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Exploring the 3rd Dimension

I want to take where we left off just a step further and I'm not going to break it down and start from scratch all over I'm going to reverse engineer this a little bit for you just because we've got so much material we want to cover today I want to be labor the, uh the animation aspects too much because again they get applied on and on and on um this again is another project file that will be available if you do buy the course there's going to be a lot more content than we're able to cover today that will be available to download this one is basically the same concept I used the same table graphic even that we had the, uh before we saw all of them jumping off the er jumping off the edge and that's what I've got going on here is I've got uh pineapple is jumping it's balancing is doing the same bounce, but you notice there's something different now remember I told you about the anchor point and noticed that the middle of the pineapple here the anchor point is up about somewhere up above ...

the stem of the pineapple and I did that because I wanted to rotate and to distort and skew over time well there's no skew point available on a regular transformed functions what we have to do is apply and effect to it and let me do that here with this this blank one here thiss blank pineapple so you see there's my anchor points right here in the middle and I want to be able to skew it that means to make the top and the bottom skew so that's an effect so I come up to effects in effect menu come down to distort and then down to transform and this gives us some other transform functions here thiss allows this is to skew and if I look here here is my skew option right here. If I zoom in, you can see there it is zoom out if I just click on that and dragon ceo I'm skewing that way ok well that's not really what I want I want it to skew but I don't want it to do that well I have to change my access so I move this and I go oh, now I can see where it's skewing it's skewing kind of that way or I wanted to go ninety degrees I just keep clicking and dragging that that's the way I want it to go so I kind of wanted to look like it's stretching as its bouncing, so while I bounce it along I can give it that characterization of hitting the table surface and bouncing forward and then as it's mid air it's swinging its bottom out so that khun land so if you think of like, somebody running and jumping or like a cat or you tigger or some cartoon character that's bouncing boingboing boy then you you kind of visualize that again this is a very subjective part of animation uh again I've got my motion blur on I've got my balance uh and in this case because I am skewing and bouncing to the next point, I didn't just lupin up and down like we did with the ball I actually put key frames in here for it to move to the next spot because I do have this skew and I also have if we scroll down here, we'll look at this layer um that's my effect layer there come down here to my transform we'll see the different things that I've done look at all these little key frames in there and that may look a little scary right now because oh my gosh there's key frames and they're they're all different shaped key frames and why are the different shades and it's like? Well, that's because I have these properties on these key frames here at the top remember we've got we ease in and out when it's at the top of the balance because that's when gravity is that at least effect it's still upward motion so you can see that the skew is pointed that way the pineapples going up it's got a little hang time there now it's coming down it's going to land on the table there balance going go up down again bounce off comes down here goes whoa! Well, what did I do here? I changed my scale it has a little bit of that, you know, cartoon well, yeah, running off the cliff and that then all of a sudden and then goes down so again, it's bringing that little character to life is thinking about ok, what do I want it to do? I want to do it act this way and how do you do that? Where you study things, you can study things in the real world? Well, since pineapples don't really jump and bounce they kind of sudden splatter, you know, but you think about it in a very cartoon aspect well, that's bringing just this one little photoshopped file it's just bringing it to life. And if I render out this, uh, this entire sequence, then we'll see oh, I've got a whole bunch of him doing it well, how did I do that again? That is just a whole bunch of layers copied or duplicated um in time and I just staggered where they went, and I also changed uh, where they are in three d space o what's that all about why are some of them bigger and some of them smaller? Well since I started with one pineapple here ah and you know I farted changed the scale and everything of it there if I was to just changed the scale of this animal's say I nested the comp and I changed the scale of that then the problem was if I did that it won't bounce at the right place that won't bounce on the table now it'll bounce beneath the table so what I have I do here is try to give them that feeling of depth and where they're going and to do that I just make them all three d layers by clicking this little box here um in this area you this little cube shaped box in the zoom in on that that allows us to make three d layers uh three d three d space out of the out of the layers themselves are you guys already coming up with ideas for projects as you watch these little bits? Yes so is this one with