Landscape Game Parallax Effect Tutorial for After Effects CC

there you go eyes it's flat back effects here and today I'm going to be showing you how to make this parallax effect [Music] so stick around you're watching flood back effects [Music] welcome back to another tutorial guys and in this tutorial we're going to be taking a look at how to finish our parallax effect so this is actually part two of a two-part tutorial so in the first part we looked at actually creating the landscape inside of Photoshop and in this tutorial I'm going to show you how to put it all together to create this parallax effect now for those of you that haven't done the first part that's okay because I put download links in the description below and you can get all the files that you'll need to create this effect now this parallax effect is actually a really common effect primarily used in 2d and arcade style video games but with a little bit of forward-thinking you can actually take this concept to the next level now in my later show real actually use this same technique for my character to be able to walk through the scene I'm just going to show you the basic building blocks you need to create this and I'm really hoping you'll take and develop this effect yourself alright so let's get started so for those of you that have done the first part and you've created your landscape the first thing we want to do is actually go back to photoshop and we just really want to quickly export our layers that we've created so the way we do this is if you remember we've created folders so if you turn off all of your layers except our sky layer you then come up to file and you go to export and what you need to do is you need to export it as a PNG now a PNG file will actually save that luma all the Alpha values so it allows the part that we can't see to essentially be see-through so you export each layer Z export one for your sky we then turn that off and then we turn on our next layer which would be our background and we export that as a PNG so you follow this same technique for each year layers so once you've done that you can import those into your After Effects project alright so the first thing we want to do is we're going to create a new composition so I'm going to call this one forest and I'm going to set this one to be 1080 25 1920 by 1080 and just make sure the duration set to ten seconds and then hit OK next all I need to do is to simply drag all my layers into my composition next I just need to order my layers so I'm to keep the sky composition on the bottom and then going to drag my background layer which is next and then make sure my mid-ground and then my foreground is on top now at the moment it's just a still image so what we actually want to do is extend our landscape so we do this by selecting all our layers we're going to make them 3d I'm going to turn off all my layers except my sky then all I need to do with my sky layer selected come up to edit and then down to duplicate alright so next I'm going to right-click and create my camera now you can name this whatever you want and I'm going to set the preset to be 28 millimeters and then just leave the rest and hit OK now next we need to actually move the camera so I come up to my camera tool and we've actually got a few options here now you can click on those otherwise you can hit C on the keyboard and that will cycle through your different camera tools so the tool we actually want to use is this one with all the arrows pointing and I'm simply going to click and hold shift at the same time and I'm going to move this off to the side so that we get about half of our screen there then with my top sky layer the one that we duplicated I'm simply just going to drag this over until it lines up with the edge here next I'm going to turn on my background layer and I'm also going to duplicate this layer so I'm going to come up to edit and down to duplicate and this time I'm going to select that layer and drag it over okay so here's our first problem so the two layers don't actually match up now a simple fix of this is just to come up to layer down to transform and then just hit this flip horizontally so that's going to make it line up exactly with the edge here so you're essentially mirroring that layer now that's okay but another option if I just control Z that is I can actually select my layer and simply just move it until it lines up with the edge now we've got this bit of a gap down the bottom but that's okay because we're not going to see that the foreground is going to cover that layer up next I'm going to grab my mid ground layer and I'm going to turn that on and then I'm going to come back up to edit and I'm going to duplicate that layer I'm going to hold shift and move this over now this one I'm just going to come up to layer come down to transform and then flip and that's going to line up then I'm going to come to my foreground layer so I'm going to come back up to edit down to duplicate and then I'm going to move this one across then I'm going to come up to layer again down to transform and then flip horizontally again and that's going to line up alright now if we went back to our camera and we just move this you can see already we've extended that landscape and it looks pretty good now if you want to continue this on you simply just keep duplicating those layers and moving them over and you can keep repositioning them like we've done to keep extending that background okay so at the moment you can see that all the layers are stuck together now if you think about an object that's close to you and an object that's far away from you and if you start to move side to side the closest object to you is going to move faster than the distant object so we have to replicate this inside of After Effects now the way we do this is we actually switch this view here to two views horizontal now what we're actually seeing here on the Left screen are