HOW TO MAKE A 3D MUSIC VISUALIZER LIKE: THE WEEKND SAVE YOUR TEARS | Adobe After Effects Tutorial

what's going on guys welcome back to the channel i've recently been watching these uh weekend animated music videos and i thought there's a lot of really cool stuff that we could pull from make some tutorials on so i'm going to plan a three-part mini-series here this is going to be video number one of that i'm going to show you a lot of things that you can do in after effects to create a music visualizer a music video like this and even if you aren't trying to completely recreate something like this i think that this video in particular and a lot of the other videos i'm going to show you are going to give you a really strong tool set when it comes to being able to make your own music visualizers being able to incorporate some of these things into your music videos into whatever video you are trying to make so we're gonna hop into after effects i'm gonna give you guys the basics on how to create something like this where you have this car going down this light tunnel and there's a lot of really interesting things happening here now in part two the next video that i want to make after this i want to go into cinema 4d and give you a 3d perspective on how to do this and show you how to fully construct something like this in 3d because there's a lot of advantages of that in this video we are going to touch on some 3d but we're not going to fully dive into it as much as part two and i mentioned this is a three-part series so this is gonna be the after effects part two is gonna be all 3d the third video that i want to make is actually on the blinding lights visualizer that they made i want to show you guys how you could create something like this where it's a full on 3d performance 3d experience so i'm going to get a motion capture suit i'm going to look into some cheap ways to get some motion capture things going i'm going to try and recreate this as best as i can so i hope you are excited leave a like if you do want to see those too and let's go and hop right into adobe after effects so we're gonna start in premiere and i'm gonna use a dynamic link but of course you guys could always just start in after effects but anyways to set up my dynamic link i'm just going to create a transparent video layer here in adobe premiere like this i'm going to right click on it and i'm going to replace it with after effects composition only reason i'm doing that is so later on i can just color grade using premiere at the very end just because that's my own preference but either way here we are in adobe after effects i can just delete this transparent video and this is pretty much just a placeholder with my little dynamic link that i have here let's start with the light tunnel this is the main essence of our environment so we're going to start off here by just right clicking and creating a solid and let's just go ahead and make a black solid for now click ok let's right click down here and create another new solid and this time we're going to make a white solid if i go up to my effects and presets here i can look up a little cc starburst effect place that on my white solid and now as you see you kind of have this light these particles coming towards you even though technically this layer in of itself is 2d you have that 3d kind of going through space having these lights coming towards you look so you can do a lot with that and of course i'm gonna try and show you this with as minimal plug-ins as possible obviously once we get to the 3d we're going to need to use some plug-ins so we'll keep that for later but in terms of designing the look here you can replace something like this with something like the particular plug-in from red giant but there are a lot of alternatives but i'll try and keep it as as vanilla after effects as possible we're going to look up cc light burst place light burst onto your white solid here you're going to see that these little dots now kind of turn into streaks now you'll notice that these rays kind of look like they're pulling towards the camera instead of going forward so let's just set the ray length here in our effect controls for light burst to negative so let's try maybe negative 60. and now you'll see it looks like we're traveling forward it looks like these light rays are coming towards us now up in our cc starburst here let's actually kind of bump up our grid spacing so that this isn't such a tight cluster so let's maybe put this up to something like 15 and you can also adjust the scatter here and the speed so you have those available to you if you need them now we kind of have these looking a little bit more blocky than we want so let's just grab the ray length here it's at negative it's at negative 60 right now let's just bump that up to negative 100. last thing we're going to apply here is a matte choker effect and you'll see everything goes away you can grab this little choke value here we're going to place this we're going to place this at negative 125 and then last but not least it's a little bit too blocky let's take the size under cc starburst and just lower that down so this kind of just looks like beams of light and this is pretty accurate for what we're looking for this is the main thing we're trying to recreate uh once it gets to around this part you can make these streaks a little bit longer you'll see there's sort of a lens effect here so let's go ahead and apply that next maybe you want to