Lessons

Lesson Info

3D Space and 3D Camera

Let's, get into what really three d space looks like and that's with adding a camera so I'm gonna go up here to layer new camera you see there's a keyboard shortcut for just about everything in here. I only use a very limited amount of keyboard shortcuts because my brain is getting old and full of oatmeal and I have been doing this so long that I'm appointing clicker, but what I'm giving you guys with this with this workshop is the adobe help pages that are all condensed down into one uh one archive that give you the whole list of every available keyboard shortcut for adobe after effects. Of course, you can also go to the community, help online and get that get that updated as well, but you'll have that available to us if you're a real keyboard shortcut. Uh, aficionado, you're going to love that document, okay, so now I've got this camera in here. So what does the camera allow me to do with the camera? I just went for the default. I just skimmed right by that while I was talking like t...

his. When you create a camera, it comes up with these settings and I cover these settings head nauseum with my other more advanced classes, so I'm going to leave it alone, but the default preset is a fifty millimeter lands on a camera I've not enable depth the field I've left everything alone so like let's leave it stock let's stock and rock so um right now we're looking at what aftereffects calls the active camera that just means that's the active u um I always like to go and actually grabbed the camera if I'm going to look through the camera view because that way when I moved the camera or do anything I'm going to see what the camera sees and if you have more than one camera uh it's always important to grab the one you really want to see and really want to render out but this is where we start getting into three d space and it gets a little wild so one thing that's really cool in after effects is the ability to have more than one view open and all at minimum due to views well I'm working in three d space so what I did is I went to two views here so this is the view from the camera I got that click see these little yellow highlighted corners here that tells me that that's the camera view you see right here is camera view if I click over here into this window it pops up and says this is top view I can change that to front view to left view and right on down the line they also have these custom views they're a little isometric so that helps you kind of line things up sometimes too. So that's ah that's a big help start a top view if I'm going to animate my camera because a lot of times the only thing I want to do with my cameras to do a nice dolly move around my object that kind of shows it off shows how three d it is and everything, so I just open this up going to grab this a little yellow box here that's my camera does grab it and I'm going to move it around the side here see how it updates in the right hand window as I'm moving this around so I'm simulating a dolly in a sense that it's moving around, I'm able to move the camera or I'm really good at a steady cam moving around in there so that's what I'm simulating, so if I wanted to start like right about here again, everything could be key framed, so I come down here and hit p for position groups I don't want color, I want position here we go and hit my first key frame and then say by the time he goes flying off, I've made that pretty short little animation spot there but um going to grab this again and making sure that I don't roll over any of these arrows here remember our arrows in three d space x y and z will those air on the camera too? So if I was to move this in any of those directions it's going to move what where the cameras pointing to is well as the camera itself, so I don't want to do that, see what happens if I grab x and I move it drag it was going to move it off, so I don't want to do that. I want to spin around my object, so I want to make sure I'm clicking out here, right? Don't see an ex wires, he grab it and then moving around. Maybe I'll pull it back because he's coming towards us a little bit. All right, so that's happening there? Slow it down a little bit, okay? So that's moving around, but it's still a little bit wonky it's kind of like we're going into it and then away from it. Well, remember how we were able to move the shovel and threw it off? We had these old bessie a curves I can do that with this as well. I can actually create some pretty amazing dolly track moves with these busy acres where I can make an s curve. I can make a loop, so imagine this is like dolly track for this camera and you're able to move that camera around that dolly track so that's, that's pretty cool, I think that's pretty powerful if I just want a narc, I'm just going to make this be like an arc around the object. Um, I can come out to this place here that around a little more so now I've got, like, a really arc of my dolly move around the objects there centered around ok? So that's the camera move and of course we can do the same thing by going if I go to the left view, ok, then I can also move it up or down. So if I'm in this space, aiken point the camera down, just click and drag see how I can point it down at my object. Aiken, line it up by looking at where it's pointing here so now I've got this curving see this curve goes up there so that not only is it going to the side it's actually going up and down, but the same key frame I didn't really change anything other than I went to a different view, but these