SUPER DETAILED 3D Map Animation // After Effects 2022

hey guys welcome back to flat pack fx now in this video i'm going to show you how to make this 3d map animation without using any third-party plugins and i'm also going to show you how to do this using an easier and even faster method now i'm also going to show you how to add some cloud and marker graphics into your animation using envato elements who are the sponsor of today's video envato elements delivers unlimited access to over 55 million assets such as fonts photos video templates wordpress themes and adobe templates now if you're interested in that then you can use the special link down in the description below to get 50 off an annual subscription so this is the animation we're going to be creating inside of after effects now before you start you're going to need to source an image of the country or the continent that you want to use now i just sourced this one online and there's lots of paid and also free places you can get maps but this is the sort of map that i'm using for mine it helps that it's kind of got that detail of the terrain although that's not absolutely necessary it does give you the best kind of results using this sort of map so what i want to do is just create a new composition these are the settings that i'm using for mine but you can use whatever you like now with my map i just want to drag that in and then i'm just going to scale it down here reposition it and in behind that i've just created a new solid here and these are the solid settings that i'm using here on screen if you want to replicate that exact color now with my map we need to basically remove the outside so we just want to isolate the country or the continent that you're using now for mine i just applied the key light you can always find these by just coming over and searching in the effects and presets panel here over on the side and you can find that and then just add it into your layer then i just selected that screen color and then i just dragged up on the screen gain and the screen balance to basically remove that background now the next part is we want to basically create that emboss look so you come up to effect down to stylize and you want to add the color emboss now what i did with mine is i dragged this up to about 4.7 or 5. you can start to see we get a bit of that detail there if i just zoom in and then you can mess around with the contrast now you can always go through and readjust this but you can start to see it kind of brings out the detail here in the mountain areas or the areas that we really want to try and highlight now one thing you need to do is match the lighting direction from the camera's perspective so the next part before we adjust that is we just want to create a new camera this can be whatever you like the settings it doesn't really matter then i want to turn on both of these layers here make them 3d and then i can basically scale this down here now also i just added very quickly on here i just added a mask which went around my object just to isolate those little bits that i didn't want on the side so now we've kind of got it in a 3d position and you don't want to move the map around you just want to basically use the camera to move around another tip is to create a null object also make that 3d and parent your camera to that now now with that null we can basically rotate this on an angle and then i can reposition the camera here to kind of get it in the right sort of perspective right i'm trying to get that perspective sort of looking down on an angle because we really want to try and exaggerate the different sort of mountains in the terrain so now that we've got that what i want to do is now add a bit of a curves adjustment so i'm just going to come up here and add the curves and just give this a bit of a highlight boost and bring the shadows down what i'm trying to do is basically trying to really exaggerate those highlight parts if you imagine if the light's shining on a mountain you're going to get one part which is quite highlighted and the other part is going to be quite you know shadow it's going to have a lot of shadow so i really want to try and exaggerate that by bringing those curve adjustments right up we want to come up to effect down to just down to distort and we want to add the mesh warp now the mesh warp is where we're going to make or create those mountains so what we can do is if you want to spend a lot of time and really have a lot of detail then i recommend scaling this right up and then you can really have you know much finer points of creating little mountains and then creating big mountains but what i like to do is then just select a whole area here and just drag it up so we're basically trying to create little areas along the edge of our map where we have mountains we're trying to replicate that in a way right so anywhere that i think there's meant to be a little mountain i'm just going to drag up if you want to do a whole area just drag right up on these so i'm going through and just trying to basically create these little sort of areas where i think there might be mountains now the thing is it's not 3d so what we're doing here is basically trying to fake almost a three-dimensional space so you've got to remember this is not 3d it's still 2d so if i move the camera around we're going to break that illusion so it kind of only works if we're moving the camera a little bit so just mess around with that until you kind of get the results you're happy with and this is what i've ended up with here so if i just turn this on and off you can see we kind of get that distorted look of all those little mountain sort of