keep dropping that ray length so it matches the video a bit more and now let's add our lens so we're going to look up cc lens and drop that onto our solid here now you can take the size and just kind of push that however you would like all right so now let's start tweaking the look and adding the color of this we're going to right click down here and we're going to create a new adjustment layer we're going to apply a channel blur so apply your channel blur here and this is going to make it so it's only going to colorize the specific lines that we want without having to tweak anything so if you just bump up your red blurriness you'll see that you'll start getting blue with these with this red edge it's also check to repeat edge pixels here and let's go ahead and apply a glow so we'll use the base after effects glow and then you guys can use this little glow value to change the look how you want maybe you kind of want to just use it as highlights here let's go ahead and just put up the radius just to really see how that glow is reacting make it look like some laser light beams now when it comes to building the environment of your scene placing in your car placing in the tunnel so right click new solid and a link to element 3d will be down below if you need it let's name this one rode so drop the element plug-in onto that solid here now let's go ahead and click scene setup so this is this is as easy as just going to create and just making a plane here and let's just grab the size and just make it a longer plane i'm gonna go to google images and i'm just gonna look up road texture just right click on one you like go ahead and just save the image and then popping back into after effects if you open up this little plain model this is the texture if you select that you're going to see your textures menu here so you have your diffuser glossy you don't need to know a lot about this just click on diffuse here and then click load texture open up that little road image that we just saved so as simple as that so now we have the diffuse and you'll see that this is oriented the wrong way so to fix that we could just go into the uv transform but to make it easier let's just click on the plane and instead of making this the long part of it let's just make this a little bit longer bump up your size x and click okay let's go and right click and create a new camera and if you just click c and you rotate a bit there's your road i'm going to open up my render settings option here i'm going to go to physical environments and i'm just gonna bump that down a tiny bit and if we click back in scene setup speaking of physical environments you guys can load in any custom environment to be able to reflect here so if you go on the internet and if you just search up like neon free hdri click here and you can save this for free so once you've saved something like that if you do want to mess around with your environment here you just go and click to load it in and there you go so now you can see how this is going to reflect with the road so you'll see your uv offset here as you see if i move that you're going to see the reflection really start to change we can also click on here and if you'd like you can even go and look up a little puddle texture just by searching puddle normal map on google images i've already got this saved so if you just look this up huddle normal or roughness map here's what it looks like just try and save something like that let's open this up in our glossiness and now you're going to see that projected onto our road and you can kind of lower the value to get a mix of the reflectance and now we just have a lot more realism in our road than we did before all right so i positioned my road now we need to make the camera animation so go to your camera transform options at the beginning of your video just click and drag down to keyframe now you just drag for however long you want this animation to be and i'm just going to click c on my keyboard to move forward here i'm just going to click and drag forward and let's drag these keyframes all the way in here's our timeline as you can see let's maybe make this like a three second animation if you want it's even easier just grab your position value here um i'm gonna start here actually so there you go we have a road now we're going pretty quick we're traveling pretty fast through time and space now we're going to use element 3d again and we're going to create a little tunnel shape because if you look in the original example here a lot of this is just this tunnel shape over top and you can kind of see the bend so let's see what we can do to create this tunnel and this is going to come in handy later because you can use these tunnel 3d tricks that i'm about to show you to make any of these crazy animations in the shape of the tunnel so let's create the tunnel so i'm going to grab my 3d road layer i'm going to click ctrl d to duplicate it so we're going to open up element here i'm going to click scene setup and i'm going to delete both plane models off here so we're going to start from scratch now what we're going to do now is we're going to go to create and i'm going to create this little sphere and if i select this tube here i'm going to grab my orientation and i want to position this so that i can fully see it so let's put this at 90. this is going to determine how straight edge this is so if we bump up the sides you're going to see it's going to get more straight if you lower the sides