xEssentials E21 Projection Mapping using After Effects

okay so I want to welcome everyone to week 21 of the X essentials presentation this week we have an exciting topic a lot of interests hopefully everybody saw the promo video the topic is projector mapping Norden Ashe will be presenting once again I want to remind everybody to please have their cameras on and to stay muted for the presentation at the end Jordan will be addressing any questions you also feel free to ask anything in chat and I'm sure people will respond and comment Jordan you've got the floor wonderful thanks ed hey I'm Jordan ash I'm so excited to to present this I guess almost a whirlwind kind of overview on projector mapping and we're gonna go over projector mapping and creating content I'm going to actually map a house actually a doll house that I got off Craigslist well I introduced myself I want to take a look at what I did last year on my house and some of you have seen this I set up two projectors in my yard and I just did some fun stuff just for Halloween time well it was still kind of warm I'm from Utah so I can't do it this during during the Christmas season just it's not practical it's too cold out and the snow and whatnot I happen to move into a white brick house about three years ago and I just had the random idea hey I should project on this thing so I got a few projectors from my work and made this map and then spent the year making content for it and this show was oh 10 yeah maybe just over 10 minutes and the kids would come get their candy watch the show and then leave last year I've been doing projection for three years last year was my first year doing X lights you can see the lights there briefly around the outlines of the windows so yeah I've only done Christmas lighting for a year now so I'm fairly new to that as far as my background I have a background in film video live broadcasting corporate audio-visual basically I love taking technology and engineering and creating it making it creating it into something awesome something that the audience can can really enjoy I really love the fusion between technology and engineering and creativity and bringing those all together into a really cool product this is done in just a second we'll go on great some of the things that we're going to talk about today in the next hour hour and 20 minutes maybe hour and 30 if we stretch it we're gonna cover what is projector mapping how to create a map and we're gonna do again a live demo of how to create that we're going to talk about animation techniques and we'll make some animations and gathering content this is again a super topic that I'm super excited about I love doing this and I love using technology to create a really immersive display I hope to make this as cohesive as possible basically I have a week's worth of class content to cover and I have about an hour to cover it which is going to be quite a challenge I'm gerund because of that I'm guaranteed to skip over a bunch of stuff especially when I get into the software the software that I'm gonna be using many of you have probably never used before so I'm going to be moving quite quickly and again there's going to be questions all over the place and I apologize for moving so quickly and and skipping over things I'm not watching the chat so if somebody has a pertinent question you know feel free to to unmute yourself and let me know I hope to yeah it just gets through stuff as quickly as possible I will open it up for questions at the very end I know you're gonna have questions throughout but if you can wait until the end that'd be awesome and we'll spend some time answering those what else well I'm going through this you may or may not be able to invest in the software that I'm using if you don't I want you to try and think about how some of these method about some of these methods and how you know how you can apply them to your display yeah let's move on what is projector mapping to answer that I'm going to have my friends at prenn D answer that question and immediately following that I'm going to play just about a minute of cool samples that I found in some of these that some of these you may have seen just just samples these I mean these these houses and these these architectural buildings these displays are amazing and these people have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours creating these so I just thought I'd show you what like a legitimate professional mapping is like projection mapping is the art of using projectors to map light onto any surface turning common 3d objects into interactive displays we then use motion graphics and creative coding to display highly engaging or immersive content essentially replacing the surface of the object [Music] [Music] [Music] so to kind of reiterate what was said projector mapping isn't just shooting a projector out of surface it's actually going in and tracing the surface and using the geometry in the architecture to your advantage and project projecting very specific shapes and objects onto that surface as far as a basic set up there's three parts there's your source your projector and your surface and I want to touch briefly on all three of those types of sources from the simplest that can be fell complie player or X schedule running off a Raspberry Pi it can be run off a laptop using Windows Media Player QuickTime iTunes etc or you can get something really really advanced and I just put this category in here because most of those examples that we just saw use a large-scale media server like disguise hippo RKOs watch out these are very very professional software and the cool thing about these they're they're a little bit different because unlike what we're going to do today in making all the content and the masking in software and rendering it out as a premade video these media servers here on the right side can actually take that content and mask it and shape it and project it live and they can do all that rendering life which is really really cool and they're very useful for very large-scale surfaces types of projectors I know that somebody out there is gonna ask well what kind of projectors should I buy well I don't know if I can actually give you a great recommendation I can tell you the things to look for but the actual specific model I you know anywhere in there I have a few links at the end of my presentation of places to look things you want to look for is your brightness which is measured in lumens the higher the lumens the better inputs if you veered towards digital inputs that's better like DVI or HDMI your resolution there's tons of different resolutions out there the higher resolution it is the bigger the content you have to make for it but the prettier it looks on your house my projection that I did on my house was to 1080p projectors the projector that I'll be doing the demo on is twenty-four by 768 which is significantly smaller than that but for my purposes and I got the projector for free it works great lumen recommendation I would recommend at least a three thousand lumen anywhere between 3,000 and 5,000 should be plenty enough for most houses the next thing to look for is your contrast ratio the higher the contrast ratio the better a 50,000 to 1 contrast ratio is better than 5,000 to 1 what contrast ratio means is if the amount of gradations between black and white if you only have five five thousand levels that's only five thousand individual colors or gradations between those two so five thousand has much better contrast in the lights versus the dark and the darks I hope that that makes sense next thing to look for is image warping the ability to change front versus rear projection any kind of key stunning that it has more advanced projectors will have a corner correction which you