New! 3D Object and HDRI Lighting in After Effects - How good is it?

[Music] adding 3D models to your scene has never been easier by the end of this video you'll learn how to use after effect's new 3D workspace to add 3D objects or text to your scene you guys know the drill let's Jump On In and thanks to story blocks for sponsoring a portion of today's video I'll tell you more about them later on as a long time after effects user if I wanted to do anything 3D I would probably use plugins like element 3D or dedicated 3D software like blender or Cinema 4D which comes with After Effects by the way but recently Adobe has been hard at work at making After Effects a good option for 3D at least for starters so let's check out their new true 3D workspace and see what we can do so inside of After Effects I'm going to create a new composition and if I jump into the 3D render tab I'll have their new Advanced 3D render set as default now down here you can see what's possible and not possible with Advanced 3D I'll go more in depth into the limitations later on but for now let's create a new comp before we do anything we need some 3D models and because we cannot create our own 3D models in After Effects we need to go online to find some my favorite places are sketch Fab or turbos squid and there you can buy some or even download some 3D models for free now after effect supports both obj and glb files we suggest sticking with the GL lb because it also stores the material and textures all in one file now that I have these models downloaded I can simply drag this into my comp and if the model looks too big or small I can click on make comp size or I can manually adjust the size and click okay and now I can move the model around rotate or resize it using the onscreen handles which is super convenient and all these parameters can be key Fram and animated down in the composition here I can also create some 3D Tex text by typing in whatever I want here how about like this video just a quick reminder that hitting the like button helps support what we do over here down in the text layer let's tick this 3D box icon to make the text 3D now if I expand its properties under geometry options I can add bevels and depth and under material options I can make the text more metallic or more shiny if I want to so currently these models look pretty dull and that's mostly because of the lighting but luckily now after effects supports image-based lighting using High dynamic range photos hdr photos so I have this HDR image and if you want to learn more about where to get free HDR images you can sign up to become a patron we put a link down below where you can get all that info to use this image to light the scene I first need to rightclick here on the composition and create a new light and let's choose their new environment light type which only works with their new Advanced 3D renderer let's also make sure that the cash Shadows is on and then hit okay and immediately the lighting looks more realistic and you can see Shadows casting on the text from the 3D model but this is just their default light so let's throw this HDR file to the bottom of the timeline and under the environment light options here let's change the source to the HDR file and Bam all the 3D models now are lit by this HDR environment and you can even see it in the reflections so now let's add a background to this 3D world I'm going to open up the story blocks extension for After Effects and find something here to use as a background I think this looks good so let's download it and drop it at the bottom of the comp I can turn this layer into 3D and immediately it'll start getting affected by your environment now down at the bottom of the comp window I'm going to change this to two views so we get a different angle of our scene on the second window I can hold alter option while clicking and dragging my mouse to move it around in the 3D space and you'll see that our models are clipping through the background footage so let's fix it by moving it back and scaling it up so it fits our composition so if moving around is lagging for you I actually recommend clicking this draft 3D icon and the preview will get much smoother but with less details and no Shadows so let's turn it off for now to see how the shadow interact with the background and it looks kind of grainy right now but that can be fixed by going to the render option and bumping up the render quality and Shadow resolution so doing this will be heavier on your system so I recommend bumping this up you know when you're close to being done also another big drawback of the new AE 3D renderer is that it doesn't support motion blur yet which is like I mean come on we need a motion blur right quick workaround that we found is that if you create an adjustment layer on top of everything and apply the CC Force motion blur to it I got to say it looks pretty good as far as a fake motion blur goes so now that we've gone over all the basics of the new true 3D workspace I now want to find footage to add a 3D model to so for this I'm going to use story blocks story block gives us unlimited downloads to diverse and highquality stock footage sounds and even after effects templates for one predictable subscription cost you can say goodbye to expensive payper clip pricing bye-bye and if you don't want to spend countless hours trying to create something like this from scratch grabbing one of these highquality templates is a great way to start and save a ton of time cuz designs like this can take months of work and all you have to do is just change a few colors and your brand and it's done and as you've seen earlier story blocks has a free plugin for Premiere Pro and after effects that you can download directly from the Adobe Creative Cloud desktop app with this plugin you'll be able to find and download any footage or template without having to leave the software that you're working inside of so now I'm going to look through some of their awesome Drone footage to use in this next segment this shot looks good I think it'll be fun to add some cool 3D models on the road here so let's hit download and this footage will be downloaded and automatically added to my project ready to go to get started with unlimited stock media downloads with no restrictions at one set price head to story blocks.com Premier or click the link in my description big thanks to story blocks for sponsoring this part of the video and supporting the channel and now let's get back to the world of 3D so back in After Effects let's create a new composition from this Drone footage and before we can add in anything 3D we first need to track the scene so go up to Windows and open up the tracker Tab and here let's click track camera and after effects we'll start analyzing our footage and once we're done we'll get a bunch of tracking dots so now we can hover over the dots to find a combination of them that gives a good representation of the floor in our footage so this spot next to the woman walking looks the best so I'm going to rightclick and set ground plane and origin so now after effects knows where the floor is at but we need to right click again and this time create null and camera and here after effects will create a camera that mimics the movement of a real camera and a null object with some data that we'll need real