you can even make it a triangle if you wanted to or just kind of maybe like this hexagon shape now let's raise the height so that this is a longer tube and i think that's a little overkill and let's go ahead and just click ok on this for now so there's our little 3d tube go to world transform we're going to grab our position that brings us closer to the camera so it's our x because we just rotated a little bit earlier so now it just looks like we're in this gray space here what i'm going to do is show you a little trick where we can have our light tunnel be the actual texture for this cylinder tunnel so to do that just select this let's actually rename this to 3d tunnel let's actually place this in a layer below the road so we can see the road in here while we're doing this and there now you see the little light at the end of the tunnel so that's nice select 3d tunnel and we're going to go to where it says custom layers here open up custom texture maps and now what we're going to do is i'm going to grab all these solids and adjustment layers the little light wall that we made before i'm going to right click i'm going to pre-compose them together i'll just name this light beam so clicking on 3d tunnel again we have our custom texture maps layer 1 we're going to select light beams source effects and mask now if we go back into scene setup this is a really awesome feature of element 3d that i don't think a lot of people utilize you can open up your model click on the little texture here and where it says and where it says diffuse instead of loading in some sort of custom texture or some glossy texture you can actually just click this drop down and use your custom layer and this is and this counts for animated textures as well so once we click ok here and okay up in the top right and there you go now you can see our tunnels kind of rotating over the top looks pretty cool so now we have our light tunnel going through and if you want to even make this a little bit better click t and lower the opacity on this even more so you can kind of have the shape of the tunnel but ultimately you have but you can still see those light beams on the outside going through and you can see how things are really starting to shape up so that's really some of our basics i showed you how to do those custom layers here what you could do is you could change the custom layers to change the different designs or you could even control d to duplicate the 3d tunnel and i'll rename this to design two just try and find some little overlay to look up something like a glitch um or maybe even like a shock wave i think that'll be a little bit better these are all just little overlays elements if you want to find some free ones just look at my website we have a lot of assets of course you can just google if you want some free shockwaves or anything just find some free assets out there that you'd like to use for your background for your visualizer whatever it is download them drag them into your composition so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to make this a custom layer as well back into design number two let's go to our custom layers and let's change this to shockwave just make it source so now as you see if i press play tunnel number two is going to have my shockwave animation kind of stretched in this tunnel shape which is really great um and another thing i should mention here green add there you go it just kind of it kind of adds into what you're able to do here and if you want to change the way that this is being projected in this tunnel you just go back to your scene setup once more click on your defuse and you kind of just and let's maybe add some repeat it's also bad some offset we're just gonna really see what happens here and there you go now you have a completely different thing so you can really do a lot of interesting stuff using those custom layers applying them to different shapes maybe if you want instead of changing around blindly the custom layer you could go to world transform and you could use your x rotation this is pretty cool let's maybe have it like this let's actually bring in another little overlay this time let's bring in a little glitch now we can just hide the layer because we don't need that we just need it in the comp you can select design three i'll just name this design glitches and i'll go to my custom layers once more and i'll change this to my glitches keep it on source again and there you go now you've got your glitch going on in your tunnel so just like that and i think this really shows the power of doing it in after effects i do want to show how to do it in 3d but you have a lot at your disposal in after effects especially if you pick up something like element 3d so you can go out of the tunnel or we can create some little transitions okay guys so to transition from our first after effects environment to the next this is pretty this is a little bit complicated i think for a lot of people especially because we're combining this effect here with this 3d tunnel so i'm going to go ahead and just give you the overall gist of it i'm not going to go too in detail because i think it would eat up a lot of time in this tutorial instead what i'm going to do is i'm going to create a full separate step-by-step guide for this and i'm going to link it on the screen now so i'm still going to briefly show you how to do this and give you my explanation i'm going to go more in depth with this with its own tutorial i'm