all our layers so imagine a piece of paper standing upright then we have our camera at the front and that's our angle of views of what we're actually seeing and then this is what we can actually the camera can actually see the active view now what we need to do is we need to select our sky layers and move them into the distance so we do this by selecting both the layers and I'm going to move them back in z space so I need to click this blue arrow here and I simply just move them back now how far back you moved them just depends on how much of effect you want so the further you move them the less they'll move and the further apart the objects the more of that parallax effect you're going to get so once you've got them at a reasonable distance we then hit s on the keyboard and you can see that they've obviously shrunk because they've moved into the distance and we need to actually scale these up so I simply just scale them up until it fills the background again now this second layer has shifted around a bit we can just simply move that one off to the side and we can reposition that one later next we're going to grab our two background layers and we're going to move them back till about there and I'm going to scale them up and I'm using this as a height reference basically I'm going to shift this one over roughly lined up at the edge again we can fine-tune that later and then I'm going to grab my mid ground layer and I'm also going to move that and then scale this one up as well all right so we've got our sky layer we've got our background layer and then we've got our mid ground layer and our foreground layer all evenly spread now if I go back to my camera tool and move the camera you can see straight away we've created that parallax effect now when we get to here we've got a little bit of adjustment to do now this one's been squished so I'm just going to reposition this one and just move it over slowly just to lines up nicely and I'm going to grab this background layer as well and I'm going to move this one up and then just over as well all right so I'm just going to reset my view now okay so I bought my camera back to the far left next I'm just going to navigate down to the transform options for the camera and I'm going to create a keyframe for the point of interest and the position I'm going to move along about six seconds on the timeline going to move the camera over holding shift till we get the edge of our screen so I just play through that we can see the effect working now that's a little bit fast so I can just move these back to slow it down okay and that looks good there okay so that's the basic parallax effect now you can choose to use this exactly as it is or you could add some extra bits in so the other thing we can do is we can come down to the camera options and I'm going to turn on depth of field next I like to just come down here and grab the aperture and just drag this up so as you increase this you'll start to see that you'll start to get a depth of field effect happening so you can see the higher I drag this the more out of focus the background is going to become so you can mess around with that to get a nice setting are you happy with and I'm just going to come back to my to view shot here and just show you something else to keep in mind now this thing here this focus distance if I move this you can see this line moving here now essentially what that's doing is that's your focal plane so this is telling the camera that this is the exact position that I want to be in focus or the exact point so one thing we can do with this if I drag this into the distance or to the next layer I can actually move the focus from the foreground towards the background so at the moment the mid grounds in focus so if you wanted to have it where the foreground was out of focus and the mid grammars in focus you can do that now something to keep in mind is that this focus distance needs to match up exactly with your layout that you want to be in focus for the sharpest results so if I had it sitting in between two layers for instance both of these layers are going to be quite soft and they're not going to be sharp so just keep that in mind alright so that's pretty much the effect done now one other thing I did do is on mine I added a foreground layer which I just made up of a solid and I just dragged that closer to the camera and then I just got this image of a train and added that on top and to actually animate the Train I created a position keyframe and an end point so I essentially created two position keyframes and made the Train move but those two keyframes so that it would roughly stay in the middle of the camera so I really recommend messing around with that to see whether effects you can do you can even create another foreground and then you can have a character walking along you could have a video game you could do whatever you want now here's another example of an image that actually bought and I simply just did a little bit of Photoshop to split the layers up I imported them using the same technique and then I laid them exactly the same way to create this same effect so if you're looking for some inspiration I really recommend getting on Google and just doing some quick image searches for landscapes to see what other people have designed and that might spark some ideas for things that you can create so there you go guys that just from me and remember flood Park effects is the flat-pack anyone can build [Music]

Channel: Flat Pack FX

Views: 129,472

Keywords: landscape game parallax effect tutorial for after effects cc - youtube, parallax scrolling after effects tutorial, Flat Pack FX, After Effects, Special effects, visual effects, tutorials, adobe, photoshop, Easy, Learn, animation, logo animation, Graphics, parallax, 2d game, videogame, Effect, Landscape

Id: KP0MVG8wA78

Length: 12min 31sec (751 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 13 2017