three d is there a button you turn on the top a swell asses in the box and don't forget the sorry that's ok and this one we don't have to click another three but just because it once we click the click it on the layer itself I'm trying to find which one is my closest uh, closest one that's. One of these fat ones here, let me see which ones that that's this one here. Okay, so I've isolated this one layer here is we see it coming across. Now, if I unclipped this cube, it goes back into two d space. So what it does is it pushes it back in in in its space. So let me explain what that actually does. So if I come down to my transform functions here, my position noticed there's a third level there right now, it's zero that is my z space. That means how close to the camera is it and how far away from the cameras that's that third dimension that three d spaces. So if we think about that is an object like this water bottle, we've been working in this space, everything goes on one plane, you know, up and down around does this, we can do all those things to it, but now we can bring it out and bring it farther away and that's what we're doing here with these little pineapple layers, we're doing that so I can select that layer, and since I'm on a key frame, I could do that see if I move, I slide that z spaceiy, how it's coming forward it's getting bigger and it's going farther away it's getting bigger and it's going further away so I could do that globally but since I don't want to do that to my position here, I want to do that so it doesn't affect all of this key frames already created I've already got a bouncing to do it all that well remember the anchor point is another adjustable thing we can do here so it's another line item we could do so if I adjust my anchor point forward and back, what that's doing is it's it's taken it off from that that that point but it's it's it's not changing where it's doing its animation is just is changing where is in ze space without changing all of my other key frames? So this point I can modify that and I can put all these layers in a different ze space farther from the camera or closer to the camera and make them look like they're all together in one group if I left them all at the same space, they'd look crowded in all to d and they look like little paper things. So this way we get that that that really feeling of depth we haven't gotten into doing cameras and lights and all that stuff that's more advanced we're just moving stuff in ze space so that we can kind of stack again if you think of everything is being on you know a sticker on a piece of plastic and where do you put that may that's basically what cel animation wass see all the disney stuff and all those cartoons they had characters that were painted on a sheet of plastic and then photographed against a background and sometimes they put him on plates of glass and shoot with a real camera and they swap out the cell sheets for different you know each pose of the cartoon character and then they'd maybe moved the glass a little bit and they take all those pictures and they put them all together that's what we're doing here we're basically creating cel animation here so when we render this thing out and we see what it's doing then we can see all these guys they're jumping at different times because again you can speed him out being slowed down by compressing your key frames and that's how we ended up with the one and of course I did the one with the sound effects which is just I believe I've got that in here so what I've done there again just like with with visual cuse you khun ad in wave files or f sauron movies on you can bring those in and put them in the timeline and that's what I've done here see all these little green uh tabs down here all of these little layers those air all individual sound files and I've brought those all in and place them right? Where there's a there's a bounce so I'm going to put it, I'm going to put one there and I physically you put that in in that location so I was able to add all these little sound effects that I got and gives us that next step of the way so love that last one, okay, so again, I'm not trying to make you drink from the firehose here. So do we have any questions about this phase of it getting into three d space? How did you bring in the sound? A sound is imported just like any other, uh, item I made a folder for them actually, in this case, I believe I can just reintroduce this. So if I go in here, there's two different ways to import things I can bring in multiple files, which means I can if I select that, then I can go in aiken select a ah, a specific image say or sound file or something. So say, if I went in here and I say, I just want to grab one thing, actually double click that and I didn't mean to because that opened up a whole folder I didn't want, so let me cancel that and undo undo come on, undo, all right, you know what? Throw in the trash can I don't want that there. So if I do import and I do multiple files, what that's going to do is allow me to select more than one file. Say, if I brought this one in the basketball and I bring it in, as I typically would, then it goes back, so okay, what's, the next one. Give me the next one until you hit council that's. One way of bringing in several items at a time. Um, another way is to bring in several items by let me get back out here to this will be this will be still in here. This is the pineapple one and sound effects. So I've got this whole folder full of items here. So what I can do is I can just scroll down here. I've got this whole folder full