also going to even render out some little preset things you can do just to be able to just drag and drop this onto your footage so that will be coming out in probably like a day or two that'll be bonus on top of the other two videos i mentioned the beginning but anyways if you want to create this sort of glowing um kind of wipe away luma matte transition here's the basic gist of how to do it so we're gonna go over to our project bin in the top left here we're gonna go ahead and create a new composition here luma mats transition so click okay and let's even create a new folder here just so we can keep everything organized because we're getting a little bit cluttered so all right so within this folder we have our luma matte transition let's go ahead and start crafting this we're going to right click down here go to new and go to solid and we're going to create a black solid so i'm going to click make comp size and click ok so this is going to be our main background and i'm going to right click again and create another solid this time i'm going to make an all white solid and you can just name it ink you can name it fractal if you want anything um that kind of gets the point across and we're going to make this composition a little bit bigger than our normal ones so what i'm going to do is i'm going to lock the aspect ratio and i'm just going to pull this up because i want this to be kind of twice the size of our normal comp so that whenever we do have the transition kind of growing across we're not going to run into any issues with the edges and then what you want to do is you want to go over to your masking tools i'm going to alt click up here until i have my ellipse tool and i'm going to just choose where i want this transition to start so i'm going to just start in the bottom right corner and just make a little circle now what you do next is you're going to want to animate the mask so i'm going to open up this mask path here keyframe it and i think this is going to be like a three second transition so let's kind of just start gradually making this grow across the screen so i'm going to hold down control and make sure you're selecting the layer and not the mask hold down control so we can start moving these anchor points and as you see with the keyframes here's what we got so one second it'll grow like that so that should be fine for now so we have a basic little shape here so let's go back into our main comp and i'm actually going to start fresh grab our galaxy environment let's grab our tunnel environment i'm going to control c to copy that and let's go ahead and just make a new composition in our folder here main comp just so we don't run into any issues so in our main comp we're going to control v to paste that we're going to place tunnel or whatever you want to transition from to at the top so i'm gonna go transition from my tunnel environment to my galaxy environment so next up what i want to do here we can take our luma matte transition comp and just place this into our main comp we can even switch our blending mode to add just so you can see the um animation growth so keep in mind so what it's going to really look like as we go along once you're fine with the animation and the timing of everything we're going to go to our effects and presets and search for rough in edges and we're going to place that onto our little white solid here now let's go ahead and just grab our border and just crank that up and if you guys want you can put that all the way to the maximum value so 500 i'm also going to put our complexity up to 10 so that we can start really getting this kind of inkblot fractal noise going on here and if we press play here's what that's looking like you can also go to your mask options in the bottom left and your mask opacity here is going to control the switch so if you don't want this to abruptly just pop in we can start this at zero at our starting position keyframe it move a few seconds over and just gradually bump that up so let's maybe keep that at like 70 percent opacity here and here's what that looks like it kind of just grows in what this is going to start to look like as you can see here's going to be the pattern of our growth all right so we're going to go ahead and just add some edges onto this transition and if you don't know what i mean this is what we're going to do here so i'm going to right click on loom matte transition i'm going to pre-compose it again and i'm going to name it luma matte transition main and click okay now we're going to double click into that pre-comp we just made and i'm going to ctrl d to duplicate the luma matte transition so i just made a duplication on top now i'm going to click track matte down here and i'm going to luma matte invert this bottom part and if you turn off your toggle transparency grid you'll see we've now isolated just the edges the outside of this which is going to really help for when we create our glow let's go back to our main comp here here's what that's starting to look like okay at this point we're going to go and just start adding some effects onto our little animation that we've created here so what you can do you can add a glow effect onto here and this is what really sells the effect you can use the after effects base glow as you see here if you really want to get the most out of this transition i recommend that you invest in some sort of external plug-in to give you some more options for the glow so here's using the bass glow which is