can actually take each of the four corners and warp them in which is very handy especially if your spiky striking your projector at night and then very advanced projectors will have advanced point warping which you can project on a curved surfaces and things like that you also want to look at your at your lens most projectors have some kind of a lens calculator so you can make sure that your lens is wide enough to actually hit the entire width of your of your surface and then of course the cost you get more features and yes you get more features ok types of projectors we have from the low end to the medium to the high the projector I'm using for this demo is about the second one there the one that I used on my house that I got from my company last year was about halfway between the third and the fourth and it seems to be that the cheaper projectors have less features and more expensive have more features and they're also much brighter the one pictured on the far right side there is 30,000 lumens and cost about $100,000 without a lens and the lens is another 20 grand good luck affording them here's a bunch of recommendations links to places that you can go that just have random recommendations and buyer's guide the one on the bottom there is actually from 2018 and it has just the latest and greatest two projectors and I will of course post all of these links in the YouTube description when we post the final video next is surfaces there's many different kinds of surfaces and I'm going to show you a few examples one is just your entire house I'm sure that most of us have seen this video and this we're actually fooling the eye and we're using a little bit of 3d the the interesting thing about that is if you look at it from a different angle it just looks completely skew juanpis I found a video from a different angle and just noting lines up and it looks really funny next is a garage door there's just some fun stuff you can do with a basic garage door he obviously the went in and and traced out that garage door and did some fun projection on it here's a quick video of him her doing the light warping on his or her house and again we'll see a live demo on this in just a minute next is just ordinary objects anything with a lighter color here is a Santa you could project onto a Santa I've seen shoes I've seen lots of fun stuff here's the Atmos 3d effects form and I'm sure that some of you have probably seen this before is it projector mapping kind of you're you're warping a projector onto a surface but are you really tracing it out not really so I guess we could qualify this as mapping and I'll put some links at the end of the presentation about Atmos and where to find that here's a little demo of their form it's just an inflatable form that you put a sheet over and you project onto it next is a car because why not this is very nice content very beautiful 3d content that's 3d projected onto a car and lastly there's pumpkins this guy actually lives down the street from me and makes singing pumpkin videos that you can project onto pumpkins so I used some of his stuff in my halloween show okay let's talk about the setup these are the main parts of the setup that I'm going to be doing I have my laptop driving the content I come out to a USB C and to HDMI I have a HDMI to DVI converter because my projector does not take HDMI I have to convert to DVI it plugged in I plug into my projector and then I project onto this little dollhouse that I found for super cheap on Craigslist now when you're making the map it might be a good idea to bring a video camera and a screen with you so you don't have to keep yeah somehow you need to magnify the image so you can see it really really up-close so you can get a pretty pixel accurate when I did it yeah I brought the camera and the screen out and I set it right next to my laptop so I could zoom in on my house with the camera and I didn't have to strain my eyes or get binoculars or get up out of my chair and run up to the house and say okay two pixels to the left one pixel up anyway some kind of magnification is a really good idea alrighty the next thing I want to do is transition to a demo this part is pre-recorded and there's a number of reasons that I did that the first one mainly being is that I can do a split screen and I feel like I can cover a lot more content a lot quicker so you'll see me you'll see a live capture of my screen doing audio editing doing the the content gathering the content creation and then you'll also see a camera that's pointed at my adult house alrighty let's get started before we do anything I have to get on a soapbox for a minute about organizing files especially with content creation your files just seem to multiply and you'll get tons and tons and tons of them so let's go ahead and make a new folder I'm gonna do it right on the desktop you can put it where you like my naming convention I do a two-digit year 18 and then I do a month right now it's June I'm gonna do 1806 and that's just my naming convention you can use whatever you like protect your mapping this really helps me find files very very quickly I have the year in the month let's look in my video projects folder you notice here on the left side I have the year in the month of every project and as soon as I'm done with a project I go and put it on a hard drive take it off my local hard drive put it on an external drive and they can sit there and rot until I need files from it again I'm gonna make a few folders in here one is called sound that I can put all of my sound sound effects music whatever I'm going to make a project files folder inside this folder I'm going to place my Premiere files in my After Effects files let's also make a folder called images video and renders and there we go there's one thing that you can take away from this entire presentation I want it to be please keep your files organized every time you download something put it in a folder if you get more than three or four of a similar file make a folder for it it really helps you in the long run end of soapbox similar to what a cinematographer would do in terms of photography and the images sound designers job is to create the same environment you see with your eyes but with your ears for my music selection I wanted to find something that's very fun very upbeat and it has lots of little sound effects and doodads and bleeps and bloops that I can do fun animations to know that you can find your music now and layer on more sound effects later so I like to start looking in YouTube techno remix or sometimes even dubstep are really good places to start so let's look up Halloween remix after listening to a bunch of these this is one that I really like let's take a listen conveniently in the description there's a link to iTunes so I can easily download the mp3 let's grab my audio file and drop it into my sound folder before we dive into editing and content creation I wanted to talk about the software that I use I used the Adobe Creative Cloud and that includes software like Photoshop Illustrator Premiere After Effects audition all of these wonderful wonderful fantastic very professional pieces of software is this software a bit of a learning curve yes however there is tons of free and paid tutorials all over the place is the software free no is there other software out there yes is it less expensive or possibly free yes is it the best bang for your buck I don't think so yes you can do this whole thing in paint or other not as great software will you get the same result I really don't think so before I started all of this ed and I had a conversation about whether I should demo everything using free or very very cheap software and we both decided that it wasn't the way to go mainly because if you're going to do something why not