MAJOR updates for 3D in After Effects!

you've probably already heard about the beta version of After Effects supporting 3D objects natively you can actually render these 3D objects directly in After Effects just like any other layer with some limitations this all happened about nine months ago but recently there have been some updates to the rendering engine that makes all this a little bit more intriguing the way that after effects renders 3D models materials allows you to light your composition using an HDR environment and voxel-based shadows from those hdris is making 3D and after effects a lot more interesting now before you head to the comments I know after effects is not a 3D package and it is not going to be replacing a 3D package anytime soon blender Cinema 4D all those other 3D softwares are going to do a much better job at making 3D objects and rendering 3D objects but the fact that we can now bring these 3D models directly into after effects with materials supported from those 3D softwares is a really big deal and if you've used element 3D from Video Copilot I think that this new 3D workflow actually feels pretty similar to 2 element without having to jump into a completely different interface in order to set things up and being able to work directly inside an environment that feels like after effects because it is after effects is really cool so how do we get a hold of these new features well first you need to install the beta version of After Effects which you can do directly through the Creative Cloud app so just open it up go to the sidebar and down to the beta section and find the after effects beta now the after effects development team is constantly updating this version of After Effects basically every single day you'll be able to install a new update that doesn't mean that you'll always see new features every single day but you will be notified when new features are available and Tim over on the after effects team did an excellent write-up of the new features for the 3D render engine in After Effects I'll put a link down in the description so you can read through all of it yourself but once you have the beta version installed go ahead and open it up the next thing we're going to need is some 3D models and there's actually a whole lot of 3D models available on Adobe stock for free you can download any of these models and bring them into After Effects now I wanted to see what the workflow was for bringing in models that I created myself preserving the materials that have been applied and instead of actually modeling by hand I decided to use my new 3D scanner from Revo point this is the revo Point Inspire 3D scanner it uses multiple cameras and sensors to build accurate 3D representations of whatever you're scanning it's really easy to use in the entire process of scanning and processing the data is really fast you can even scan yourself with a surprising level of detail this model the Inspire is actually being launched through Kickstarter and the campaign is running from August 16th through September 15th of this year you can follow the link in the description or click the card above to go check out the kickstarter for yourself and you can even save up to 38 off the device if you use one of the super early bird packages so go check out that Kickstarter if you're interested in getting into 3D scanning thanks so much to revapoint for giving me an early look at this scanner for this experiment I decided to scan this toy ice cream that my kids have with three different flavors after I processed all the data and got it into a solid mesh I exported out of revoscan as an obj and and open that up in blender just to do a little bit of cleanup realigning all the vertexes and rotating it so that it's nice and centered in my scene I scaled it down a bit and I flattened out the bottom of the cone just so it was nice and smooth then I exported each one of the ice cream cones individually as glb files which is what Adobe recommends to be using with After Effects but gltf and obj files are both supported formats for the after effects beta now that I have models to work with I need to import it into after effects and you do this exactly the same way as you would with any other file so if you want to use my models I'll provide a link down in the description so you can go check these out download them for yourself but you just double click in the project panel to import and I have these three ice cream cones right here as well as some other models that I'll talk about in a second but let's just start with the three ice cream cones so I'll select those click on import and those will immediately go straight into after effects with a folder for each model so if you are importing an obj that has other files that are necessary like the textures those will show up inside of this folder like I said glb is the preferred format because everything is contained within that one file so these don't really need to be in their own folders I'm just going to clean this up and call it models and move everything into that one folder so let me clean that up and now that I have these assets you can create a composition from them just like anything else so let's start with the chocolate ice cream cone drag down in the new composition button and this is going to ask me how do I want this model to be rendered now you can see right here in my composition we're already seeing a preview of what this model looks like it's sized pretty well so I don't need to change anything in here if you wanted to you could change the object's scale you can make it the comp size we could go into advanced and change the model units in the object scale this is just the starting point so whatever you set here that's what 100 scale will be in your comp so why don't we just put it about there and there's some other options in here if you want to change the Axis or flip things around