Lessons

Lesson Info

3D Layers: Logo Animation

So I'm just going to import this uh, illustrator logo here as a a zey single element here I'm going to create a new comp so I could do it up here that uh uh you know let's leave that white for now and I'll bring in this logo and just dragged in here so this is the adobe logo? Yeah, toby because they gave us after effects, right? So what we've got here is this logo now if I go in and I do all my other properties like scale and whatnot we're going to look at it go wait it's a vector? How come it doesn't look so great? Well, it's kind of okay, but it's not wonderful it's not perfect because what we can do now is actually convert that go one hundred percent again here we go actually, I'm going to come up here and reset my position and everything there you go. I can convert this to a shape object or shape player so I just come down here and I right click on the layer in the timeline and then I can select this create shapes from vector layer everybody see that create shapes from vector layer...

s is right, click and grabbed that so what it does is it creates an outline shape outline of all of the vector space in that logo and notice that it created a new layer here says blue layer here with a little star next to it that tells us the shape layer and it hides the original illustrator file well what I can do with this now is I can scale it so I can look here I can scale this up and it will maintain good vector edges to it I can do other things to it such as uh converted to three d o k now what I could dio is I've got two different kinds of three d and this is important to note too and this is only from after effects six and above is we've got the classic three d which is what we've been working in but now you've got the new rae trace three d and if I come up here to this top button appear in the upper right hand corner and click on that classic three d s open up this dialog box and it says render classic three d if I click on this and select ray trace three d that's going to give me the new options in three d space and give me this little warning panel here this tells you what it does is it allows you to have extrusion tze and beveled text and shapes reflections refraction all of these more advanced three d features but you don't have to really get into all of that if you don't want to this is probably getting into more advanced territory I'm going to just show you what it can do again it also takes some time to render so I'm just going to show you how that gets set up and then we can go on so I've got something new here says geometry options so that's something new I can give my bevel depth I can have extrusion depth I could make that thicker I can tell what kind of a bevel that's the edges of the object I can have so I say convex so none of this really means anything at this point it just looks like a bigger muddier mess at this point because I need thio actually move it around so let me just hit our for rotate here and since I'm in three d space you can see that I'm rotating this in three d and I can rotate it different directions in three d space kind of like a cube here but it still looks a bit like a blob while we're looking at it here let me a speed this up a little bit by going from full resolution here to half and that way it doesn't have to think so hard I'm fifty percent viewing so I go half resolution and render a little faster that way too, but it's not going to look like much until I add a light because it's it's thinking ok, you're in three d space but I'm still this victory object that doesn't really exist I'm just this thick blob of something but what makes something look three d is adding lights uh to it so we're going to come up here to layer knew and then add light and I'm going to leave it at its default so we don't get too confused with it but I will click this cast shadows button there that's off by default. So click that and once I do that, then it's like, oh, I see there's something different here going on so let's, take this a little light and just go click and drag it and move it around we can see okay, the light is actually doing something here I'm shining on things here this is pretty interesting the more I pull it back, the more it shows and reveals this clicking and dragging it around so we can see all the surfaces so as we get into more advanced three d will be adding more lights, we can add cameras and all of that action. So I've got one that I've already done so let's let's open that up just open project here and no, I'm not going to save that, um get out of here, go to here and, uh, this will be this one here it's open this project, okay? So I've got a couple different things here going on here's my logo and I'm going to go to half on this again so it renders a little quicker for us here in the studio so what I've done here is I've got a drop shadow because I've got an actual solid surface back there I've got one really bright light there and then I've got another one that's called an ambient light the ambient light is just the light that's around us spotlights work just like spotlights and if you think in the real world with everything it's a lot less confusing you think about okay what if I had a little table top set here and I had a piece of paper back here on my back paul and I had this little cubicle thing floating in space here which is the adobe logo and I shined a spotlight from up here on it what would it do? Well, it's going to cast a shadow on my paper back here, right? And if I turn off my ambient light here, turn that off and let it render we'll see that that's exactly what I've got just got one spotlight nothing else is showing they're happening here but if I turn that back on will say, oh, everything brightens up a little more because somebody turned the room lights on but I still got my spotlight on you know so that's it you again you think of in the physical world what should happen that's you know what typically what your results will happen and you kind of move things into that space until they happen one other element that I have here is a camera and what I've done is if I hit p for position I've just set this camera up and we're looking through the camera actually I'll go down here too active from active camera to camera one because that is the camera I'm looking at here uh and I've moved it I've got a key frame from where it starts and then I've moved it to another position and let it render there we go so if I was to render this we'll see if it will even attempt at doing a ramp review it may be too much to dio in the short period of time so I'm going to pull out the frosted cake like julia child's out of the oven because he always keep a frosted cake in the oven right? So you put put the raw battery in and pull out the frosted cake and this is what it should look like when we watch it back so just that one camera move I just extruded the logo uh give it a little bevel and you can see all the reflections in it all of that is in there it's already in the render that's from c s six and above is in there already. So it's beautiful. You can do some amazing, some amazing things. So let me get rid of that and that there we go. So