use the best tools available also I've been using After Effects and I use it almost every day so creating content in it is quite straightforward if you are serious about adding this kind of video a very immersive element to your to your show I'd highly recommend looking into a license you can just go to adobe.com and click on view all products scroll down and here under After Effects you can click download trial I can also click Buy Now and we have a single app or the entire Creative Suite which is all the software's that I mentioned two second ago and tons and tons more for the single app you can get either the trial or I can get just a single month subscription which is just above 30 US dollars which for all the content and the really cool element that this is going to be adding to your show I think it's totally worth the thirty one dollars for a month to purchase the software and make your content and map your house out let's jump into Premiere and edit this audio file down bit open Premiere and hit a new project I'm going to now save this back in my project files on my desktop and I'm going to title the project 18:06 projector mapping audio hit enter and that will bring up Premiere just a quick overview of how this works here's your media in your library this is a preview window a program window in your timeline below double click in your project window and navigate to your sound file click import and drag that down to the new timeline icon then it creates me a timeline let's zoom in by hitting shift + and I can easily zoom in and out of the timeline just hitting the plus and minus keys and now let's trim this down we're at about five and a half minutes and I want it to be oh maybe just under a minute alright let's jump in and cut some of this down I'm gonna stop it right on the downbeat there zoom in using the plus and minus keys and right here I'm gonna I'm gonna do a cut I can either grab my razor my razor tool and cut it or I can just hit command K and that will also cut right there again on the downbeat I'm going to cut it again delete this delete that and let's take a listen I think that sounds great and I'll fast forward the next little bit of this just cutting down the music you okay so we have this chopped down I'm at about 50 seconds which is right where I want it at least for this demo one more thing that I want to do is go in and add markers when I render this out as a WAV file those markers will stay intact in the in the audio file and that'll help me a ton in After Effects know where to do the timings so I'm gonna go through and whenever I hear a big downbeat or something I'm gonna hit em on my keyboard and that will add a marker in [Music] okay when all my markers are placed you come up to file export media let's set it as a waveform audio and I'm going to output it again in my folder and the sound subfolder and let's name it edited let's save and export alright I intentionally didn't spend a lot of time on that just because it's kind of outside of the the realm of of what we're going over today in my folder you can see in the sound I have my edited file which is a WAV file I'm going to take a listen to that and make sure it all sounds good [Music] awesome it sounds great I'm gonna go ahead and save my premiere file and quit before we go and create the map of your surface it's time to actually set up your projector it's probably helpful to do this at night time so you can see the image set it up in a place that has low traffic so it won't get bumped it helps to shoot your projector image slightly wider than your surface try to use minimal warping and keystoning as this reduces resolution unless you're Chuck Norris and can set up map create content and do a show all in the same day you'll probably need to bring your projector in for the night it's a good idea to mark the exact location with spray paint or lawn markers may I used a few rocks to sidetrack for just a sec projector enclosures are a great idea if you're planning on having your projector out more than one or two days say for the Christmas season there's tons of great ideas for enclosures out there do a search on the Facebook page or the forms and you can find lots of other people that have created enclosures that work really well for them all and I'll make sure that your projector is well ventilated you can even go as far as to automatically turn your projector on an officer times using felt comply player or X schedule I won't get into that but there's a few examples on the Facebook page and forms feel free to ask around when creating your map it might be a good idea to bring a small table and a chair out and possibly a small space heater as it could take a little while to create it took me three days I also traced every one of 500 bricks the next thing to do is to plug your projector into your computer using an HDMI DVI or whatever your projector and computer have for this demo I use a USB see two HDMI dongle then I adapt to DVI and then into the projector the next thing to do is to find your projectors native resolution if you don't know this you can find out on Google by using your projectors model number many projectors say they can support up to a higher resolution but their native resolution is actually much smaller what this means is that you can send a higher resolution video signal but the projector will actually down scale and I just think that that's silly the higher the resolution you make your content in the harder it is to find the content and create content and also the longer it takes to render now that your projectors all hooked up and focused and you know the native resolution it's time to set up the projector in the display settings on your computer this is automatic I'm going to go to the Apple system preferences click on displays if I hit arrangement it shows that I have my projector connected because I have two displays here and I'm gonna hit gather windows so I can see the settings of this secondary display there it is I'm going to click scaled and it gives me different options that I can send to that projector my projectors native resolution is 1024 by 768 so I'm going to make sure that that's selected and quit out of here on a PC it's very similar go to control panel then display the screen resolution make sure that under multiple displays it's set to extend and that the resolution is set correctly now we can do the fun stuff which is diving into After Effects now like most software there is a learning curve to this it's not gonna be something that you can just sit down at and instantly know how to how to do things however it is very intuitive and very very straightforward and again if you have any questions there's tons and tons of help out there anything that you want to learn or anything that you want to do you can find out on youtube or other places very very easily because of that this is going to be a very much whirlwind tutorial and not gonna get into a lot of detail and there's gonna be many times where many of you are gonna say whoa wait a minute that went way too fast back up go over it again so excuse me if I if I skip over things or or go a little bit too fast again there's plenty of help out there I'm gonna click new project and immediately go and file save if you don't save and you're in After Effects crashes which it sometimes does you will lose everything in my folder in project files I'm gonna save it here 18:06 projector mapping the effects enter similarly to premiere we have a project panel which all of our assets and media sound files audio files videos images timelines compositions everything is organized inside of here where we have we have our canvas which is where we do our animating at the bottom we have our timeline and then we have all of our properties panels here on the