numbers here have all changed. If you watch those numbers change, that means it's changing its position in time, but I didn't have to type any numbers in I'm just, you know, just dragging and moving that camera around. So now I'm going to do the same thing, but this time I'm going to create in light and I want to go back to one view at this point so we see it a little more better than what we're doing okay? And I'm going over here tio layer new light and there's a lot of different lights you can get in here by default should be said it spot one hundred means it's a spotlight it's going tohave a an actual like an actual spotlight it's going to give you a defined shape to it um and then you can get real fancy and start dealing to fall off now that we're not going to do that today but I am going to have a cast shadows I'm going to click this having cast shadows and I've rarely ever seen one hundred percent darkness in any shadow in the real world, so I'm just going to go fifty percent there and because it's not a real light we're not in real space where in two and a half t not three d some of you go fifty fifty on shadow darkness and diffusion just to give us a good example here I believe the color at white you have different colored spotlights and there it is looking at are signing see it's kind of shadowed on the sign there all right, so but it does still doesn't look like much I'm going to turn off the transparency grid here and even though it's shining on that guy why am I not cnn a shadow well that's because by default adobe in their wisdom have left this and I complain about it every release but they have the default for the default for these material options for the three d uh layers is that the drop should cast shadows is turned off so I got to go in there click that to turn it on and there it gives me a drop shadow so that's a real drop shadow is coming toward the camera so it's a really well really it's a real simulated drop show riel imitation leather or really imitation sour cream just what anyway so now we've got that light there wouldn't see it's a it's an actual like it's simulating the shadow I can move the light around as well just like I did the camera just by dragging it I could move it out move it around I could bring it in and israel time uh response here again I could go to two views do like I did with the camera and I can play with the light move it out the closer you get the tighter the shadow depends on what you're trying to what kind of effect you're trying to get and of course the light can also move in time so if we go to the top we can see that uh let's see let's get our position on our light here p position and I could move that light around as well as the cameras I could drag this light around here and I've just key framed him so let's go here left in the same thing here I could make it go up and down closer farther away you can see how the shadow responds to that. So now if I go here the light moves the shadows move we've got a lot of things in motion here and we're not really working in a three d application we haven't really modeled anything we haven't had to doing they were still using that to de vector data but we're using it in a three d space now what if we want to go a step further? We wanted to have more volume we wanted to have more of a three d look well, let's see here let's some let's spread this out a little bit here a little congested in my timing it's gonna pull this out a couple seconds for all of thes layers here pull my key frames out so where's, my positioning is pull everything out here to about two um it we'll leave that there that's fine and then my rotations let's see what I got for rotations are for rotation don't have anything there I think it's all in this base here yeah there it is let's move it out to you that way everything's all happening within the same space of time it gives us some time to look at this all right so um say I have this guy here we're just get freezing on this frame here it's gonna one view I've got my lights have gotten the camera everything's all in there but I want himto have more depth I want him to have more depth and to look a little more realistic well this is where the other three d mode comes in if I come up here to where it's his classic three d I'm going to click that and it's going to open up my three d settings here now I can go from the render from classic three d to ray traced three d no what rate raise three d does is that lets us extrude vector shapes and text and also gives us things like reflections and refraction through transparent objects and it becomes mohr like a three d modeling program so I'm just going to click ok um this is going to slow things down to a crawl so I'm only going to do so much in this example and I'm gonna show you some rendered rendered examples as well um okay so right now it doesn't look like it's done anything because we haven't done anything with it yet so I'm going tio first take the this guy right here and right down here and notice it it came up with geometry options that's something that we didn't have before for this layer so I've got geometry options allows us to have extrusion and bevel on the edge of our character here so let me zoom in a little bit um all my full resolution let me turn that back to say half that still gives us a decent amount of get turned that two adaptive to those two things I changed my resolution here it allows me to work a little faster typically when I'm animating I leave things in quarter resolution until I need to check things like little edges and