of goodies. I just hold down my shift key, select all of them and click open. And that brings them in like that. Uh, and then I can create a new folder. Put them all in that way. It keeps my project file organized. So that's, one way to do it can undo that. Another way is tio import, and I could just select the whole folder sfx like that, and that brings in the whole folder full of goodies. So if I had several files just kind of out in my hard drive from sloppy and sometimes I am not that organized all just going great I need that I need that I need that I can select select a line of him and either go teo shift select all like I just showed you I can select all of them or I can use thie command or control key on the pc and aiken selectively select just holding down the command key I say oh, I only want to bring those in those are the only ones on a work and then click open and brings them right in so any media whether it's video or illustrator files vectors gps psd is any kind of photo show any kind of media that includes audio import it the same way it resides in your project folder and I like to keep things organized so if I say I brought all those in on I want to keep them in a folder I just click and drag him down here to this little icon which is the new folder icon I do that dumps him all in a folder and says, what do you want to call this? And I'll just call this audio um and that's one way of keeping things organized in there now I look in there and those are just the little audio files I just brought in so do we have any questions off the internet? E? I just want to let you know, jeff, that what people are saying about this course, I'm in the lounge and photos by deb says this is a wonderful class loving it, and ryan says, I'm like a little kid enjoying this that's great, I'm like a little kid presenting thiss brings out the ten year old in all of us, you know, it's like I get to play so much fun, so beats for thirty five asked is z coordinate also determining which layer overlaps the others appears in front or that determined by the layers position in the timeline list? What typically your layers position in the timeline list will dictate what's on top of each other in the two dimensional world, just like photoshopped you think about that photo shop that's going to dictate that when we start adding the world of the third dimension in ze space, it doesn't matter where in the stack in the in the timeline it is is long since the three d layer. Once you move it in and out of ze space, you've changed all the rules, so it is it z location that's going to dictate what shows in front of it, so just like my hands, you know, this could be a bottom layer, but if I've got it easy space, closer to the camera, then you know this hand it's going to appear in front of that hand. Now, the only difference to that is if you have a two d layer thrown in there, then that has to be say, like I've got a background, I put a background of some kind in there I didn't want to put in in ze space because I'm not moving cameras or whatever. I just wanted to be in the background that I'm going to leave in two d and stick it up the very bottom, because that way it will make sure that it stays back there. So no matter what I do it's going to stay way in the back it's not going to move it on in ze space, cool, thank you and johnny huff asked, you have a black background, but I would like a white checkered background. Is there other way toe make that happen? Most definitely, this background is just transparent space. When I set up my composition, I can change my composition settings, click on it, then go to composition settings and this background color here is what shows up as the default make it white on that's just again that's basically transparent space if I want to turn that off, I just click this little toggle transparency grid on and that tells you what is actually transparent, what's a solid and what's a transparent, so by default, it's, whatever background color you put back there is what your background is now, if I wanted to render this out with the transparency there's a specific setting, I'm going to get into exporting next. So it's perfect timing to bring that up. Actually, um now I could bring in a a solid background or a photo shop background or a photo of some kind, some kind of an image I can put that in there like this. They put that in the background. Anything I want to put back there, I can make it static if I want to add a solid layer, say so come down here to layer new, solid and say I wantto oh, just having a neutral gray background I can do that click okay? And, oh, everything went away what's because it's a two dimensional layer that we'll get thrown in there again. I'm in the wrong file because I've got a comp inside a compliment go back out here where it makes more sense with all the three d layers here, house in the sound effects one so if I want to add that solid in there since already made it let's just grab it out of here and we'll throw it in here okay said we're right back where we were I grabbed you whenever you make a solid it makes a folder full of solids in it resides there sound have to make it again just go grab it out of the folders already in my my project window so I can grab this solid layer and I just drag it to the bottom and that was the answer to these e space thing well where does that reside and since I don't have that selected as a three d layer it resides in the back always itjust defaults in the background so now I've got that in there so imagine if that solid layer was a photograph or another video