Lessons

Lesson Info

Bending Comps & Footage Layers

Okay? And then onto bending footage this came up yesterday. Maybe you brought it up again today to as faras taking photos or video or anything and given them a three d effect and this is kind of the extreme of that where I'm bending the video footage. This is a video clip here this some footage I took in yosemite a couple years ago it's just this shouldn't say it's just this is it's an amazing place, but zoom out of half dome in yosemite so zooms out and kind of pans around a little bit so it's just a it's just a pan zoom pan, but I thought was kind of an interesting shot to use in this example. Um now this is going to be thinking a bit so let's turn this to draft mode so that will make things move a little faster and I'll go to half resolution as well. So anything to make things move faster while you're just dealing with motion and then turn him back to full resolution. When you want to render just a frame, make sure that everything looks good before you go to your final render out do...

es speed things up, especially with processor intensive things like this now this one's a little more complicated, I've got the camera moving again, I've got the camera moving around a central point focal point didn't need a uh noel object because I'm not moving the camera unnecessarily and changing my focal point at the same time I just em kind of rotating it's almost like if you have a string attached to something if you think of it that way you've got a string anchored to the center of your object in your you're trying to keep the string tight but you're holding the camera all around and that's kind of what you're doing or maybe it's a rubber band so you do have some motion this way but you have to stay connected to that center point and that's essentially what the camera is doing here um it's it's just centering around that that center point there so what I've got going here several different three d layers now noticed that this text is bent that is really interesting because our other three d text was extruded well, what you can do here is I've got text inside a sub comp so even though it's three d I've got my my taxi's air to text layers in here so you see I can turn him on and off I can uh edit him if I wanted to um and uh if I wanted to animate them in that's another thing you can do, I've done that before with the text animates in from the side then it just kind of looks like it comes from nowhere which is kind of cool to this is this is the world in which we really want to live in this this virtual three d world here, so I've got that going on, I've also got a plane on the bottom that is just a solid layer that is also three d, but I've got reflectivity in it, so it's reflecting what it's seen, so I've got three basically flat images or three flat elements that I've been able to do things to bring them into this three d world, and I'm just moving the camera around it. So how I'm doing this? Let me do this part here, let me just duplicate actually, I've got one. Uh, no, I don't I don't have one that's undone here. I thought I did made just duplicate that layer we turn this one off, let me turn this one off and turn that one off, and then I'll quickly destroyed that by going from two d back to three d it didn't destroy it, I thought it would destroy my geometry. Okay, so my geometry options you are like such by default, they come up looking something like this when you have a flat plain like an m ovi file or a b I file if you're on p c w v file if you got some kind of a video file and uh you are converting it to a three d layer in the ray trace three d mode then you can bend it and buy default it comes up with four segments with zero curvature and then you can just start cranking up the curvature and bend it back but as you see your bending it back since it's on ly got four segments it now looks like a trade show booth yeah, it's it has that that feeling that it's it's you know just four segments there so I crank up the segments to at least twenty five or so let's try twenty five and that rounds it up a bit more um thinking increase it what can you go to so we can go toe to hundred fifty six, two hundred fifty five, two hundred fifty six so that's going to be a lot more then we need to get the effect done it's gonna take a lot more time to render. So twenty five I found makes a a fairly passable band at one hundred percent so if we do this well, you see we can kind of bend this in time again everything as a stopwatch I could bend this overtime so I could bend that so that it actually um starts off flat or it goes out the other way we could go this way too so we can bend it either direction so I could start off with it being flat and then come out here a little ways and then bend it back so it makes that arc so again, that could be animated overtime and I've never done this, but you can animate your how many segments you have it looks like so I could start with like, one segment to I guess is the minimum and then it actually increases segments actually that seems to kind of work all right to you and you don't even notice that that may speed up render time, who knows? I don't know I haven't played with that maybe I could do just the opposite I have it band and then start breaking so I'd like to bend the rules. I like to break the rules, you know, it's like nobody said you have to do it a certain right there we go. Bunk look at that that's kind of cool. Okay, I'm easily amused. So anyway, so that's how I'm doing that now the same thing applies to a cop. Now, this is something that I tested early on. I thought, okay, what if I made a three d comp of text that had extrusion and then brought that in? Well, what it does is actually treats it like it's a snapshot of time and so it's still bends a two dimensional image