Intro to 3D Animation in After Effects

Video Transcription

Hey, this is Tziporah Zions for Noble Desktop. And in this tutorial, I'm going to try to make this cool 3D super design, and it'll be after effects. So we'll be animating this side to flip around in a 3D space. We're going to position the sides line up with each other, flipping one side around so it'll be legible and turn around and we're going to put them together in a print comp and basically animate that.

And then like last details are just like adding a drop shadows and motion blur, nothing too big. But as you can see, this is what the project looks like when we're going to be done and I say it's really important to learn 3D and after effects because you see it everywhere, like title cards, UI logos and ads. Anything that wants a bit more dynamism in its animation, it's a lot easier to learn than traditional 3D being that it's actually more like 2.5 D uses 2D elements to make the illusion that it's 3D.

It's an easy way to add a lot more depth and animation objects to your projects that you won't get anywhere else in the program. So we'll be relying on these assets that are put together like, you know, the sine layers, they're in text, and there's background too. But all of this is going to be bundled together. You'll find them all in the video description below.

So let's get started. All right. So when you open this project, you're going to be seeing these two sides of the sign side by side B and so first is a little bit of set up in order to make this work. So make sure we're going to select both of these guys and make sure that they're aligned with each other.

If you don't see this, you go to like Windows, align this panel and you're going to hit align horizontally or, you know, line loops are going to hit basically align horizontally to try and get them to be perfectly on top of each other. Resizing if needed, there should be a correct size, but I've got them down here. Both these guys are about like 36% in.

OK, so with them, with these two sine sides, sine sides I'm going to follow up on that later in this video I am sure. But it's like both these guys and then hit the switch. It looks like a cube. And let me just make sure that both were turned on. So that's the 3D switch. And you saw instantly all these options opened up.

And so now we're working this 2.5 D space. So now you see that there are more dimensions to work with. There's an X, Y, and Z now. So a hit like position, not only is it moving in like X and Y, it's also moving in Z. You can see that it's curving and Z, you can think of it as so x is horizontal, flat Y is vertical up and down and Z is in and out like towards you or away.

And you'll see this in like rotation as well. You know, we could do like zero station and Y rotation, like, see what I mean? That kind of thing. But yeah, so those are part of the options now are 3DS enabled. All right, so we're going to select our Side B and P for position and in the Z direction, put in five.

The reason being is that we're trying to separate these two layers a tiny, tiny bit. So they're not right on top of each other. You know, even signs in real life, even if they're on paper, have a little bit of space away from each other, even if it's a little bit hard to see if we don't do this otherwise, then the sign is just going to be covering everything the whole time.

So, yeah, we want a little bit of distance. Then we're going to be flipping this guy. So again, make sure that side be selected right click on side B, lower transform and flip horizontal here. I'll show you the top layer. And as you can see, it's backward. Reason being is when we flip this whole thing around and we want it to still be legible.

And if you think about it and like in real life, like when you're not seeing the other side of a sign from wherever you're positioned in space, technically the other side of the sign is backwards. Dude, you got to walk around to the other side of the sign in order to see it the right way round. All right.

Now, with that set up done, select both of them right click and go to pre-crime. We're going to call this sign Flip I'm going to recolor this to Fusion. You can see my finished product over there, and now it's remote. We're going to make this a pre cup so it's easy to update. If you want to swap out any graphics, you go into the pre comp and then you just change one of these layers around but on the pre-comp level, enable through D and this is important.

You see this guy, this is usually the rast rise layers button, but it's also the collapse transformation so let's get to animating this. So with our new pre comp selected, we're going to be hitting R for rotation. We've got all these options, but don't be scared. We're just going to be animating a couple of these guys. So what's the play here at Origin like?

The very start we are going to be animating the Y rotation. So it looks around like this. Yeah, just like that. So the first thing that we're going to be doing is let's just set a keyframe over here and then let's move over to like 2 seconds in and we're going to set the wire tution to 225. This is for like overshooting because we want this thing to like flip all the way around and then kind of like rock back and forth a little bit.

Let's go to 4 seconds and about, let's get this guy down to like I'm going to do 195 basically now it like kind of rocks back a little more, but not as much as before, you know how like when things rock back and forth in real life, you know it's first it's heavy but then it kind of like slows down and then like 5 seconds like a little past 5 seconds, I'm going to put this guy like 510 for the mine.

I want it to go up a little bit. So it keeps swinging back and forth. But as you can see, it's like rocking less and less. Yeah, I think that's it. And I want to make them all easy, so. All right. Clip Keyframe Assistant. So if I play this, you can see that you're slipping just like that.

It's all the way around. It's legible. It spins back a little bit back and forth. It's the last thing. If you have your effects and presets open here, you can type in drop shadow and get that. You can also right-click and go to effects perspective of drop shadow. So, you know, drag and drop it onto our pre comp over here in just a couple of settings here.

Pretty quick we're going to make our shadow color. So now we're going to make it just a darker version of the background color. So I dropped it from the background, blurred it down here for the distance, I think maybe put it back, you know, 15 and five for softness. So it's a phase out a little bit and just a little bit more of a drop shadow.

Yeah, that's it for the drop shadow. And then the last touch is turning on motion blur, which is this three circle thing over here. Make sure that the motion blur switches turn on over here, and that'll add as it sounds, you know, just a bit of blur as it moves around. And you want to do that kind of thing at the end of summer because it takes a good amount of processing power.

But yeah, here we go. So that's the basics of 3D and after effects. This stuff is really cool and versatile. You can use the fundamentals here to make any kind of flipping texture objects. You can even parent two pieces of footage together and flip them around as a transition. You can think of like weathervanes or spinning 2D tops unfolding origami like anything that would look cool with depth and movement.

So that's it for this tutorial, but definitely stay tuned for the next installment of our 3D and After Effect series. Next up, we're going to show you guys how to use a 3D camera for some more dynamic shots and angles. And yeah, so let us know down on the comments if you'd like to see a specific tutorial technique or like just share whatever project that you're working on.

We'd love to hear. And yeah, I hope you enjoyed learning how to make this 3D flipping sign and after effects. This has been Tziporah Zions from Noble Desktop.