i just apply that to the map layer and you can see you can adjust the fold position that's going to kind of create this simulated fold-in effect and that's all i did for that map icon again that'll be in the project file you can explore that a little bit more but i didn't want to show you kind of how i did that as well let's jump back over to our main scene and we can apply a glow effect here to our hologram areas and the way we're going to do this is i'm just going to right click here let's do a new adjustment layer i'm going to move this adjustment layer directly above our hologram area so it's kind of in the middle of everything here i'm just going to hit enter let's go ahead and rename this glow and with that adjustment layer selected let's come here to effect and under stylize go ahead and select glow and i'm going to refine this quite a bit i'm going to set it to be 70 for the threshold and for the radius let's expand that out to 70 as well so you can see kind of that glow effect coming through you can adjust the intensity if you want to but now as we rotate around this we're going to see kind of how that looks another effect i like to do is add a light sweep kind of on the window area of the card it's really simple and easy to do as well so i'm going to select our image window comp down here and with it selected come to effect and come down here to generate we're going to select this cc light sweep you can see it's going to add that light sweep that we can then keyframe on the card so for the shape i'm going to set this to be smooth and then for the width i'll go ahead and increase that quite a bit and you can adjust the intensity if you want for the edge intensity here on this one i'm actually going to turn it off and so what you would do with this is you just keyframe this across using the center here so as kind of your cards rotating i'll just do a quick keyframe with this so you can see it so i'll move the very beginning here keyframe the center let's move down to two seconds and just move this across so now if we ram preview this you can see we're getting that light sweep across the card so it's just a matter of kind of faking that key framing it as you're rotating it in 3d space to create that kind of reflective look finally i want to show you this really quickly and this is adding a back to the card so you can kind of see i have an animation here and this is included with the project file as well but the way you can do this to add it back on the card is i've just duplicated that card back originally that we started with and i pre-composed and kind of created i'll show you here just created the back for the card and so what i've actually done here is with the rotation with the no object here for the camera what i've done is once it gets to the very side of the card right here i just switch everything over so again so that card back comes into play and so that's how you can actually reveal kind of the back of the card there because if i didn't have this here if i just turn this off if i select all these layers if i just brought them back out here you can see we just kind of invert the card and that's not what you want so that's why we kind of fake it here by having that card back layer turn on right as it gets to the side of the card all right now let's quickly take a look at creating this effect using 3d plugins in after effects plugins like element 3d stardust or any other 3d plugins you might have so you can see in this example i'm using an element 3d layer here kind of in 3d space that we can see through the card so it gives it a really cool effect let me show you guys how you can set this up because it's a little bit different there's one extra step it requires so let's jump back over to this other composition and i'm also using element 3d here but you can see let's dive into the image window comp and that's we're actually going to create our element 3d object so i've got element 3d in here and you can see i'm just navigating around here with the camera but you'll notice when we jump back over to our actual composition our main scene the rotation here it's not honoring that 3d space uh with the collapse transformations on so you actually want to have that turned off in this particular situation we're using element 3d so i've got it turned off and what we have to do here is we need to copy and paste the camera from our main scene into our element 3d composition so i'm going to select the camera and the null object here for this scene and hit ctrl c to copy those and i'm just going to dive into that image window composition which again has our element 3d layers in it i'm going to delete whatever camera i was using in here kind of as a temporary camera and i'm just going to go ahead and ctrl v to paste that and now you can see so what it's done is i hit you here we can see the keyframes and now the camera in this scene is moving exactly the same as the one in our main scene so if we jump back over to our main scene we can now see it's going to rotate exactly the same here for this as the card and that's going to give us that 3d effect there because the cameras in both scenes are moving exactly the same way but that's how you would set that up for element 3d or any of the 3d plugins if you want to have those kind of viewable through the window of the card if you have elements 3d if you're still a little unsure about how you might set this up i'm going to include two element 3d scenes with the project file again you'll need the element 3d plugin to actually view these but i just use the starter models that come with the plugin so you can dive into those scenes as well and you kind of see how they're set up and how everything's working all right guys hopefully you enjoyed this tutorial and got some ideas to create your own 3d cards be sure to download that project file and again i'm charles with premiumbeat and i'll catch you guys on the next one you

Channel: PremiumBeat by Shutterstock

Views: 161,457

Keywords: After Effects, Motion Design, MoGraph, Easy After Effects, AE tutorial

Id: _nEXlqlzZt4

Length: 25min 3sec (1503 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 29 2020