little fine things but since we're looking at details half is good enough resolution to be able to see things like some of these these nuances around here I'm going tio give this a bevel style you've got angular which is like a chiseled edge and photoshopped khan cave and convex is obviously kahn cave has con it looks like it's been routed and convicts is a nice rounded edges I'm gonna go with convicts and see what our edges look like that doesn't look like much yet so let's go to our extrusion depth and let's extrude that a little bit now still it's black on black so let me go to my material options on this and give myself a little more space here move this up just a little bit came material options uh it except shadows cast shadows accepts light all of that this is where we get to come down here and get a little more shiny nous on it so let's make it a little shine ears that it picks up the light a little more um bring up our diffused light a little more and again each one of these things makes it go a little slower and it's a little harder because it's it's black on black but it's see if some of our reflection just am please things up a little bit so it's a little harder I may have to add another light to really make that shine that's the beauty of after effects we've got a light coming from this angle so if I was tio add another lite let's go to new light we'll leave that isthe spot number two and this one I'm going to move over here whoops don't do that here we go want to move it this way so it's shining down on the edges of our guy here that's going to show up anymore here it's still not shining a lot on him. Let me look at another view here and see if I've got um due to two views and one's camera zoom out this one will be top they'll see if I'm actually pointing this light at him that's that light and they grabbed this light and I see yeah I'm nowhere near him so this is where I can see how the light is pointing at something this line right here that's what it's pointing that it's actually pointing at the sign so if I grab this line out here this is going a little bit slow because it we're trying to do this ray tracing thing it's a little bit wonky all right, there we go and now we're pointing mohr at our character pull us around and let's go to the front and see if we're pointed down are pointing up through what's doing and it's chugging along here pretty so this is a very ram intensive process, ok? We're not seeing a whole lot of edge on this guy. Yes, let me try because it's it's black I thinkit's freaking out at this point so let me try applying that also to our the background here the sign itself so let me look at our geometry here we'll do that convex um well leave the bevel depth where it isthe will make it good and thick and that should show up over here we go backto one view so we can see the edge here and we're waiting for it to right there we go now we're starting to see an edge here on this one so as we spin around will be ableto to see more of that edge let me just go ahead and uh rotate this a bit right here so we can see more of it there's the edge so you need more lights for teo really really shine no pun intended and you'll be able to start seeing some of that seen some of the edges in there now I've got one that I've already already done it's not with this particular sign but it's a logo that I did hide this we're sitting here and we'll hide illustrator okay so let me get into um here got a retrace three d and in this case I've got uh the adobe logo that I had done with the rate raise three d so let me open that up come on open there we go so now you can see if you set all of those settings even with black type are actually black this is just a black layer you can see I've got reflectivity shiny I think this took like six hours to render says his it's a real monster but as he scrubbed through hearing see the reflectivity of the background is just a white plane behind it but because of the spotlight it gave me a nice shadow I've got a secondary ambient light which has a little bit of blue in it and so you get all this this light bouncing around so you can see the reflections even in the lettering here and it makes a really nice uh, animated graphic here, but you have to you have to spend a lot of time and take a lot of patients playing with ease and then, you know, do a lot of renders you can't do anything like this in a hurry and hope you'll be done in an hour because it just won't happen, but if your learning curve is at I can't do this and cinema four d or something that has a much more robust render, you're going to be able to get, you know, some nice results out of this and probably easier than trying to do it even in photo shop and photoshopped three d because this is just yes extruded vectors extruded shapes, so it makes a nice smooth the animation there, and I'm wondering, I know not a lot about this kind of stuff the three d rendering, but I know you can do three d in photo shop and did I hear that part of the new functionality brand new this week is that you can export stuff out of photoshopped into other rendering programs that be a question for somebody that's actually had a chance to mess with photo shop pre pre release I only got my hands on this just a little bit ago for after effects I haven't got to play with the rest of the sweet yet so I don't have that answer. But that's a great answer. And I'm sure somebody like colin smith. You would be really up on that another creative life instructor, because he's, he's he's, the photo shop guy for three d and video.