you can mess around with that but I'm happy with the way this looks so I'm going to click ok I'll drag that comp out of here and we'll call this ice cream 3D so there we go we've already got a 3D representation of this model and it has all the familiar After Effects controls that we're used to seeing I can click on the little Gizmo and rotate it around in any axis I can move it around like an object it has a bounding box that's actually 3D which is really convenient and just really easy to identify that yes this actually has some volume to it and you can see that as I click on each side it's actually moving the transform box around so that's just a cool little feature allows you to grab any point of the model and transform it from that side but one thing you'll notice is that it's actually really Snappy it's moving around really quickly without having to do any kind of down sampling I have my resolution set to full and we're not getting any kind of slowdown it's actually a really quick render and what we're actually using to render is the Mercury 3D engine that is this new engine that supports 3D models it's not Cinema 4D it's not the classic 3D engine it's new it's Mercury 3D and it definitely has some limitations but it gives us a lot of features that we don't have in the other renderers let me just open up this glb file so we can see what options we have there are only transform controls so no material properties nothing that you can do to affect the appearance of the actual model that all has to be done outside of After Effects at this point but everything else is completely familiar to what a 3D layers transform properties would have I'm just going to reset that and let's bring in the mint chocolate chip again it's going to go through the same process let's scale that down so that it matches I think it was around 75 percent sure I'll click OK and this little tool tip is actually kind of cool it's saying we created a 3D Bim and this really is just a visual you see that these two 3D layers are kind of outlined and brought in together in a box this just means that these two layers are working together in 3D space if they run into each other they're actually going to collide and render on top of each other but if I put put a 2d layer between these two objects let's say an adjustment layer and I drag that down you'll notice that breaks the bin and now the render order has been broken whatever is on top of that 2D layer is going to render on top whatever's on bottom is going to render visually on bottom so that's just a little indicator visually of if your layers are rendering together or if they've been broken and separated so just be aware of that that's an interaction between 2D and 3D layers that's been around forever but it's nice to have that little visual cue now so that you can see oh these layers are rendering together in the same 3D space all right let's get rid of that solid and bring in the last Model the strawberry drag it in change this down to 75 now I've got my three models and I can reposition these however I want but my scene is pretty boring and that's really because there's no background and the lighting is just default we have a default environment light that is lighting up all three of the these models and an environment light is one of the new features of this version of the beta so to customize it I need to bring in some hdris or environment layers that I can use to light my scene so this is also something you can get from Adobe stock for free there's a lot of great high quality hdris for you to choose from so go check those out again I'll put the link down in the description so you can go check those out but I'm just going to import all of the ones that I have on my machine and I'll put those into a folder called hdris and I'll just drag all these into that folder and each one of these is a different 360 image that will actually have enough information in it to light the 3D models this is a common way of lighting things in the 3D world and now it's actually supported here in After Effects so I'm just going to start with let's say this one right here I'll drag it into my comp and we're going to see it in the background I don't actually need to see it though I just need to use it as a source so now I need to come up to layer new light and in the light type options we have a new Option environment I'll click on that and leave the intensity set to 100 percent and this new checkbox down here cast Shadows this is actually the only light type in the Mercury 3D render engine that supports casting shadows as of right now I'm going to have that checked on and click OK and again this is just the default environment light that's being used for this environment light so I need to go into the light options down to the source and change it from default to the HDR file that I have here in my comp any number of hdrs that you have in comp will show up in this list I'm going to choose that as my source and the lighting has drastically changed because this image is drastically different than the default lighting environment it's all a lot flatter the lighting is softer and it's dimmer but I can increase the intensity right here past 100 to bring in more light from that hdri now this is still is existing and kind of a void so it's not really very interesting I could put a solid into the background if I just make a new solid but the only types of layers that currently support Shadows are 3D models so what I did was went into blender and made a few backdrops that we can use in After Effects so I'm going to go back to my models bin and import this and grab these three models right here one wall psych two wall psych and three wall psych these are all very simple models but you can download them again link is down in the description and they just serve as nice little environments to put your objects in and for actually supporting these