right side there's one last setting that I need to do that enables After Effects to talk directly with the projector up and after effects go to preferences and video preview now if you've set up your projector correctly and set your settings to UM mirrored or extended displays it should show up here on this list mine shows up right here adobe monitored to 1024 by 768 so i know it's the right one i checked that and hit ok what that does is it duplicates what's ever on the active canvas as a pixel accurate representation on the projector which is awesome and it's exactly what we need to get started so i'm going to start by importing that audio file that we just made double-click and find your file click open i need to add this to a timeline and after effects timelines are called compositions so i'm going to grab this asset drag it down to the new composition icon and there's my new composition as you can see all these markers that I placed in Premiere are imported which is fantastic I can see my waveforms here by twirling down into and waveform and there's my waveforms with all my markers nicely synced up just an FYI this checkerboard pattern here means transparent or alpha which means that we can see through it to the background let's set the resolution of our canvas by going up to composition and hitting composition settings or commander control K I'm gonna set it to my native resolution of my projector which is 1280 by no which is 1024 by 768 and hit enter I can also set my frame right here and I'm gonna do a frame rate of 30 frames a second it okay and now it's time to start drawing shapes I'm gonna make a new composition and well we're gonna call this map and I'm going to set my dimensions to 1024 by 768 at a frame rate of 30 hit okay and I'm going to put in a new solid layer let's make the solid layer 1024 by 768 and make the color white now inside of this I'm going to make a mask using the pen tool and as I mask this I can see that masks show up live on my projector so I'm going to grab the corners of this and mask in the first top left window just like keeping files organized it's equally as important to keep your layers organized so I'm going to rename this top window one let's copy and paste this layer and once more window 2 and window 3 I'm going to drill down to this mask that we just created and shift this over same thing with my top window 3 so I'm gonna copy well let's make a whole new layer because then I can do a new color behind it let's do a light pink and I'm gonna hide my windows and make another mask on top of the window frame and making both the window and the window frames I have more versatility when I'm animating if there's something on your house that you think that you might use later on it's better to just go ahead and trace it out now there's window 1 I'm gonna rename this layer top window 1 frame and I'll a copy paste paste I can hit enter down here to rename it rename the layer easily and I'm again moving the mask and not the entire layer yes I can just grab the entire layer and move it but the problem with that is if I turn off my mask see how it moved my entire layer over and not just my mask so I'm going to reset my transform select my mask and just move my mask let's turn that back to AD and again I'm going over a lot very very quickly if you have questions on any of this just look up what is a mask how to make mass what these are all good things to know and things that I just don't have time to go over so there we go I have all my top windows and my window frames created then they look decent on the house I could go in and tweak them just a little bit more I'm gonna go ahead and trace out all the other parts of the house and I'll fast forward that speed that up and I'll see you in about an hour [Music] [Music] alright I've gone ahead and traced my entire house and I've made masks of all the objects and it took me just over an hour it wasn't too bad I made about 80 shapes I decided to do it all in one layer with each mask labeled so if I come up here for example to left door and I turn that to add there is conveniently my left door and you can see that on the model just like exlights I also chose to make larger areas for example the entire house if I scroll down to the bottom I have a whole house but turn that to add we can see the entire house which actually includes a lot of the other masks whole house - the step and I also made one that's whole house - the sides and the step notice that that doesn't include the two sides and this is just convenient cuz if I choose to put a video layer on there I can easily just add that mask to the video layer and just see the video inside of that area on the house so it's convenient to have those kind of groups wonderful well let's start animating some stuff there's a few animation techniques that I want to show you the first one is just taking pre-made video layers putting them on your house and applying a mask to them so let's go ahead and find something I found a fun little animation that I found on YouTube and just downloaded that and there's some it's fairly low quality but there's some stuff that I can use from this so I'm gonna click and drag that into my project panel and drag that down to my composition and find a good little section of that that I want to use I like this little witch so let's trim this I'll call that good the shortcut for trimming is alternate left bracket and right bracket so you can either drag it to or I can hit alternate right bracket and it will trim the layer to where your playhead is let's bring that to the beginning and I want to put that in the bottom left window so I can do that one of two ways I can go and scale that and crop it and fit it in there or I can create a track map and track mats are awesome it basically uses a layer as the Alpha information to know where the layer needs to be cropped and then another layer as the video information and I'll show you how to do that so with this master mask I'm gonna copy and paste it just so I don't destroy my main mask let's turn this on and find my window - there it is and let's turn that to add now that that's on let's go ahead and hit s4 scale and I can scale this layer and drag it and fit it roughly into this window notice it's slightly overlapping but that's okay now I'm going to set this top layer as the alpha information and the bottom layer as the actual video information to do that I need to turn on this little guy down here that it says expand or collapse the transfer control space kind of a mouthful and it gives me an option under the track mat I'm going to select this to alpha mat and notice that it has master mask which is the layer immediately above that to use as the Alpha mat and that'll do a few things one is that it'll automatically hide that layer and the second thing is that it applied that alpha information to the layer below it which is this so if I turn this back on there's my green square and notice that now my bottom layer is cropped the sides are cropped now if I turn this setting back off you can see now it's not cropped and it's not within the constraints of the window and if I turn it back on it is cropped which is exactly what I want so let's do one more of these for the other window I'm gonna hide this layer and let's find another little clip it's kind of cool I like that alternate begin bracket let's move that forward and alternate and bracket again I'm going to copy and paste my main master mask drag it to right above this layer go to add and again set this to alpha matte and something's funny oh I haven't scaled my video and yet oops let's turn this back off and scale it in drag it as a side now all of these transform controls I can easily access by hitting P for position s for scale R for rotation T I think they