areas where it should be sticking up and the parts that are meant to be sort of sunken down so at the moment it looks okay like it doesn't look particularly bad it's just that we really want to try and exaggerate those mountains now one way i found to do this is by creating shadows on the mountains so what i've found is if you take your background layer and just duplicate it and drag it above your map here i'm just going to turn the opacity down to around sort of 65 percent and i want to change that layer color to be black now what we're going to do with this is i want to basically you can always just turn this off i want to grab my pen tool here by hitting g and i want to focus on a part that is meant to be the back side of the mountain away from the sun so it's where the mountain is going to have shadow on it so if i just turn this on now you can see that we get that little shadow area so if i just turn this on and off see how it kind of adds to the detail in that manner kind of makes it look you know like like it's more 3d than it actually is so what you can do is just kind of go through so any areas that you've kind of exaggerated here maybe do this side here kind of bring this along like this and maybe do like a little trail edge something like that another thing you can also do is just add a bit of a gaussian blur to it so you can just search for that over here and i've added about 17 and all that does is just kind of blur that the detail of those shadows so you can always just drag this down if you want less or more of that so i've just gone through and just finished my animation here with all the shadows and this is what we have right you can see it looks much more dynamic in the overall end product now to really help exaggerate this map one little element that i wanted to add to it was little clouds and i did that by adding these little cloud graphics above my map now source the cloud graphics from envato elements were the sponsor of today's video now all i had to do was just go over and search for clouds and then download them using the one simple license which still counts even after my subscription has ended now i personally love having access and being able to download all these little graphic elements that would just take me far too long to recreate for every single project even better though as you know map animations can be very time consuming to create so i found envato elements has a ton of ready-to-use map generators that you can just download and use within after effects using one of these generators i can easily create the perfect custom map all within minutes now if you're interested in trying them out you can use the special link down in the description below to get 50 off an annual subscription which will give you access to everything in envato elements all for less than 20 dollars a month so what i did was i've just bought my cloud graphics in here and i can just put them on top here and all i have to do is just make them 3d i can then stand them up and just shrink them down here by holding shift and then i'm just going to bring them up so they sit above my map and then i can just reposition them however i want that also helps me if i just duplicate them and i can just move them over here and then maybe flip them around maybe squish this one down a little bit like something like that and i can even drag another one straight in here also make this 3d flip this up and because they're 3d if i just pull up my camera tool by hitting c i can now basically move around the screen and you can see they're floating above my map so that's a really simple little graph you can just add straight into your map animations and it's just going to make them look much more realistic now the next part is i now want to add a bit of a 3d edge because it's looking a little bit flat so i want to add a little bit of depth now i've covered this in a previous tutorial but the way we're going to create this is by taking our bottom layer i can just duplicate it and with the bottom one selected what i'm going to do is just delete the curves delete the color emboss and leave the other two because if i turn off the mesh warp it's not going to line up with my original map then i can basically put a fill over the top and this is the fill color that i'm using here is just a gray and it kind of creates this little edge so something like that what i can do is take that again duplicate it take the bottom one here and just move it down another step again take both of those duplicate them drag them underneath and then just move them down again now all i did was i just kept duplicating them and stacking on top of each other moving them down one space until i ended up with this sort of extruding edge here then what i did is i did it one more time on the bottom to create this bottom edge here and with that what i did was i added a gaussian blur and with that what i did was i moved it down a lot further so it basically extended further down from the bottom and i changed this color to be black and then i added a gaussian blur over the top of about 128 and then i bought the opacity by hitting t and just scaled this down to 59 and that just kind of gives us that that shadow on the bottom edge something else you can also do is the layer just above that you can also do the same thing again so if i just turn that one off you can also add basically a bit of a dark fill to that by scaling it making it black and just add a little bit of a gaussian blur and that's going to kind of give you that drop shadow but it creates that really nice sort of fake 3d look where it looks like it's extruding out the bottom and then sitting on the map now