pretty nice i mean once we apply the alpha transition and everything it'll look okay what i like is either if you have red giant trap coat starglow is a really good plug-in for this if you have the sapphire if you have any sapphire plug-ins um glow edges is one that i like a lot as well as you see it kind of adds a little bit more thickness onto here i can lower the glow width a bit i can lower my brightness a bit and then i can change my color just like this so in my opinion glow edges is my favorite for this but you don't need to have the external plug-in you could always just use the built-in after effects glow so here's with glow edges added in now the next thing you want to do is add a little bit of a blur onto this so i'm just gonna look up a fast box blur and i'm gonna put the blur radius at 0.5 and you guys can also look up a little levels effect and you can adjust the brightness of this now all you need to do is go to your tunnel environment layer whatever layer you're trying to transition you see your little track matte drop down you can just set that to alpha matte it's going to show what's behind this layer in the shape of our little ink transition so if i was to hide my galaxy here's the transparency and how you could really see it affect our full tunnel now that's one way you could go about this but that doesn't really look like it's happening in 3d space so what i recommend that you do is you actually put this back on normal you grab your luma matte transition main i'm going to control c or control x just to copy it and i'm going to pop into my actual tunnel environment composition that we made earlier so here is where we use element 3d to make the 3d tunnel so we have our 3d tunnel which we made earlier with element 3d we have our luma matte transition which is this kind of wiping effect that we have going on here and now what you can do the same exact thing we did earlier we're just placing it in the main comp so it's going to react a little bit better so under track matte alpha matte and now as you can see it's really only wiping away just the shape of the tunnel make sure after the alpha mat that you just show this so you can see the full um glow on the edges of everything so as you guys can see completely wipes away and it's wiping away in the shape of the tunnel now there's an alternate way that you can do this because we use element 3d and before when i was showing you those custom layer maps and we were able to make it in the shape of the tunnel using those custom maps from earlier we can do the same thing for our little wipe transition have it in the shape of the tunnel and give us some different shapes so if you don't want it to wipe in this specific manner which you could always do you select your 3d tunnel that we made before you go to your custom layers and make sure you're in the custom texture maps and not the text and masks you need to be in the texture maps for this to work now you just select the name of whatever layer has that transition we made so mine was transition pre-render and we set it to source and now you see we have a completely different animation going on here so you have a few options for being able to create this i think it's a cool effect and i'm going to go more in depth give you guys some free resources so that it's easier to pull this off without having to do all the luma inverting the alpha inverting i also want to show how to do that in adobe premiere as well so that's going to be coming soon alright guys so here is what this transition looks like and we talked about a lot so far but let's start adding in some basic 3d elements like the car i'll mention the 3d character there's a lot of 3d floating buildings in the background again you can just use element for that it really is as easy as just looking up 3d car model you can use turbosquid if you'd like free 3d cg trader the only thing you need to be careful with is sometimes since they're using the names of the actual brands you have to look into the licensing but we're just using this as an example you want to either have a cinema 4d file or an obj i'm just going to right click here and set this up so i'm going to make a new solid i'm going to name this car and i'm going to apply the element effect onto here so drag and drop that onto the solid and now you just click scene setup so if you were just to bring in an obj um here's what this would look like let's use autonomous also it's pretty small so let's normalize the size and there you go so sometimes if you get a good model like this one you're gonna have this all broken up so you wouldn't even need to bring this into any external because you can just use any preset um shaders here which are in element and just drag and drop it onto here if you don't have any of these shaders again you can always just bring the fbx into an external 3d software and then export out an obj or a c4d for element even if you have zero 3d knowledge doing that is pretty easy so i'm just going to drop some of these little preset materials onto here once you're ready just click ok and another little nifty tool that you can use for cinema 4d as you see this is here instead of having to use your world transform to kind of mess with this you can go to group one and you can go to create group null and use groupon only if your scene is in group one obviously um once you've done that once you've opened that up just click create and it's gonna create this little null here and you can use this