or some kind of a rendering of some kind uh that would just stay back there and reside back there so if I got rid of that solid let's do that and I turned my transparency grid on so we can see oh that's what's transparent everything else is going to be transparent now when I go to render it out I can choose tohave an alfa channel in there and you're going tio here that we're in alfa channel god you know wait wait what's that well he usedto working with transparency and objects for the internet for the web design you'll use pings are gift files and or even with flash different element is that you may be using for the web there's transparency around them that means that you can float your your image anywhere over something and it will maintain its transparency rounded well, the same thing happens in after effects with you've got something that you want to render and then be able to put text behind it maybe or something later when you're editing your video this is the way that you would want to do that so exporting how this is great law looks good in here how do I make something out of it? Well we could go to composition and add to render q that's one way um and we'll do that and it puts it down here you see, I've already rendered a couple things that I have a full render q already so here's what happens let's look at this here let's move this up where we can see it a little better let me get rid of these old ones because those air already done rendering don't need those in there don't want to confuse anything so when he first render something you know you have this render queue here and sometimes people like to put these somewhere else and in fact let's address that now I don't want to keep sidetracking but this is really important to know too about workspace the thing with aftereffects is it's highly customizable for what you use and what you need you can move these tabs in these panels around anywhere you want say like this one here this preview tab I rarely amusing my info uh box up there so I'll grab this preview and see when I click and drag it see how things turned purple that means that's where it will place it once I let go I could put it over here and it will make a whole long preview panel there off to the side I never want that s o I'll bring it here I'm just going to add it to this other list here where I've got that so now I can click back and forth with these tabs it's kind of like photoshopped that way you can kind of combine things the the same thing here sometimes people want their render cue to be over here maybe in another tab I don't know why but I have seen that because I like to see what's going on so I tend to leave then its default down here but that's what's beautiful about this this interface it's highly customizable you can move things around you can add tabs you can open things and um while we're on that workspace issue say I want to leave in some of my text tools I want those in there so I'm going to open up character and paragraph and see how it's moving things around, bumping things around. I don't want that I want to leave my my tabs up here, my pal it's, all up there in that place because I like, is much timeline area down here is I can. So what happens now is I can save this workspace and go down to window workspace and then say, new workspace, I'm going to call this jeffs workspace. He was the what? There. This is just slow. Okay, uh, there we go. So there's jeff's workspace. So now if I want to go back to the standard, maybe I'm sharing this machine with somebody else and they don't like that they like the standard, so they're going to go back to standard. I just select standard if I mess up standard say aye, move something that somebody doesn't like, you know, move that up there. Somebody else wants it back to where it wass I just come down here to work space. There we go, reset standard, and that sets it back to its original default settings. And there it is. Any question about workspace? Yeah. Yeah. If you saved, like jeffs work space and then you were to make a change to it, and then would you have to save it is new workspace or what? It's like if you wanted it to be yes, that you wanted that to be your your new default then yeah, you have to there's you can't just save it on top put itself you just call it jeffs workspace and get rid of the old one so that's that's why you would do that? Or re set it back so you can delete the workspace so I can go back up here and delete that select that one and deleted if I want so that's a really that's an important thing of course. Now with the creative cloud when you log in on another computer and the log in you bring all your attributes with you you could be in a totally different computer in a different part of the world log in under your account and all your your workspace everything comes with you, you're preps, everything comes with you so it's really cool that's that's one really exciting part about three new creative cloud so back to our render q. Let me open that back up so we set this this to render out and I click on this the word best settings and this tells me what's happening here is a lot more information than we need to worry about at this point, but if you want to change say, I'm just doing a quick calm for somebody only want this to be half the resolution so it tells you what it's going to do it's going to scale it down for me so that's one thing that you might want to change in there I just need a little sample I need to send in my client I need to get approval for this. I just want to preview it quickly. I don't want to see the whole