Use THIS Technique To Elevate Your After Effects Projects

this simple technique will help transform your projects and really take them up a level not only this but I'm going to show you three different ways you can do it and just how easy it actually is I'm talking about the effect full 3d to help add an element of depth to your scene so let's get to it first I'm going to show you how I made this Cube and it's actually a really simple technique so the first thing we need to do is create a square in our scene so I'm just going to go up to my shape tool up here my rectangle tool click that I'm going to hold controll and shift to draw from the center and create a nice even box I'm going to press control alt and home to Center my anle point and then just contrl and home to Center that to my comp I'm going to press U twice really fast on my shape player here in the timeline and that'll just bring up my size properties and I'm just going to set my rectangle to about 500 so now we obviously only have one side to this square and we actually need another five because this is kind of like making a real Cube so the first thing I'm just going to do is rename this layer just call it one and if like me you don't have the switches for turning 3D on you can go down to this toggle switcher modes button and it'll bring up these other parameters so I'm going to turn on 3D on this layer and the first thing I want to do is change my Anchor Point so my Anchor Point on this layer is actually out so I'm going to zero this out then I'm going to press U really fast twice again on my rectangle to bring up its content and you'll notice our rectangle positions actually out so I'm I'm just going to change those to zero so now we're back centered but having these zeroed numbers is so much easier to work with so on my Anchor Point I'm going to press a to bring that up and on the Zed I want to change the depth to be half of our rectangle size so we set our rectangle size to be uh 500 so I'm just going to change that to 250 now we could link this up with Expressions if we want to but for ease I'm just going to type in the value now you'll notice in my 3D mode it actually says Cinema 4D here and I don't want that I want to change that to Classic 3D for this one and I'm just going to go to where it says one View and change it to two views so I have my top and my front it's just going to make it easier for positioning these rectangles so I'm going to ju this up once by pressing contrl and D then I'm going to press R to bring up my rotation properties and on my X I'm just going to type in 90 and now we have the top and I'm going to dup that again and I'm going to do minus 90 and that will give us uh the bottom and then I'm going to dup that again and this time on the X uh that wants to be zero and 90 on the Y and then we want to do that again and change that to minus 90 on the Y and now we're just missing the uh back one so I'm just going to dup the the base one and change the Y rotation to 180 and that'll give us the back so I'm going to select all these PR say youu to uh bring those down and collapse them all I'm going to link all of these to a null controller so I'm going to go layer new and null object and I'm just going to call this Cube control and to select all of these layers and just bring the pair to the cube and make the cube a 3D layer as well now if we press R to bring up our rotation we can animate this around and we have a full 3d box now I should mention if you plan on adding layer styles to these layers you will have to do some tweaking if you just have rotations on these cubes as you'll notice on my original one my layers are kind of dispersed a bit different ly and I have them trim off and that's because you'll get this kind of see-through effect uh happening if you don't just where the layer styles are interacting so you'll see the top uh is now visible uh where really we don't want it to be and it causes this kind of seethrough look almost just the way the layer gradients are hitting um so I would recommend you just kind of go through and trim your layers accordingly to uh give you that look that the cube is actually fully whole and fully solid however if you you're not using layer Styles you don't need to worry about that it's absolutely fine now the next method does require a bit more work but you can really tune it to what you need and I'm a big fan of this one it's how I made this Loop and also this one as well uh and we're going to be manipulating shape layers to do this so I'm going to go ahead and make uh the one that I made for for this video I'm going to go ahead and create a rectangle and this is just going to serve as a base to our uh to our cylinder so I'm just going to control all home that to Center my Anchor Point bring that to decision and I'll call that cylinder base and then I'll create a ellipse by going up to the shape tool up here and I'm just going to add an ellipse to this as well now that kind of gives us the top uh something around there I'm going to press U really fast twice on this base I'm just going to even out these numbers uh so we have uh an actual Square to work with and then I can set my uh cind CER top to be 600 uh pixels as well so let's set that 600 by 600 and then if I unlink this value here that means uh these values are no longer attached I can just change my x value which is the first one to be 600 as well and now I have my cylinder uh but the way to get this to work and I'll just make this a different color so we can really see what's going on is we need to animate our path properties which is super simple so I'm going to go to my cylinder top and press U really fast twice and really we could just animate this size because it is a circle object if it's something more handdrawn you may need to go in and do this manually but I'll just go ahead and key frame my size parameter on this and I'll press the stopwatch to create a key frame I'll move over to maybe around 2 seconds and then on the y- axis I'm just going to set this to about two I don't want it complete zero um but what you'll see happen is now our position wasn't actually correct because it's not lining up with the top so that means means my uh