one other thing i did in my original con was i added that little path of the track going over the layers so to do this i just selected my pen tool make sure i have nothing selected here and then you can just create that little line which basically follows the path of whatever you like so wherever you want your line to go i can make sure the fill is set to none and then i can just drag up on the stroke maybe change this to be white and if i come down to the stroke settings i can add a dashes on here and to animate it all you have to do is then just add come up here and add a trims path scale down on this so on the end point and then go along the timeline and just add that animation so that creates that little line animation going over your map so very basic you can always go through and readjust the path of that one other thing i did was i also used envato elements to add a little markers so i just went online and i found these little markers i downloaded them and then i just dropped them into my timeline here made them 3d scaled them up or stood them up right bought them up very slightly and then scaled them down i can also add the fill effect to them and i can change the color to be whatever i like and then just position them wherever you like so i like using these little elements because it just adds to the project but it just saves you a heap of time already having them you can just download them and insert them straight into the project and that's how i did those little those are the line animations like that now there's two more things to do one is to animate the camera so to do the camera what i did was you can basically just come into the camera settings here create a point of interest here and here go to the end of your composition here and create two more and if i just grab my camera tool i can basically just pan down to something like that and if we play through you can see we've got that bit of that dynamic movement in our camera now it's important with this effect that because it's not 3d you can't really do excessive movements so you can't move the camera around but you want to try and limit the movement just to small movements because otherwise you'll break that illusion if you want to do this properly you do it in a 3d program you can move a right around or you use a generator like the ones you can get in envato elements which will allow you to basically move the camera around your country now a couple other things that i did in my original composition was i added this background element which are these currents now these are really simple i had to do is just take my background and duplicate it then come up to effect down to generate and just add the fractal now you might have to scale your layer down a little bit here and just reposition it it creates these interesting little shapes here and to change them what you can do is you can basically go and change the equation so if you want to change the completely different look you can basically select different options in here and then change the equation but the one that i'm using is this uh top one and then i'm using the second one down to create this sort of interesting look now one other thing is to change the color what you can also do is just come up to effect select the change to color select that color set this to be hue lightness and saturation and then you can change the color in which you want to change it to and that creates those sort of title patterns that go around your layer you can also just drop this down very slightly if you want more or less of this and you can also scale this up to kind of get that interesting look it just kind of adds something into the background to make it look a little bit more interesting the other thing i added on my original composition was i just added some text and all we have to do is basically just type out your text select the font that you that you want to use and then just make it 3d and you can automatically position it around the map so as long as you're not moving the map layers themselves everything will basically straight away line up so if i just don't so if i just turn this off and then turn it on to 3d see how i can basically just reposition it here on the x position by dragging it up and down and then just position it in the spot that i need it just kind of adds something a bit more interesting to you know to kind of make it look like it's more like a 3d map also out of the second marker here at the end but there's lots of different types of markers and graphics you can get from envato elements and you can add them in over the top now remember this is not proper 3d but if you want something that's more interactive where you can really move the camera in and out then i recommend just going on to envato elements and use one of those map generators that we spoke about to be able to create the exact map that you want for your project so hopefully you've picked up a few tips in this video you can give this video a thumbs up or a thumbs down you can also check out more videos over here on the side of screen thanks very much to envato elements for sponsoring today's video and i'll catch you in the next video

Channel: Flat Pack FX

Views: 153,808

Keywords: flatpackfx, Flat Pack FX, how to make video effects, after affects tutorial, adobe after effects, video effects, Adobe, SUPER DETAILED 3D Map Animation, Vox maps, how to make vox 3d map animations, 3D map animation after effects, Map animation, map animation after effects, how to make 3D Maps in After Effects, No plugins after effects

Id: cKZzpTI5agI

Length: 16min 59sec (1019 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 29 2021