SHADING IN AFTER EFFECTS - Tutorial

okay so how do you shade in After Effects let's draw a little circle call this base color let's just make it a white skin color so kind of like a pink like a light pink like this now I'm going to duplicate this and call this shade one now to make a kind of Darker shade instead of just going straight down like this to make it darker what I usually do is I just go along to the right and make it more red then I switch to a mask and I draw a little uh shape like this underneath and then I double tap m a couple of times and I increase the Feathering push this up to accentuate it now I'm going to duplicate the base color again and pop that on the top to move a layer hold down alt command and then up and down depending on where you want to move it I'm going to change the color to white and then I'm going to mask off a little circle kind of like a oblong up here f for feather and then increase the feather of the Mask now it kind of looks a little bit shiny like it's reflecting a light that's coming from above what you can also do is duplicate the base color again call this uh Rim light in the real world a rim light is a light that you put behind an object to give it a sort of thin white glow on its outside so let's do that with this make this white mask and then let's go really close to the edge and make a very thin mask of the shape you see that maybe even get it as close to the edge as possible press f for feather and then increase the Feathering might even need to push it a bit further out so that it's as thin as possible almost unnoticeable but it's still there I'm going to make the shade a little bit darker now what you can also do is make a new adjustment layer do color correction and Hue and saturation then I'm going to turn this around to make it more purple drawer mask like this like a moon like a crescent moon and then press f for Feathering and then increase the Feathering now what that does is it subtly changes the Hue because when in sunlight Shadows are more Bluey than than black so what we can also do is uh pre-comp these duplicate that and say generate fill and then make it a dark blue turn the transparency down and draw a mask just like we did before f for feather and then increase the Feathering like that and then if I wanted to make it kind of like a like a cartoony kind of shine I can put like a couple of these white Oblongs on the top with no feather just duplicate the path make this one smaller pop it next to that one it all depends what your style is it all depends what you want to see that's basically how you shade something in After Effects let me show you how to apply this to a hand okay so here we have a hand and everything is exactly the same color how do we make the fingers distinct from one another using shading well the shadow of this thumb is going to be on the index finger so if we duplicate the index finger and call it index shade and then we change the color to a more ready pink and then we draw a little mask where the thumb overlaps with the index finger then we can feather this mask then you see that the thumb is distinct from the index finger let's do the same with the rest of them so we'll duplicate the middle finger I'll call this middle shade let's change the color then I'm going to do exactly what I did and draw a little mask over where one finger overlaps with the other finger then I'm going to feather The Mask I'm going to make sure that the feather is the same amount or nearly the same amount of Feathering as the other one duplicate the ring finger ring shade I'm going to pick whip it to this color and mask it then I'm gonna pick with the mask feather to there and lastly I'm going to do it to the little finger so duplicate the little finger call it little shade thank you pick with color mask It Off and then parent the feather amount to the original feather amount we can also duplicate the arm make that more of a red you can mask that off foreign we can also give the arm a rim light so let's call this arm Rim pop that above and then switch to a mask and draw it very close to the edge and then feather it oh so slightly we can also create an adjustment layer maybe we can do the um the change of the Hue to a more purple hue foreign and then across the whole thing draw a mask like this and then feather it and then I guess maybe another adjustment layer effect generate fill and make that the dark blue just like we did before with the sphere put that down to about 30 percent and mask that off as well foreign depends where you want the light coming from what kind of story you're telling what you want it to look like I mean this might not be correct for the arm that you draw but it's all really the same techniques I mean we can we can pop this Shadow over here instead so that it gets darker as it goes off screen that probably makes more sense give that mask a little curve maybe increase the the Feathering maybe we can even duplicate the arm call this arm reflection pop this all the way at the top so hold down alt command shift and up so it's the top layer turn it white and then just mask off like a like a long oblong of it like that and then increase the Feathering see that's some nice looking shading maybe I want to duplicate the thumb make that a little bit more red mask that off and feather it you see now it's starting to turn from like 2D shape layers into kind of almost a 3D looking hand see here's an example of shading being applied to a character what I did was I just duplicated her head and I made a new head made it more red than I masked it did the same to the ears I duplicated the neck I made the duplicate blue I then turned the opacity down to about 30 and then I masked it off with a non-feathered mask and I did the same to the legs as well but then for the rim light all I did was I just duplicated the character I made the duplicate white and then I just moved the duplicate up like that so that it's just slightly offset from the original position

Channel: Ross Plaskow

Views: 49,314

Keywords: tutorial, course, after effects course, after effects tutorial, aftereffects, animation tutorial, adobe, how to animate, learn to animate, learn after effects, beginner tutoriial, beginners, after effects, shading in after effects, gradients in after effects

Id: olYmbMYbxfA

Length: 9min 8sec (548 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 07 2022