of your three d text it looks horrible horrible horrible you can try it if you want make a three to make this a three d extrusion and render it there are at least get some lights on it or whatever and then bring it into something like this and bend it it's gonna look dreadful so that's what happens there this guy here this was kind of cool this is our floor and notice that you can see the little reflection of the text down there just ever so slightly because it's up high enough you're not really seeing it much there because that's the only thing in the scene right now I've turned off this other layer so it's truely recognizing that as a reflective object and here I just went to my material options it's on the floor so it doesn't need to cast shadows so I didn't worry about that but what I did do is increase my secular intensity which means that's how it bounces light off the shiny nous which means that's how that's the finish so something more diffused like this metal desk is got a lot a lot more diffusion on the surface so these bright lights hitting it are soft and diffused almost like they're you know it's a matte finish but if it was a really highly reflective surface like a monitor screen or a piece of glass I'd be seen the pinpoints of the lights I didn't want that on this floor I wanted it to reflect sharply, but I didn't want the lights to be really sharp so you can see my reflection sharpness you can actually enhance how sharp the all the items that get reflected our and the reflection fall off that just how far out does it reflect? Natural surfaces have fall off unless it's one bright light source one super mirror glass type surface and then one object being lit by the light you're going to have a very sharp image and it's going to reflect along a long ways away such such a glass or a mirror but this is a more matte surface I wanted my fall off to be about halfway out there number fraction because I'm not looking through it, so I just made a shiny surface that that reflects what I'm putting above it and sew this model here that I created just stays there, but we can see that the video's moving in there so it almost looks like the whole thing is moving but see the reflection into the floor there too I do have that rendered in uh full resolution here see this one this one doesn't have the reflection that's why both women they're one is within one's without here we go that quick time bar out of there so you can see that's just a simple single camera move nothing fancy with that camera move it all just comes around to the centre. You can see how that bent surface in there really works well it's above the floor a little bit so there's a little bit of space there if I had it touching the floor surface uh in three d then there would be no gap there. Okay, so get back to our project here, all right? That's right? I put it in another project now we're going to get into an extruded logo so me close this and open up my other one got that out here on dh here don't know how far back I want to go there I think I've got that in there. Yeah, this one I brought inside. Okay, so what I've got here is a couple different variations of of things let me try to make this draft mode and half resolution there we go because this starts back to where we started this segment with uh taking actually that was our last segment before lunch we went it's all one segment to me these days are all connected my brain is always I glue everything together so this is this is like my marathon for me to keep going so I took the adobe logo and I extracted the shape outlines so you can see here's my original adobe logo um right in here that pops up you can see it behind their let's hide that one you see there's the adobe logo it's just in three d um and I made shape outlines I went to that shape outline and I extruded it so we can see you've got a little bit of a convex bevel there we zoom in on it will be able to see the edges a little more zoom in about two hundred percent and look at it here so while I'm talking about it it may bring my resolution back off here on and bring that up and then I'll click off it so that it doesn't put the lines on their so let that catch up while I'm explaining what I did here so I've got, um several things going on if this is going to release me it's thinking it's rendering its frozen me out while it's thinking so while it's thinking do we need to catch up on any questions that are coming in for comment? We have a question actually um yeah, just real quick I'm paul asks what's the difference between orientation and rotation and transform of the camera when I change these parameters it looks like the result is exactly the same well that kind of our orientation is kind of a combination of all your different elements it's it's kind of like grabbing the camera and doing this with it versus putting it on a tripod or putting on a device and then cranking one thing or another like if it's on a jib he's got controls that comptel the camera he can pan the camera and you know he can move it with the jib in ze space toward me um why don't you try an example of that want you want you bring the camera up and let them see through here if our control room look connected this camera and physically see what's happening here I'm waving at everybody out there in tv land so what he's done is he's got this camera's on a jib and it's moving toward me and the camera is is in a setup where it's kind of locked in that position but if he was teo dial in and pan it back and forth or move it up and down he's got controls to do that see there he is he's panning and tilting and he's raising it up with the jib arm and so that's basically what we're doing with our three d cameras in hairs were doing all of those control so you can control them all individually with the individual accesses