moving on in in three d space here, another thing we can do in three d space is to actually bend footage and calms. And since we're in the ray trays three d render at this point, I've got a text layer that was a sub cop. So if it was just if it was just text, it would want to extrude it because text is handled like vectors, it'll extrude, but anything that's footage like a photograph or video or a sub comp it's treated like you know, it's, something that's kind of flattened, so the only thing you can do there is bend it and that's what I've done here, I've got this is in three d space, so I look at my material on my geometry for that videos is a video file here, and I can see that I've got curvature so I can turn that down and it won't be so worked. I can actually bring it to negative space and warped the other direction it's taken a minute here to think about it because it's also on full half so I can bend I can treat it like a piece of plastic basically it's like taking this this this sheet of paper and bending it I can do that with video with photos with sub comp seiken bend it in three d space as well and then as faras extruding ahs I did with the logo I could do that with text layers as well so if I've animated a text layer to come in and go out thie extrusion can happen is well, overtime again all of these things can be, you know, animated. See, this will stop watches here I can animate that extrusion depth so I can have something flat and then extruded over time so then your mind really starts to blow up. You kind of go oh, my gosh! You know I can I could do so much more than I thought I could do. I'm not just stuck with this three d thing the way it is and look around it, I can actually change its depth I can change all those elements because again you just dig down and if you see this little stopwatch is in there you're going tio you're going to see I can animate it if it's got a stopwatch, you can animate it, okay, we got some gotta question back here do we have any questions in the studio audience? Because doing right way dok go yeah so in the viewer right now it looks like your cameras like behind what you're seeing how do you place a camera behind what looks like your viewing from the front designing sense? Um the camera you know the camera is actually in front of it now if I want to see what the scene looks like where everything really is in the scene I can come here tio my from my camera view and I can look down on top of it so if I look down on top of my scene let me cut this back down to like a quarter so that draws quicker there's my there's, my text, my bevel text so if I look here too my camera click on my camera and I'm going to have to zoom out to see where my camera is where is mike camera uh should show it's because I don't have it visible there we go visible there's what my camera's seen actually, my camera is way out in front of it it's just that I've got this extrusion going way back, so what I've done is I've animated this camera and I'm just using the scroll wheel on my mouse to zoom in and out by the way, if you're wondering how I magically zooming in and out so my camera you can see the camera has a path here is it's going? So if I move there's, my camera is making a move over time so I can see where my camera's looking and where it's moving so you look down at it and I want to look back through the camera, I go to camera and then I can look through it, and then as I moved through it, you can see a moving across time. Yeah, this is, is this a bit drinking from the fire hose when you're dealing with three d because it's this you could spend a whole day just on three d and it it could be a little overwhelming, but if you really think about the physical world again, I come back to that because that's really where you you plan ahead with all of your movements, you know, if you think of an object, is if it's really in three d space, you know, where would I want to see that from the special? If you're a photographer, you're going to understand that I'm going to move my I'm gonna move my camera around to where I want to view that well, you do the same thing here, you move it in physical space around your object or through a scene, you're going to be moving so it's it's it's very much like being in the real world the same thing with your lights a zai mentioned if he just picture something is on set, then he position your lights to shine where you want them into to bounce things off. So actually, if there are some questions before we go forward, it might be a good time now because I just did cover quite a bit that all of that that sounds great. We're ready so okay, jackie let's just jump into it, right? Okay on dh then do you want to go ahead and how did you get the camera layer in there? That's that's a good question because I didn't really add a camera to anything yet, so what I would do is come up here to layer new camera and that brings up this dialog box and you could get into really wild things in here with your enabling you dumped the field, the different presets, different lenses that you could be in there that gets that goes way down another rabbit hole. We're not going to get into that today, but I can add a second camera if I want teo without changing my scene, I'm just going to leave it a default keep a camera too and say I want to look through that camera to see what it looks like I just come here and select I want to look through camera to not camera one I want to see what camera two is looking at, okay? Camera two isn't looking at much of anything, so I want to make it look at something I'll come up here and go to my top view I like to start a top view looking down see typically and panning from from one side to another or zooming and it's easy to look down on a scene that more than it is from any other angle so I want to start here with my position so hit p for position hit my first key frames stopwatch and say I want it sometimes a little tricky when it's out therefore I wanted out here a little more so what if I want to see what I'm what the camera sees while I'm doing this and this is one really cool thing about after effect especially if you've got a big screen, you can kind of make this a little bigger right here where it says one view I can select two views horizontal and that's going to give me two previews so what I can do here I can click on this left side and say, you know what? I want that to be my top view, so I'm looking down what I'm what I'm working on and I want this to actually be what I'm looking at through the camera so I'm working on camera two on a zoom in a bit I want to see what camera to seize, so while I'm sitting here moving this camera around and if I hold down the shift key that gives me a this grab a handle or I could move stuff around that's very good to know, especially when you have to move off the off the edge I'm not looking at the the window itself, I'm looking at what's outside the window right now my camera is outside of that area so I can hold down the space key and, um, move that around so I can see I'm on my first key frame and this is what I want to see I want to move down in time, I just moved down to the time indicator there and say, I want