soon now it's time to drop in the 3D model that we just downloaded here and place it on the road now in the comp let's select the null press p and copy its position data to the 3D model now the model will move to the null objects position which is on the road I can now resize it so it makes more sense for this particular scene right so it doesn't look too silly and now if we hit play the model will stick directly to the road which is what we want and I can add key frames to animate it if I want to and it will still look like it's a part of the scene now obviously our model still sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the rest of the footage so let's see how we can make it more realistic starting off we can create another environmental light like we did before but this time I'm going to use this HDR image that has similar lighting to our footage and what's really cool is I can rotate the environment light to match the direction of the light in our footage this is looking a bit better but now we need to add Shadows to the ground to achieve the shadow I'm going to create a new solid make this solid 3D copy the N position data that we already have to this solid rotate it and resize it to fit the ground under our model now you'll see Shadows are casting on our ground solid and if you don't see it try checking the render options and under Shadows casting box hit fit to scene and this will resize the Box in which the Shadows can be generated you can manually lower this box size to only cover the spot where the shadows will be casting to save some computing power I know that's a lot to take in so let's just take a beat you can do all of that all right now let's continue on so the Shadows are looking good but we don't really need to be seeing this ground solid let's first turn off cast shadows and for accept Shadows I want to change it to only so we only get the Shadows but as you see it's disabled this is another big limitation with the advanced 3D render you can't make objects only except Shadows of course this most likely will be fixed in future updates of After Effects but for now we're kind of stuck but of course this is gal and I am the gal we have a workaround so what we need to do is Select all the layers except the stock footage duplicate them and precompose so we can place the precom under our car model and let's rename it to Shadows only we can now delete this ground solid from our main comp and inside our shadows only comp make sure the environment light is linked to the HDR image that's very important so on the 3D models layer let's turn on cash Shadows so we only see the Shadows on the ground and on the ground the solid layer itself let's make sure the material isn't metal or shiny and let's turn up diffuse to 100% to make the ground white are you with me all right back to the main comp let's hit the toggle switches button below and now I can make the blending mode of our shadows only layer to multiply and finally we're getting the Shadows that we deserve so sometimes you just have to hack the system until you get what you want or until after effect creates the thing that you want so as some final touches we need to make the model look like it's a part of the original footage and this requires a little bit of grading but if you try to throw on a lumetri color effect to the car 3D layer it just won't work because currently in this after effects update it doesn't support you know basic effects on the 3D objects but don't you worry because gal here has another work around so first let's create a solid layer and drop in the calculations effect yeah a calculations effect so stick with me here underneath the calculation effects in effect controls I can choose the source of the second layer to be my 3D model I can bump up the opacity to 100 and in blending mode change it to copy and now I can hide my 3D model layer and just use the solid layer as a doppo ganger for our model using the setup I can now add any 2D effects like lumetri color on my my model so that way it fits the color and lighting of the scene better and here I can add any other effects like some blur or maybe some light wraps and anything I want as if it was a 2d layer and as a final cinematic lighting touch let's create an adjustment layer and add it to the very top of the comp and let's rename it to cinematic grade just for organization and now let's add a lumry effect to this adjustment layer now from effect controls we can go to lumry color and go to curves and with the white Luma curve let's create an S curve so create a point in the center and then click on the bottom half and pull it down to add more shadows and contrast and let's click above to push it up to add more brightness and overall this just creates a more cinematic contrasty look but we're not done let's add another lumetri effect and on this one let's go to the RGB curves again but this time select the red and this is how we're going to create an orange and teal look so let's make an S curve by lowering the bottom part of the red you can see it reveals more blue in the shadows and literally you can see the blue line so it makes scientific sense because you actually see the blue being revealed in the line beneath it the blue line is there and by raising the red you can add more warm tones in the highlights so now if we turn off the adjustment layer this is the before and this is the after and you can see it just makes a big difference and once we're happy we can press contrl M or command m to add this to the render queue and Export it out as a video [Music] file and now you can work with 3D models with a few workarounds of course so after taking a look and experimenting with the new AE 3D workspace I can say that you know working with 3D models is a great space to be in especially for Motion Graphics but because of all the limitations and if you want to get serious in 3D I still think the plug-in element 3D might give you some better more realistic results but if you really want to get serious with 3D I highly recommend a gting blender it's a free software and it has a great online community and lots of tutorials to get started so that's where you should go when it comes all things 3D whichever tool that you use right now we can't deny that the barrier of Entry to 3D is definitely getting easier and easier and I'm really happy to see that after effects is taking the step forward into the world of 3D and making it more accessible to us that said you still need to know a lot about after effects as you saw in this tutorial there's a lot of steps so if this video helped you out be sure to give it a thumbs up and if you want more of this leave a comment below and as always keep creating better video with gwn see you next time bye

Channel: Premiere Gal

Views: 22,544

Keywords: Premiere Gal, After Effects, 3D Workspace, 3d model after effects, .glb, environmental lights, hdri blender, hdri light, hdirs, HDRI lighting, New in After Effects, how to use after effects, adobe after effects tutorial, after effects tutorial, after effects new features, hdri, adobe after effects, after effects 3d animation, after effects 3d text, after effects 3d object import, after effects basics, add shadow to 3d object after effects, 3D tracking

Id: ks9TXSxSUGs

Length: 14min 48sec (888 seconds)

Published: Tue May 28 2024