uh or you can do it with the orientation which is all one unit that's a great question well thank you of course alex and am attack here he's great so this rendered while we're well, we're answering questions here so I've got you can see the edges of the logo here uh I've also got a lot of reflectivity in the logo even though this is the logo is black or a very dark charcoal of sorts I think I may have altered the material just to make it so it wasn't completely black, but I wanted it to show up and have some reflectivity but still be dark so it's kind of like a a matted, glossy black so if we look at the extrusion depth is fifty it does cast shadows so that's why we're seeing shadows on the back wall uh accepts lights, speculum shyness I wanted it to be very shiny I wanted these little convex edges on all of my bev als to really have nice highlights on them, so uh they are reflecting well, I'm seeing the shadows from the bevel czar coming out nice reflect reflection, sharpness I wanted them to be glossy, so I wanted one hundred percent sharpness anything that reflects back onto the letters I wanted them to look really nice, my reflection intensity I didn't want it to be totally mirrored because then they wouldn't look black anymore they would look like there are probably chrome or something and that would totally destroyed the adobe logo I wanted it to look like was painted with enamel and I think I got the right balance of that just by plane without these material uh, options in here so with that I also did the same thing well, because that's attached this is all one thing this whole shaped thing the red up here we'll see that also reflects nicely may click out of it seeing sea that looks like red painted enamel like a big enameled sign they'd see outfront even the little tm up here so that's another reason why I put a background in here this background texture instead of just going to a solid color the background texture has some of their adobe aftereffects logo marketing logo is in there and it's just a graphic that I put in there to give us some some texture and some interest it doesn't go anywhere it's just too still I don't know why I'm scrubbing through it I'm always used to scrubbing through the timeline to see if something's moving that's just a bad habit but s so I just have that over top of this blue solid layer and the two together are sub cop that I have here in the background and of course I've got that curved here so let's get up to percent and I've got it curved but it's big you can't see it here so let me go back out so it does have some depth here if I was to look at it from above let's look at the top I don't know why it's taken a while to render that park that's just that you see it has some depth here see this is the orange layer it's not showing me the actual shape of it but it's showing me that this does have depth that's kind of giving me a box that represents that go back to my camera and here the camera again is just making a position move only around let's go back up to the top again so we can see how it's moving yes he just makes a nice little smooth our care so goes just from left to right makes this nice arc and it's gonna catch up here here we go so I did the same thing I did before I just made the handles that made a nice arc in there and this one I didn't have rest at the end I didn't have it easy in because I didn't hold on it it just does a just a quick move in so let's go back to our camera one and look at our before and after stages here let's fit up to screen let that render quickly so we'll see the last frame then I do have it rendered with the full reflections I think this one took because it's so intensive that's the thing with reflectivity when you have things reflecting off from each other that adds a lot to the render time definitely something to consider because you've got you've got shadows we've got light um I've got one ambient light in there just kind of it softens up our shadow areas inside the letters thin the one spotlight which is casting a shadow onto the background and from the letters to each other then we've got reflection of the background onto the logo and it kind of goes back and forth now if I had reflectivity on the floor on a floor plain and the back wall reflected is well I could go crazy and then you've got this mirror ya house of mirrors thing going on and every time it has to go and think and render and do all that you've added a lot of time I believe this fifteen second piece here at full resolution took about six hours to render and that's what sixteen gig of ram on until of course seven processor so that's a long time to render to see if something is going to look right so that's why we always coming turn things to draft mode bring down our resolution you know at least a half or less and you can kind of play through here and see what our camera move looks like before you go through all that craziness because nothing's worse than rendering something out and how it go that's not what I wanted so really important to know that those options are there let's, go ahead and see this um actually I did want that I render just by itself with no reflectivity, I want to show you that one first so this is just the logo with a slow camera move not touch my mouth here um and with the same lights but I had no reflectivity on it and no background like yes, I do have reflectivity everything's the same except there's no background because you can see right here on the curvature of the be reflecting into the upright of the b same thing with the d here I've got reflectivity of the letters into themselves. I don't recall how long that one took to render because I did that one first that may be in one of those I set to render and then went to bed that's typically what I do, I save renders like this get him