were thinking transparency but t means opacity so if I just hit s I can easily have the scale property shows up same thing for PT a for anchor point etc etc I can also hit P and hit shift s and that will give me both of these which is great so I often I often have my position and my scale properties show up at the same time so I can easily come in and adjust these layers so let's Center this up scale it down just a little bit more and now I can hit alpha mat and that will automatically hide the layer above it and crop it now when I click the layer above it it shows all these other masks and that's okay because they're all set to none only this window 3 mask is set to add great let's come to the beginning and hit the spacebar to play it and take a look and this is awesome basically I can find any piece of video content from any source that I want to incur and fit it into any piece of the house that I want to I can also have multiple pieces going on at different parts of the house at the same time a friendly note the more that you add in the longer it's going to take to render especially when you get up to 20 30 layers and you hit the spacebar after effects no longer plays it in real-time it'll have to render it through once and then you can go back and hit play and it'll it'll speed it up a little bit and you can actually get a feel of what it looks like now once your map is created you can go back into your office and sit in your comfy chair and make all this content because your map is is made or you can do a similar thing that you did while making your map and you can see your canvas life projected on your house and you can do all of your animation while watching it live on your house which is kind of cool me I think it's a lot more comfortable to make the map first and then come inside and make all of your content later great the next effect that I want to show you is kind of a build effect in which we're going to animate these masks and make the make the different shapes build on the house so I'm gonna hide these two layers copy and paste my master mask and I'm gonna animate one mask at a time let's start with our pillars let's select our four pillars go to add turn my layer on and there's my four pillars right there now I'm gonna introduce a principle called key framing underneath underneath each property when you drill down to it there's a little stopwatch here when you enable the stopwatch it gives you a keyframe in the timeline a key frame basically freezes the values of that property at a specific time so I'm gonna have a keyframe at zero seconds and another keyframe at say four seconds notice when I hit the watch here it gives me these options here which I can go forward and backward between keyframes and also I can click them the center diamond there and add another keyframe so let's do that let's add my second keyframe go back to my first one select my mask I'm going to zoom in and grab these top grab these top two points here I'll shift select both of them zoom back out and bring them down so they kind of meet this the other two points now if I scrub through my timeline I can see from the first keyframe all four are together and the second keyframe the pillar is reset which is awesome I can now grab that key frame and make it two seconds or one second hit plus and minus to zoom into the timeline okay and I'm going to do the same thing with my other three pillars going in about ten seconds I can make an animation where the pillars rise now I want to offset these I'm going to hit page up and page down on my keyboard to advance frames let's go five frames and offset these key frames and that just makes it a little bit more dynamic there we go hit play awesome well we're looking into keyframes I want to show one more animation technique and that is easing it's a lot more natural for things not to all to suddenly start and stop rather they slowly accelerate into the motion and back out of the motion so to do that I'm going to select all my keyframes right click and go to keyframe assistant and select easy ease or f9 on my keyboard notice the difference they slowly accelerate into the motion and when they're nearing the end they slowly accelerate back out and this is just a little bit more natural of a movement great I'm gonna do just a few more shapes to kind of show you this build animation that we want to create let's go down to our fence window to fence these vertical pieces I named fence one through seven and I have a fence top and a fence bottom let's go through one through seven select all of them twirl down set my keyframe for masks let's go to one second and set another keyframe I'm going to zoom in and draw a box around all these top points and I can animate them all at once let's click and drag them all down to the start and select all of these keyframes and hit f9 there we go I'm going to also set these to add and we have a nice very simple animation again I'm going to offset these let's say by two frames hit page down awesome let's take a look looks great one more shortcut key that I want to teach you is is you if I press you it reveals only the properties that have keyframes so I can easily get into and adjust all my keyframes without having to trill down a million properties to find what I'm looking for I can hit you again and it contracts everything and again hitting you will reveal all the properties that have keyframes on them which is pretty awesome great the next thing that I want to show you is how to change colors in these layers so what I'm going to do is separate these fence layers from these pillar layers and to do that I'm going to copy and paste this master mask let's label this first one pillars and the second one defense great now in the pillars layer I've already animated everything but I'm just going to turn off the masks for the fence so we don't see them and likewise in the fence layer I'm going to turn off the pillars and let's just double check that I did that right there's my pillars and there's my fence wonderful now there's a bunch of different ways that I can add color to this and here's one of them I'm gonna right-click on the layer and come up to layer Styles now if you're familiar with Photoshop these are these are the exact same layer styles that are in there let's come down to gradient overlay and notice that that puts a nice gradient on my layer let's drill down into the gradient overlay and it gives me a bunch of options I can click on edit gradient and that gives me a nice window that I can come into and add a little bit of color to there we go nice and bright and happy I'm gonna do the same thing on the fence right click go to layer styles color overlay and I can set it to a solid color let's set it to [Music] a deep blue purple there we go and let's take a look looks great I'm gonna go ahead and fast-forward a little bit and show you what I created with these very simple keyframing properties and color properties let's take a look and there we go yeah just some very very simple masks moving very simple keyframing a little bit of the easing and some gradients and colors and we can make a pretty cool animation quite quickly actually this took only five to ten minutes great the next technique that I want to show you is how to put an outline on all the architectural features of your house to do that I'm again gonna copy my master mask bring it down to the bottom and let's set most all of my masks to add everything except for the whole house and now I'm gonna add an effect there's two ways I can do that I can come up to effect and there's all of these different effects that I can add there's some really really powerful awesome effects in here that just takes some time to fiddle around with to see what they do I also have an effects and presets panel here