voxel-based Shadows that the after effects and beta gives us so I'm going to drag all of those back into my models group and get rid of these and let's just start with the one wall psych I'll bring that out to the background and click OK and I tried to size this to a 1920x1080 comp so all I need to do is kind of drag it down but what you'll notice is that everything is really grainy right we're seeing all kinds of noise and this is just because my render settings are low and that's something that you probably want to do while you're working because it speeds up render time but you could also turn on draft 3D down here which in the after effects beta is really nice because we have this ability to have an extended viewport so we can actually see outside of our comp bounds it's a really cool feature that I like a lot but because I had to crank up the intensity of this light so much it really blows it out so you kind of have to decide how you want to work if you want to have this draft 3D View and turn down your lights or if that doesn't really bother you that will speed things up but that is going to get rid of your shadows if you want to see the Shadows but render more quickly just leave your render settings the way they are so it's nice and grainy but renders a lot more quickly or if you want to see a lot less grain we can go into the Mercury 3D drop down and click on renderer options in here is where we choose the render quality the resolution of the shadows and the smoothness of the Shadows so if I actually cancel out of this and zoom into 100 or maybe even 200 so we can see really nice and close all that grain and I jump back into my render options I can turn the render quality up and that's going to decrease the grain I don't exactly know what this slider is really doing but I'm guessing it's increasing the number of samples for all the lighting and the Shadows that's how you clean up grain in software like Cinema 4D or blender but with increased render quality comes increased render times so just keep an eye on the frame render time down here increasing it up to a quality of 90 has turned one frame into 1.4 seconds so be aware of that that's a really good way to see how long each frame is going to take to render as you're increasing the sliders the other thing you could do is leave the render quality overall down low which the default is eight and increase the smoothness of the Shadows everything in this box down here is specifically for the Shadows resolution is set to full you can increase this but that's going to take a lot more vram from your GPU so I generally leave that at full and then you can increase the smoothness and as I do this not only does the grain kind of go away in those Shadows but it almost makes everything appear more bright because that grain has been knocked down so far so maybe we'll turn that down to 10. I'll click OK and zoom out so we can see that now everything is a little less grainy it's definitely still grainy but it's a little bit clearer than what it was now I have this wall layer that's intersecting in my ice cream cones I need to move that so I'm going to grab the position and just shift that back and really I don't even need to see the floor you see how that's cutting through the bottom here I don't ever need to see that I basically just want to use this as a wall and to do that I'm just going to bring up the scale unlink these and change the Z scale to just one percent so that just flattens everything out and now I basically have this single wall in the background I can rotate this around you see that it basically has no depth now and I can then just scale this up on the y-axis move it down a little bit and then make sure it goes past where it needs to on the sides and from here I can use the position to move it further or closer to my 3D objects now one thing that you do need to know about is in the render settings is this casting box size this is referring to the box that the voxel Shadows are actually being rendered in anything outside of this box will not be seen and there's this handy little button right here fit to scene that when you click on it it will automatically measure all of the 3D objects in your scene and size and position that voxel shadow box to your models otherwise you can change this to be whatever size you want so there's the little magenta outline guide showing you just how big this cube is that the shadows will be rendered in and if I move this around you can see that it's only going to produce Shadows inside of that box so I want to make sure that's nice and big covers all three of my ice cream cones and if I say fit to scene it's going to get much bigger because it's going to size it all the way to the wall that I've created in the background I would encourage you to only make that as big as you need it though because this is almost 3 000 pixels in every direction and it's probably larger than it needed to be for this particular shot and now that that's done I can play around with the intensity of this lighting and get this dialed in now let's say that I'm happy with the lighting of these three ice cream cones but I want to change the background color because it's just this blank gray white background well like I said you can't change any of the material properties here in After Effects of a 3D model and you actually can't even apply effects to these 3D objects if I were to grab say tint and drag that onto the one wall site I actually can't let go it's not going to let me apply 2D based effects to these 3D models again not at this point it may come in the future this is constantly being updated and is under development right now but there's actually a way to get around this so let me just Center these up a little bit and I'm going to make a new solid layer so layer new solid I'll call this matte actually let's call it BG matte for background matte click OK and I'm going