full rendered, uh, cop that's one quick way of doing that. Um may set them back to full. So that's one area where you change that this here where it says output module lost list, this is one that people kind of freak out about it it's like it doesn't make sense but the default is a twist on the mac. It comes out is quick time animation format I think it's w m v and windows media but in this case this is where I want to keep that alfa channel. Remember I said alfa so I don't want to just select alfa because that will only set out a mask that will only give me an alfa channels I want to do that rgb plus alfa what that means is just like in the photo shop you've got your channels basically you've got rgb and then there's the negative space which is the alfa space and that's, what gives you your transparency that's the same thing here? So we're getting all of the color information's going to be on one one item and that's all the animation stuff, the alphas give me negative space, so then I can add this this rendered video to something else and bring it into premier or final cut and I can put it over top of a video. I mean, this is how you animate title graphics you animate, you know, it's, a text is flying in or whatever and flies off for lower thirds fly in and out for doing video editing. You're going to want those graphics we can animate him here. Rgb plus, alfa is going to allow you to bring that in and lay it on top of all your other video editing all of your other components, and at the end of the day we're going to show that little sneak that showed that the beginning with the fake news broadcast we're going to be showing all the little elements of everything I'm showing you today comes together in one project will be able to break that down for us, he'll understand that, so if I do this, I can also decide to resize it at this point say I want to give it a specific size. I can change that by re sizing it here. If I've got audio, you have to make sure you click audio if you want audio to render out by default it's not in the new creative cloud version, it gives you the option of auto, which means if there's audio channel in there, it will automatically render audio out for you. Or you can have it say always on are always off so in that, you know, that is a new preference, which I really like, because a lot of times I'll sit there and I'll render something and I forgot some in a hurry or it's three a m in my eyes, you know, burning and I go to render something and I wait, you know, four hours or whatever, take a nap and I come back, I was there, and you want to just shoot somebody, usually yourself, you have to go back and re render them so that's one, you have to really keep an eye out. If you have audio in there, you've got to make sure that you render it out. And so so that's that's very important. Your format options here are very important. Depending on what kodak you are using, we'll also dictate whether or not you can have on alfa channel so be aware of that we're not going to get into any of that right now um I'm leaving this right at this point um so if I click okay then I still have to say where is this going to be sent to? So if I go to out put my movie I want to put it somewhere and you have to dictate where is this going to go? I'll just say example so we know it's going there and then I don't like this hide extension I like to see my extensions I'm pretty crazy that way I don't like that apple does that so I always unclip that I want to see that movie on there so I want to know that's what it is so I click save and then I hit render and depending on how much is going on in your production well dictate how long it'll render and this you know, see it slows down a little bit is it gets to that beach I like seeing this yellow progress bar and it will usually tell you here estimated time one minute and then oh no it's not a minute it was ten seconds so that's done at this point, so now if I hide after fix, we could go out and we'll see this example movie and when we see it in quick time player hey, what happened is supposed to be, you know, transparent what's black just because when you you watch it back in quick time it's always going to revert to black so just because that there's nothing else back there that's what negative spaces is black so if I quick quick time and I come back into aftereffect and say I bring I'll just bring that movie back in here and we'll put it over something uh, let's go out here and import whoops bring us down again here so I can import something import ah file and I'll bring that example movie in quick open okay and say let's, just build a comp from that I'm just dragging it down here over that new cop icons and now I've got a brand new cop made with all the attributes of that movie we can see there's our transparency back there so the transparency is indeed in there now I could put another piece of video animation text photo whatever I want behind there but it's all rendered now I don't have anything mawr in their teo to manipulate that's a rendered flattened movie, so sometimes I'll do that. If I've got a lot of different things going on in a project, I've got a pretty complicated piece, so I'm not stacking too much on top of other things in the projects sometimes I may have one hundred some layers in there, if I'm trying to do it all in after effects where if I've got an animation like this that's going to go over top of another animation or something, I'll render out that and bring it back in so that the computer's not having to think about oh, I've got to turn that I've gotta have