Center wasn't actually centered to the uh cylinder as you can see so I'm just going to bring this up and just Center that by bringing these middle points up to the top and I just press T to get my opacity up here and I'll set that back to 100 and now we have the illusion that our camera is kind of tilting up over this object and it's super simple to do but it really gives that a nice illusion of depth so you can just add a bit of easing into this and then you get this nice movement as though you're kind of got some 3D in your scene and then obviously just because it's 2D layers you can add all your layer styles to this as you would normally with no issues and just create a really nice animation by the end of it so for the last method of this technique we will actually be creating a fully 3D object that you can use in After Effects using the Cinema 4D renderer however the problem with this is you can't use trap mats and layer Styles but you'll notice my original one had layer Styles so I'm going to show you a little hack that we can do to add those to our 3D layers so first off I'm going to go ahead and create a cylinder shape so I'll go ahead and create an ellipse and I'll just do this in the center and I'll press control alt on home and then control home to Center that press you really fast on this and I'll just size that to 500 and I'll rename this to cylinder on this ellip path I'm going to select it and press contrl and d and I'm going to go to my properties in my ellipse path and just change this to 400 maybe we'll go down to 350 just to get a nice uh kind of tube look and I'm going select the top of the contents here go to add and we will add a merge paths in our merge paths we'll go down and change this to exclude intersections and that'll just cut out the middle piece for us now what we want to do is add all of these to a group so I'm going to go to add and group and I'm bring this to the top select everything below and just bring this up to the top here and we want to turn on 3D for this layer as well so I'll turn on 3D and make sure you're using the Cinema 4D renderer for this one now what this will do is it will give you some new options such as geometry options and material options we just want the geometry option so I'm bring this down and we now have the ability of an extrusion depth so I'm going to set this to 80 and you'll notice if I bring up my Rotation by pressing r on my keyboard and begin to rotate this we actually have a full 3d object which if that's all you're after that's great you can end the tutorial here but if you're want in layer Styles in this you'll notice you can't actually do it with the Cinema 4D renderer active so if I try add a gradient overlay it does nothing because layer Styles don't work in the cinemod renderer the same as track mat Stone so I'm going to go ahead and delete that and I'll show you the little work on that we can do to be able to do this if we go to our content and select our group you'll notice if we press the add button we have a few more options now and we can change the color of the front side and back and we have some bevel options as well now to our side I'm going to add a color and to the back I'm also going to add a color for my side color I'm going to change it to bright green and for my back color I'm going to change this to bright blue this is going to make it easier to separate our colors now what you will need to do is actually animate your 3D within a precom so I'm going to go ahead and just animate this x rotation over 2 seconds maybe to do a 180° spin so I'm going to go ahead and pre-compose this layer by pressing contrl shift and c and I'll just call this cylinder now to be able to add layer styles to each side of this and treat it individually say we wanted the side different color to the back and the front a different color to the back as well we actually need to separate these into layers so I'm going to select this comp and dup it three times and then on my top one I'll call this cylinder face we'll call this second one cylinder side and the bottom one can be cylinder back so to be able to get each separate layer on its own we need to add an effect called color key so I'll go up to my effects here and change this to color key I'll just drag this linear color key on and I'm just going to solo this top player to give us our face so you'll notice it's already defaulted to Blue and as isn't far off so I'll key color and just select that blue and then we want to dup this effect by pressing C contrl and D on it and then I'm actually going to select the green as the next color just clicking the eye dropper and then selecting on your screen and now we just have this red face which is perfect I'm going to copy both of these and paste that to my next layer I'll unsolo that and now we want our side so I'll just solo the side paste on these and we can change our green to a red this time and now we just have the side and then we can unsolo that and now p paste these to our back layer and this time we just want the blue so I'll just change the first color from Blue to red and if we solo that we now just have the back layer when it comes around so obviously all together we have each side on its own and now because these are just 2D pre comps we can actually add layer styles to this so if we go to right click layer Styles and gradient overlay and this is on the back so I'll just need to flip around and now we have the opportunity to add the gradient as you wish and if you want to learn how to create awesome lay Styles like this you can go ahead and watch this video next

Channel: Motion By Scott

Views: 22,539

Keywords: after effects, after effects tutorial, faux 3d, 3d in after effects, layer styles after effects, cinema 4d after effects, motion design, animation process, adobe after effects, tutorial, aniamtion start to finish, after effects workflow, animation workflow, animating loops, motion graphics, motion graphic design, learn animation, animator, mograph, motion, how to lean animation, learn after effects, how to, 3d after effects, shape layers after effects

Id: oHchNexhz_M

Length: 11min 36sec (696 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 28 2024