on the right side and I can easily search for an effect I'm gonna search for one that's called stroke there it is I'm going to click this and drag it down onto my layer and in my effect controls panel I have some more I have some more controls and these controls can also be accessed if I twirl down on the layer go down to effects down to stroke and notice that the identical properties are down here so in my stroke effect I'm going to select all masks and I want to change the paint style to reveal original image to see them better I'm gonna toggle the background from alpha to the background color by clicking this little button here toggle transparency grid and that turns my ground block and as a side note I can change that background color by coming up to composition composition settings and there's my background color right there now I want to change my stroke thickness let's bump that up just a little bit we can see that looks pretty nice on my house now because the paint style is set to reveal original image it's using the color from the original image I can easily change that by right-clicking going to layer Styles and let's add a gradient overlay to it come down to edit gradient change the colors a bit and I'm gonna make this into a radial gradient under style click on linear and go to radial and that makes the gradient start from the middle and expand outward and then I'm gonna scale it I'm gonna scale it up just a little bit and that looks pretty cool okay so there's a pretty cool outline of all the features on the house let's now take this layer I'm gonna rename it to outline on this layer I'm going to add another effect called turbulent displace and again I can easily find it by just typing in the first few letters and it will do a search it's under distort turbulent displace you can see what that's doing already kind of a cool little wobbly type effect and this effect is kind of just a cool one where it just slightly skews the outline and it makes you kind of do a double-take at it anyways it's an effect that I really like I'm gonna turn down the amount quite a bit to oh about there and under my evolution setting I can click this and drag it and that kind of gives it a little wobbly type effect now to make that move without me clicking it I need to add a keyframe let's click the stopwatch and now that I have the stopwatch selected up here I can select my layer again hit u that will reveal that property and notice that it placed a keyframe right at my playhead time let's advance to about four seconds and increase my evolution a bit there we go and let's watch it back I think that looks pretty cool I'm gonna add one more thing and that is a keyframe on the amount I want it to start with no displacement and gradually add a bit of displacement keyframe amount click on the layer hit you and there's my amount let's add another keyframe at one second go back to zero seconds and start with an amount of zero see what that does yeah I like that anyway it's just kind of a cool little effect that you can use alright the next thing that I want to show you is the shatter effect and this is kind of a cool one that you can have bricks crumble and break to do that I'm going to find an image of a brick wall I already found one on Google Images let's grab that and drag it into my project and drag that down into my composition it click scale and scale that back quite a bit because I want smaller bricks and add an effect called repet I'll and that will basically duplicate and extend that image out to the right left top and bottom I'm gonna set the tiling pattern to unfold that gives it a little bit more of a natural look now that I have my texture I want to mask this inside of the shape of the house we already know how to do that I'm gonna copy and paste my master mask let's turn that on turn find my mask that is the whole house - the sides and step well let's have the sides in there as well add that and then set this bottom layer to alpha matte and now that image is constrained within the constraints of the house which is exactly what I want there's one more thing that I need to do and that is to combine these two layers into its own composition now here's the power of After Effects in the feature that I think is really cool I can make composition and take that entire comp and put it as one layer inside of another comp so you can layer comps to do that I'm going to take the bottom two layers right click and go to pre compose now that automatically will make me a new composition let's entitle this shedder bricks great notice that those two layers are automatically moved into my new composition and back in my main composition I have a sub composition called shadow bricks now if I double click on this it brings me back to that composition alright on this layer I'm going to add a shadow effect and I'm gonna select rendered view now if I just scrub forward we see it gives us a kind of a cool shatter effect let's now go and adjust some of these properties the first one is the shape I want the shape to be bricks and let's adjust the repetitions just up just a little bit so they more or less follow the shape of my original pattern notice as I increase this the pieces get smaller and smaller they don't have to be exact but yeah that's about good here I can also change the extrusion depth or the thickness of the bricks and we'll talk more about extrusions here in a minute I think that's good now I want my bricks to shatter from the top down and I can change that in the fourth setting so let's move that way up to the top I'm gonna adjust my radius down just a little bit come way up to the top add a keyframe head to you let's bring your key from all the way to the beginning and at let's say three seconds I'm going to bring the center of this force all the way down and that looks like a pretty cool effect it's not affecting these edges so let's add another keyframe to the radius click you again and there's my two keyframes that have just set with the radius the radius is small at the top and as it goes down the radius gets bigger and bigger yeah let's make it even bigger right there so it gets those last few bricks awesome now in the physics drill down I'm going to adjust my gravity and I turn my gravity down just a little bit from three to two that'll make them fall a little bit less fast it's even turn it down to one now that looks pretty cool on my computer but it looks even cooler on the live projection there's one more setting that I want to adjust and that is the tumble randomness and that just makes it look a little bit more dynamic and actually like it's a brick wall crumbling and then I'm gonna use YouTube to find a cool kind of crumbling rock sound effect let's drag that into my project window turn off the video and just have the audio on here I'm going to drill down to my waveform and hit alt left bracket and drag that to the beginning and that sounds pretty cool I was doing a search for some cool places that I can get content in one place that came up was this site called video mapping dot store and they basically have all these pre-made elements that you can take and drag and drop onto your house and some of them are pretty cool looking so you can download these and each of these elements is a separate file which then you can take and scale and position on to your house so this is what my dollhouse looks like with those elements mapped onto it near the end of my audio track there's a voice that says I'm coming for you and I want to jump into character animator and and animate a little puppet that says that here's what it sounds like so let's jump into character animator and do that I went ahead and rendered out just that section as a WAV file so my goal is is that I want to have a character speak those words