to apply the calculations effect to this what this effect allows us to do is basically take any of other layer and re-render it on this solid so I can have a duplicate of any other layer including its Alpha Channel and we can push it even a little bit further and the way that we do this is by coming to the second layer under the Second Source category we need to choose the layer that we want to duplicate onto this solid so let's just start with one of the ice cream cones we'll say strawberry since it's on top and nothing appears because our second layer opacity is set to zero just increase that up to 100 and there we go we've got that ice cream cone and now living on this solid in the exact same place as the actual 3D model but I want to knock out the rest of my layers so that we only see the ice cream cone so I'm going to change the blend mode from normal to copy and now if I solder this layer you'll see this is actually shaping the layer's opacity and I have that ice cream cone isolated next I'll duplicate the calculations effect and change the second layer from the strawberry to the chocolate now if I sold this layer nothing is appearing and that's because of two things one is preserve transparency I'm going to uncheck that for the second copy and that brings back my chocolate ice cream but we're missing the strawberry to get that back I need to change my blending mode from copy to normal and now we have both of those layers existing on the same solid I'll do this one more time duplicate that second calculations change the second layer to mint chocolate chip and now I have a layer that is just a duplicate of all three of these models on a single 2D layer and that will allow me to isolate an adjustment layer to just the background so let's make a new adjustment layer layer new adjustment layer and I'll call this BG adjust and we'll add let's say a tint effect to it and we'll just choose some colors that feel a little bit more like ice cream so we'll get minty blue and green in there okay so I've got this tint effect that's being applied to everything I want to now use this background matte layer as a track matte for the adjustment layer so I need to make sure that I enable my transfer controls pane right here that gives me the track matte column and I'll grab the track matte pick Whip and choose my background matte solid and now this adjustment layer is only affecting the ice cream cones I want to invert that so I'm going to just check on the invert mat right there now I have an adjustment layer that is effectively only adjusting the background and that's exactly what I needed now I can literally do whatever I want on this adjustment layer and it will only affect that background so why don't we even just add in a ramp a gradient ramp effect and change it to maybe a radial I'll move one point over here one down in this corner and we'll choose some colors from this ice cream again so let's start with that minty color maybe make it a little bit more blue just so it adds a little bit of contrast and separation from the background and there we go now we have the freedom to adjust the colors of the background freely without having to go in and adjust any kind of material properties in another software we can change anything we want about that background right here and it doesn't even have to just be one effect if we wanted to bring in some curves just so we can manipulate this a little bit more that's totally doable and allows us to work inside of after effects in a very familiar way right now we're just using the default camera but I can go up to layer new camera and why don't we choose the 80 millimeter preset and click OK and now I have a 3D camera that I can orbit around we can animate these layers just like any other 3D layer keyframing rotation position and that's exactly what I did I just made a very simple animation of these three ice cream cones flying in I added in a little bit of a camera move and ended up with something that's pretty simple but also really impressive that I'm doing all of this directly in After Effects the lighting and shadows are all interacting with each other no third-party plugins it's all just native right inside of After Effects now from here I just dropped this comp into another comp and added some more effects like a vignette some color grading some glow and because motion blur is not currently supported it with 3D models I added CC Force motion blur on top of it all to generate some fake motion blur which I think did a really nice job but that's a basic overview of the new features of the Mercury 3D render engine I'm actually really excited to see where Adobe takes this because it's pretty Snappy everything renders pretty quickly it's taking advantage of my GPU and it feels simple it feels like it actually fits into after effects with no crazy workarounds or external tools or third-party plug-ins it's just after effects and that is pretty cool let me know down in the comments what you think of these new 3D features and what other features you would like to see I know the after effects team is all ears and would love to hear your feedback how you're using this 3D engine and what you would like to do with it in future updates thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Jake In Motion

Views: 177,841

Keywords: After Effects, Animation, Motion Graphics, Motion Design, Tutorial, Adobe, Adobe After Effects, after effects 2023 new features, after effects tutorial, after effects new features, after effects new update, after effects 2023 new features 3d, after effects beta 2023 new features, after effects beta 3d import, after effects beta 3d tutorial, after effects beta new features, after effects beta 2023 features, revopoint, 3dscanner, inspire, 3dprinting, revoscan, Kickstarter, aftereffect

Id: Zetbh4p9Z8A

Length: 20min 54sec (1254 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 17 2023