null as a control for where you want the 3d model it's a lot easier so i can open up my null and i can orient i can rotate i can change z position all using the null so we just have that floating in place which obviously doesn't look that good another thing that you could do is you can just control x all of this pop into the tunnel animation and paste in here that way it's going to be reacting with our camera so if you want it to kind of be reacting with the camera if you want to animate different camera movements like in the weekend video you can do that obviously you're going to have to compensate the speed for this so if i go into my group null now maybe we could just give it a little bit of speed so we'll keyframe the position and as we move forward we'll just kind of send it forward a bit let's also scale this up because this looks pretty inaccurate with the road and there you go so we can have it driving along the road and using your camera controls here you can even click control d on this camera to duplicate it and we'll just rename this and i'll just call it angle two this is a neat trick for making different camera angles different animations out of one scene we can hide camera one and an angle since we have these keyframes let's just delete these keyframes for now and you can kind of rotate around it is possible to do something like that open back up camera one and another thing you can do and i'm not going to get too in depth with it but if you want you can go back into the scene setup or even in cinema 4d or blender you could isolate the tires here these are kind of just materials for it because it's all together but you could isolate them and rotate them themselves so you can have those tires moving in your animation but that's how we would be able to add something like the car now for the character if you want to create your own custom character i made a tutorial recently on my favorite software on how to do that i think it's the easiest way it's the fastest way if you want a more basic a more if you want a free and more basic version of that you can use adobe fuse which is actually included in your adobe subscription so i'll link below the tutorial i made on using adobe fuse which is the free adobe way you guys probably already have it and don't even know and i'll link the way using iclone using character creator from re-illusion an awesome way where you can go a lot more in-depth and create characters of specific likeness same with buildings if you want to use element 3d let's control d on the car if you guys have element 3d's built-in metropolitan pack you guys will know that you have a bunch of little buildings here so you don't need the metropolitan pack you could just go on turbo squid same place i got the car from and just look up free building bring in that obj that c4d file from elements and you're ready to go let's do the same thing here let's create a group now you can easily just place this anywhere in your scene give it a little bit of keyframed um orientation if you'd like so pretty easy to add in those tiny little 3d touches like from the original music video that you see here just using element to finalize this tutorial i'm just going to show you how we can add some simple little fireworks in here and this is something where if you just look up fireworks tutorial after effects there's a lot of info on there but either way let's go ahead and just make a new comp is we're going to go ahead and create a new black solid we're going to look up that little cc particle systems too so so a similar way to how we made those um circles in the galaxy earlier you can just drop this on and you'll see it kind of already almost looks like a firework for gravity let's just set this from 1 to 0.2 and then let's put the resistance at 10 and then already you can see you've basically made a firework see that we keyframed our birth rate at this position just go ahead and set this back to zero if you want you can open this up here and you can adjust the keyframe so maybe you don't want it that long something as simple as that and we can do the same thing we'll just enable this as a 3d layer we've already got our camera so you can see it kind of passes by isn't as polished we're using after effects only but i wanted to give you guys as many of the easy techniques used as possible creating those different environments i think that's where after effects really shines in this sense and then you can use things like element 3d if you want some simple 3d but if you want a full polished look i do recommend using a 3d software and coupling it with after effects if you did enjoy if you did learn something please leave a like on the video to help the growth of the channel as always guys thank you so much for the support thank you so much for watching and i'll see you guys in the next

Channel: Max Novak

Views: 136,285

Keywords: adobe, after, effects, the, weeknd, visualizer, animation, light, tunnel, vj, loop, instagram, tutorial, premiere, max novak, save your tears, blinding lights, editing, element, 3d, video copilot, music video, best, top 10, preset, pack, plugin, free, glitch, vhs, overlay, luma, transition, car, sci fi, c4d, cole bennett, justin odisho, the weekend, how to make a 3d music video, ae, glow, music visualizer, galaxy, fireworks, peter mckinnon, cinecom, corridor, heartless, partymonster, zoom

Id: 92xaZhjrh04

Length: 28min 11sec (1691 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 19 2020