and fortunately Adobe has a really awesome software to do that in the Creative Cloud and this software is included with the subscription it's called character animator and you can click right there to download the software next I'm going to open up my projector mapping folder and I'm gonna go ahead and create a new folder completely that's called character animator next I need to find a puppet online if you go to okay samurai come forward slash puppets there's a few dozen free puppets here and I'm gonna find one that's kind of scary ish yeah these are all pretty happy cute puppets let's settle on this little guy let's download him to that folder and open up character animator I'm gonna hit file new and again inside of my folder on the desktop let's name this I'm coming for you over here in my project window I'm gonna double click and import the puppet that I just downloaded click on the puppet and go to scene add to new scene now notice on the right side there's a live feed from my webcam that's taking facial recognition and translating it into this puppet there's one property that I want to turn off not his head turn so that way he's always looking right at the camera now notice if I move my head left and right he follows I can go left right spin up and down make him jump a little bit I can even make him walk left and right which is pretty awesome if I hit record down here it will record all those motions and then play them back notice that his mouth is also following my spoken word which is pretty cool so basically it's creating live visions now I know that some of you are thinking well why did I just spend all this time creating a lyric track when we could just do it this way well it's not really waste of time because the audio recognition isn't that great it's a fairly new technology the software's only been out there for about a year or so so doing what the x-lite singing faces group did is definitely not a waste of time here's another really cool thing about the software just like After Effects I can see a live duplication of this canvas over on my projector and that's in preferences live output Adobe Monitor 3 1024 by 768 hit OK and there I am live projected on my dollhouse can you use your imagination for this for Halloween or Christmas putting a character and having the kids come up to a webcam and come and interact and see themselves talking and walking and dancing and moving on your house which i think is pretty awesome ok next I want to import that audio track that I just created double-click and navigate to it I'm going to add that audio track down to the timeline and using plus and minus I can zoom in next with the puppet and the audio selected I'm going to come up to timeline and click compute lip-sync from scene audio it'll sit here and think for a second and basically create the visions automatically from that audio file and notice that the Vizia up down here and it's it's mediocre to say at best you'll definitely need to go in and adjust these visions yeah not quite it's close but I can right click on any of these visions and it gives me a number of selections and I can also zoom in and track these visions right and left but I'm gonna just for a second and I'll speed this up you okay great this is what I'm at so far I'm coming from here not too bad now I'm gonna turn my webcam back on and record a little bit of motion let's take my glasses off so it can actually follow my eyeballs I can also see that it links when I blink which is pretty awesome I'm gonna hit record and record a little bit of motion when I'm all done I can just save and close coming back to After Effects I'm going to import the puppet and I'm not even gonna render it out I'm just gonna bring in the data file which is very very small zero bytes and this is one of the really cool things about the Adobe software is that it all talks to each other and often you don't have to use video intermediates you can just use data files and they'll automatically talk to each other and update dynamically it's called dynamic link I'll choose the same that I just created hit OK and drag this down into a new composition and there it is let's scale this down here's my master and I'm gonna find the mass that has just the house and I will use that as an alpha mapped for my video and there's my dude I'm coming for you not horribly scary but it'll do the job I can then go and sync that audio back up into my main project and voila the last technique that I want to show you is a really cool one it's kind of advanced it's one of the first times that I've used it it uses 3d objects and lights and you can actually get real-time shadows and it's really really cool but it really pushes the bounds of what After Effects can do basically my goal kind of is to make a mock 3d model of my surface so I want to try to break down my surface depth wise into different layers that have a common depth and I've already gone ahead and done I have my roof layer my eaves layer which is slightly behind the roof outlines which include my pillars and my fence and my window frames behind that I have the house behind that I have the windows on the sides and then the background behind those windows the next thing to do is position these layers in z space and add extrusion depth to them to do that I'm going to change one view to two views so I can see a top in a front view next select all these layers and hit P for position notice I have an X and y position I'm going to set them all to 3d layer now when I do that and hit position again notice that I now have XY and Z position also in my top view you can now see that they're flat using the Z position I'm now going to position these in z space my side shapes are the very very back with the windows slightly in front of them and I have my main house quite a bit in front of that and this is all again approximate I can change this later outlines in front of that eaves in front of that and the closest one towards me is the roof great the next thing that I want to do is add extrusion depth to these to do that I need to change my renderer in my composition settings I'm going to come over to 3d renderer and change this to raytrace 3d and hit OK raytrace 3d enables layers to have depth to them they're not just flat objects anymore floating in a 3d ish space they actually can have depth to them which is pretty cool changing it to raytrace 3d gives me a another option here called geometry options and under that there's extrusion depth I'm going to extrude this all the way to the back layer and do that for all of my other layers I'm going to set this top view to custom view one let's zoom in and hit fit now when you start working with 3d objects with complex just extrusions after effects really starts to bog down so I'm going to change my preview setting too fast draft and that'll just make it render a bit faster come up here to the unified camera tool or hit C and I can now click and drag this object in 3d space and you can't really see it that well until we add lights to it you can kind of see that it is a 3d object which is kind of cool let's go ahead and add a new light and make it a spotlight let's do an intensity of 90 it okay you can already start to see how cool that looks on the live projection let's move it around a little bit to kind of give you an idea of how awesome this is making shadows that aren't really there and you can use your imagination of all the cool things that you can do with this again a word of warning if you do choose to do some kind of 3d lighting technique like this it does take a very long time to render I'm going to add some keyframes to this now with a light there's two keyframes that I need to worry about one is the point of origin which is where it's pointing and the other is the actual x y&z dimensions