the motion blur I got to do this and I got to do that and everything else you're doing underneath it so it's sometimes it's good to render things out and bring them back in so it's it's taking less computational power away from your project and you can move things along a lot quicker so that's another really important thing. So do you have any questions up to this point? I know I'm starting to turn up the flyer hose a bit so I don't want to lose people entirely we do have questions okay, so we'll go back can we go back a little ways? And asher okay, this is a question from duke in park city, utah how do you control the depth of field? So so you get the blur, you know, that's a little more of an advanced feature because that gets into cameras and there is a depth of field option in cameras, but that's a little more advanced than we're going to be able to get into today's thing but what you, what you can do as a fake fake around I like fake around is to actually add for if you want to simulate that depth of field is teo and we're going to get into that a little bit in the green screen functions this afternoon is to simulate it with a little bit of lens blur on the different layers and you can again fake iraq focus between a couple different planes by adjusting the key frames of the lens blurs I'm going to show you that this afternoon when we get into the green screen section and again that's the faking it in two d, so we're not even in three d space at that point, but you can do that on any layer whether it's too dear three d fake that depth of field by adding some lens blur or gazi and blur to it cool and studio modern would like to know is there is no quality quality loss with rendering out and importing back in. No, not as long as you are rendering at the same your resolution that you're working it so yeah, it's fine, as long as you don't render out something that's really low raz or you know bad kodak or whatever lossy then you always keep things as much data as possible more is better, just like resolution or scale have another audio question here from eric are del rio who says hi congratulations for this great course how do you match the sound with the apples movement? Well that would be again that is a matter of subjective editing that is just a matter of looking at where what's happening when let me get rid of this gray solid layer there here we go and let's turn on our background again this week something solid to look at what is happening here is you can see that all these different instances of that sound are happening right at the bounds so I've only got a bounce going on there and it's a very subjective thing where you have to just kind of listen to it and the nice thing is is with ram previews they don't take sound sound isn't taken into consideration so I I don't have to worry about re rendering each time as long as I'm not moving any on screen attributes so I can look at this just let's look at the one bounds so I can move this along time here see if I get my timing to change so if I move it one way or the other too much see so it's just a matter of a lining it up and seeing where it's happening another thing is you can look at the speculum data here twirl this down told us down look at wave form and there you've got some speculator data which helps you line up to and I do that a lot for sound effects as well, so if you just twirl down the audio file and you twirl down away form, then you can see the peak of that speculate data should line up with the actual bounce and that will get you very close so that's a great way to do it and again notice hey there's a stopwatch here on audio levels I conf aidan and fade out with key frames so anytime you see a stopwatch next to any attributes of any kind where there's audio video and effect transform function layer styles, anything that has a stopwatch means you can animate it with the key frame and the key frames are all the same concept and I think that's where people kind of get scared is like more key frames it's like gnocchi frames they're just a point in time it's like I want this on at this point I wanted off here or I wanted to to do something here and I don't want to do something there and unlike photoshopped in some aspects, things that you do and apply and effects that you apply to layers here in aftereffects they're all non destructive so it's kind of like working with smart objects and smart filters in photoshopped that way that everything's nondestructive everything is reversible everything you can turn on and off, you know, it's beautiful because you're not really affecting that. Yeah, that layer what's happened in fact, how it looks and how it's presented in how it's moving but you're not changing the core layer, right? Cool. Eso marco santos from portugal asks, how can you resize the window timeline in full screen for best work flow with all layers is there a shortcut? Oh, actually there is and I believe that is no did it? Ah, till the the till d key. Which is? Is that showing up in the mouse pose a it's ah it's this little one that's a little hand. The senior are that guy up at the top? Right under the escape key depends on which, uh, window or which panel your mouse is over. That is the one that will show full screen when you hit the till d key. So if I'm in my commandant, see it full screen. I do that. If I want to see just panel do that my timeline if I want to see it that way utility key I can see that full screen just by hitting that on and off I just have to have my mouse over that particular panel to see that full full screens that's a good question