to zoom in on this so I'm going to grab my camera and I'm gonna move right in on it and maybe come off to the side or something crazy, you know, so that's cool. So now I've got this move where I can see the camera is moving in it's doing that will notice how this little line that connects my first and last key frame has these little handles here busier handles I can pull those out and actually changed the shape of the path the camera is making so I am now making this little s move just like the camera was on a dolly is on a little track or some and I can make it make this really elegant move so it's not just a hard so you could do that again you can add more key frames you can ease things in and out and there's you can just again go way down the rabbit hole but we're not going to do that today no rabbit holes today no rabbit holes today we're trying to stay out of the rabbit holes love that I have a question from oh go ahead, jim okay thanks, jackie yes? Asks jackie from jacksonville, florida as does a support onion skinning well onion skinning that's a little more advanced for one thing but onion skinning is just it's a matter of your transparency with layers and you can accomplish that it's not the same as doing like onion skinning in say photo shop on the timeline in photo shop doesn't work the same way cool and someone asked earlier about rotoscoping same type of it does well with rhoda work it's an entirely different workflow and you can go to my website and and see some of the previews on the road working they're cool yeah speaking of cool really cool has a question from new york city is that still text once it's been extruded? Is it still edible yes, it iss I can change what it says on the fly, which is beautiful because a lot of times I am a visual artist by no english major and being a little bit dyslexic I'm a screw things up so what happens is I misspell things sometimes and say um so change it to trey race instead of ray trace um and everything else stays in its place so that's the beauty of working with text layers in aftereffects you khun fully fully animate them and uh be able to edit them fully editable cool beat four three five asks and beat thank you for just the best questions across the whole day just really great on topic stuff asks when you import stuff into the project folder isn't taking up space on your hard drive or is itjust being linked it's just being linked is this kind of this kind of you think of it like you, corker and designer some of the page layout programs or even, you know, dreamweaver you know it's not really copying anything and making more media it's just data so there's a whole area we could get into with data management to that we really can't get into today, but once you've brought in all of your your you're content basically a media content you brought it in there it's just data saying go there and look for it the danger of that is twofold. One is if I go and I move something or if I save this project and I hand it off to somebody else but they don't have access to the media files it's not doing any good. So what I typically do is if I build a big project like this and I need to hand it off to somebody and say I got oh, cem, you know audio from this folder and maybe videos on another drive on the network and and something's on an external drive here and I pulled in all this stuff from all over the place. There's one really cool thing after effects does and that is if I go up to file and collect files that's going to be yeah, let's go ahead and save it need to save it first before you can do this, it will save it. You go to collect files, file, collect files and this is going to allow me to collect all of the files into one folder. So I just call this uh uh, yeah, throw me away so I don't keep it later so I can leave it. I can call it that and it's going to grab all of the content from all of the resource is that air out there save it all on a project than it opens it and now I'm working on that one that I just collected so now what I could do is hand that off to somebody if I hide aftereffects here I can look at it it's in this one here he throw me away project folder I can compress that make it a zip file send that to somebody uploaded on their ftp whatever everything's in there the project folders in there that's a little text report if I wanted to see what I was in that because me all this information what was grabbed and where it came from that little reports in there than all the media folder all the media files are all in here so everything is all recreated in there for me so that did make a duplicate of everything that is going to take up more space in your hard drive when you do that but everything's all in one place where it belongs so it's easier to hand off to somebody else. All right, we have a question from johnny huff. How do you access the z access for objects? Uh if you are moving them in three d space, that would be well say here even the say the spotlight let's try that for exist inference it's a three d object and it's the third line item in your uh in your lineup here here of your dimensions or oh what's the word there the attributes here for position or rotation whatever. So it's x y z always goes x y and z so the third bank of numbers is yours e space so as I move that it's going to move that item or that element in ze space now one thing that gets a little confusing is if I dizzy space in the scene that I'm looking at it through my camera is different than the z space of the object cassie on moving this light in ze space to the camera that's my active window right now you can see that as the light moves it's moving back away from me or toward me but if I look at z dimension of the light itself see these little zoom in on it here sees little arrows. Every object in three d space has these little dimensional arrow and you'll see that the red is x the green is why in the blue izzy and as he roll over them um be zoom in for at home audience to see so you can see as I roll over these I can grab it and I can move things in that dimension for the object itself I'm not really moving it in space for the camera moving the objects x y and z so it can get a little confusing when we go down that road and I'm going to try not to confuse you too much with that, but if he always think about where you are, what you're looking at is the x y z of that space, more so than the x y z of the object itself you'll be you'll be pretty safe, but those arrows can get a little confusing and get turned around a lot by trusting those until you really get a handle on cool, awesome wanted to one final question before we go right? Sure, that sounds good, sarah gardner asks, is the only way to adjust the speed of the animation by dragging the frames? Well, we're going to get into that a bit later. Yes, key frames are the major way of changing your animation speed. You can nest the cop and then changed the the speed or the playback timing of that cop, and we're going to get into that actually in our session, right after lunch, we're going to get into timing, re timing, slo mo time mapping and all of that as well, because you can do that with cops and animations as well as video footage, too.