so let's twirl down and enable my stopwatch on point of interest and position come to four seconds and add two more keyframes let's X to the right and Y down and also change my point of origin to over here let's give it a look that looks pretty darn cool now if I set this back to adaptive resolution or final quality it will take a very very long time to render twenty seconds anywhere from 20 seconds to three minutes of frame so when you're actually exporting this you might want to do it overnight okay coming back to my main composition the last thing that I want to show you how to do is export the video I'm just going to export this falling brick effect that we made earlier I want to set in and out points on my timeline so it's not rendering the full fifty seconds I can either grab this right handle and bring it into four seconds or I can come up to my composition settings and set the duration to five seconds now to export this I'm going to come up to composition and go down to add to render queue that will then add that main composition into the render queue window and this is where I can set all my output settings and my file path I want my format to be QuickTime and under format options I'm going to set my video codec to h.264 and hit OK and ok again and then to set my render path I can click on output two I'm going to output it to the desktop under projector mapping in my renders folder and let's call this Halloween version one hit save and click render this will then create a single file that I can then take and play back later alright after all is said and done this is what I was able to come up with this is maybe a day day and a half worth of work [Music] [Applause] [Music] I'm coming for you [Music] awesome well that stand the pre-recorded presentation I'm gonna jump back into my slide deck hopefully you guys thought that I was kind of cool there was some I thought some pretty cool stuff in there I loved the word cool by the way and one of them is gathering content there's tons of places that we can go to gather content including YouTube and bit easy video blocks video hive pond5 etc Center I'm going to go through just a few of these ryan had a fantastic little couple of tidbits that he gave on his ex lights presentation it was uploaded on May 17th of 2018 of how to find and use YouTube content so I'd recommend watching Ryan's tutorial here's what vidi sees library looks like this is story blocks by video blocks video blocks calm they have some pretty great content and they also have a free trial and their free trial when I did it a few years back it lets you download I think 10 are slow clips for free a day for a week and then make sure that you cancel your subscription after a week and then they won't charge you there's Envato market which is videohive dotnet they have a bunch of fun stuff including After Effects templates I mean these aren't this isn't just footage background footage and live-action footage but there's also a bunch of After Effects templates which are a great way to learn to download and dig in to load them up and pick apart the layers and the effects and stuff there's pond5 of course it's a little bit pricier and then the good ol atmos effects don't we all love Atmos they have some great stuff some really really cool stuff it's fun but everyone's using it so yeah the singing pumpkin this is a guy that again lives down the street from me that made all these fun singing faces and you can know that you know how to map you can take these faces and actually position them onto your projection surface if you have pumpkins similar with a snowman he has singing faces for a snowman so kind of some fun stuff there light rageous com.com apparently has some fun stuff next let's talk about playback there's a bunch of ways to play this back if you don't have a super fancy media server like a d3 your hippo or some other thing or some other software and somebody made a comment a minute ago about looking for software at projection - mapping org slash software I looked at that there's some fantastic stuff there it's basically everything middle - very very high-end software and media servers in there so give that a look for us it's a lot easier and a lot cheaper to run it off they'll comply player or X schedule tutorials on the folk and PI player can be found at Felton Christmas come X schedule there's some out there that Keith does you'll have to look around to find them though next thing I want to talk about going further what's what's next after this after you've made all this great content july 20th at the expo there is conveniently a two-hour class split into two one-hour parts and it's entitled intro to projector mapping I have no idea who's teaching it but I wish that I could go and if I was going I would love to take that class and learn some of these things again and review some of these things again again this is just like X lates and like any other thing that we do in life basically there's more than one ways more than one way to do it this method that I showed you using After Effects is one of many many ways who's ever presenting at the Christmas expo might be using a completely different way which is great you know the more we can learn about this stuff the better mapping tutorials here's some mapping tutorials I'll post these links in the in the YouTube video and software I'll also add the link on there to the projector - mapping org After Effects tutorials After Effects is awesome because anything that you want to learn you can find online you can of course use YouTube there's tons of tutorials out there just asking YouTube what you want to learn and you'll find a dozen different tutorials on how to do it Video Copilot net is a fantastic place that's medium to advanced tutorials that gets into really deep into effects but they're really they're really interesting to listen to and and mr. Cramer does a great job over there and then there's a few other ones listed here okay last things last and I have to give a plug for the excellent around the world video this year by popular consent I guess we did a poll and we're gonna do the song the greatest show from the greatest showman that's the opening song for it you were participated in it last year you film a video of your house and then we put it together and make a video where every few seconds we switch to a new house and basically show the same song not necessarily the same sequence but the same song from different houses all around the world if you want to be a part of that which I highly recommend an epic sequence will be provided I think by Ryan and it will be provided sometime in September October that's kind of what we're aiming for you can use this sequence or create your own sequence from scratch and then film your display and submit it and we'll have again more information about that submit it by mid-december we're moving up the due date a little bit so we can get the video done and and and thrown out on social media before Christmas so that's the goal the due date will likely be December 16th well I hope you guys learned something I had a blast putting this together again it was a whirlwind of information best of luck I mean this is this is fun stuff once you dive into it I guarantee you will have a blast doing it all right thanks guys [Music] the exlights project exists because of people like you help contribute to the project by making a donation today at exlights org slash donate

Channel: xLights YouTube

Views: 125,381

Rating: 4.9461641 out of 5

Keywords: Projector Mapping, projection, Adobe, after effects, Holiday, Christmas, halloween, tutorial, content creation, character animator, xessentials, xlights

Id: bUtdMcoOcVc

Length: 79min 24sec (4764 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 07 2018