already! Then I sent him to render and then I go to bed because I can't touch anything can't do anything with it. However, now with aftereffect cc, I can send this off to the adobe media encoder and let it render in the background for me may slow down everything else on the machine but least I'm not locked out of aftereffects and I can't work on anything else it is sent off to process some rounds and there are ways that you can send it to another computer render farm or whatever you got more than one computer you can send it off that way and that kind of speeds things up too. So let me show this one in all its glory this is the six hour render and um let that go through and that's a lot of build up for something that's very simple but you can see though that I didn't move my lights I could have animated my lights is well um and I think I may have showed that yesterday but I could show that today is well, we've got a little more time about ten minutes I could show what animating in light might look like but I just want to show this one one more time and really look at the reflections in the letters theodore b letters you khun study those and see the background reflecting into it the shadows on the background that air cast by the logo are reflecting back onto the logo and to me that's just exciting that we can do all of that one hundred percent in after effects which is very cool very, very cool okay, so talking about animating light since we've got draft mode here I could actually do that here with our spotlight real quick and moving the light is very similar to move in a camera because it has a point of interest, just like a camera does, um and a position, and if I want to keep my light pointed on the adobe logo, I would just animate my position. So let me go to two views horizontal here, and I've got my top view, which is where I like to start. Actually, I want to end their own end at that position. So that's, what I see so I'm going tio key frame my last position and then come back to my first position and I can move my spotlight around to this side and we'll see the update over here see how the shadow shifted let me go to side view my left side view click on my light and again with the x y z I wanna click where I'm not getting one of those so I can freely move this so I've got my spotlight coming down at a steeper position and just like the camera, I can come in here looked down at the top, I've got these handles again so I can move the light so it animates across that path in an ark as well. Okay, so let's, take a look at what that did hear us go backto one view and do a quick ramp review with very low resolution and see what it did here so we see the shadow is going to move the light source is going to change on how it lights up the logo um and it's all going to pan across if I tightened up the uh the spotlight that's another thing I could do to change how the light appears I could make it more intense over time I can tighten it up I can make it more focused where it comes wide and goes you know really tight there's a lot of things I can animate with the light as well and that's that's really big I mean that's really exciting you could do all of that and this again all of this is just being done in the ray trace three d mode of aftereffects again that's that's all in in six to not just the c c version so if you're still on c s six that's the thing to this hole the workshop for the most part except for our next segment where we're getting into cinema forty and some other elements most of what you're learning here at this workshop is also applicable to six so for people who haven't quite made the jump up yet or they have to work in both worlds I have to sometimes sometimes have to go back and work in cia six for a client then you still can so so we'll just let that go on, and I think I will take it to a point where we could take some questions before the break. Sure, and I think it's also a great opportunity to mention that if you're following along with jeff and you're loving what you're seeing, but you think you might want to brush up on some of some of those basic skills, we also have after effects for beginners, which is, of course, jeff previously taught for us and that's still available for purchase. So if that's something you think might be useful, you might want to do that and then come back to this coursework also, if you're in that position, so just wanted to make sure everybody knows that that's out there for them, um, we can take a couple questions here. Yeah, so I'm here's the question from trap city productions, and I know paula also asked it earlier, but when should I use the ray trace render instead of the classic three d that's? A good question, and we're going to get into that probably a little more as we continue just because there's there's certain things that only work in ray trace there's certain things that only work in classic and that's, why you have to be able to go back and forth. And I catch myself sometimes going why it can't. I extrude this text, why isn't that working? And I just have to look up there and I see, oh, it's, because I'm not in ray trace mood. I'm still in classic three d mode. Classic three d mode is we're going to experience is the only way you can use the cinema for d link. So the centre, where software only works in classic three d mode s o that's a time for sure that you can only use that ray trace three d is for things like extrusion sze forgetting these great reflections, volumetric looking stuff. You know where we can bend stuff where we can extrude stuff that's, where that's all work is that's all working inside of after effects. But as we get into our next segment, you'll you'll see some other things and that's kind of where we work in two different worlds. You have to be able to jump back and forth.