1. IntroductionWelcome| 00:00 | (Music Playing)
| | 00:03 | Hello!
| | 00:04 | I am Chad Perkins and this is
the After Effects Project Workflow.
| | 00:08 | In this course, we're going to build a
real world motion graphics project from a
| | 00:12 | bunch of different files using a
bunch of different applications.
| | 00:15 | We'll create the layout using images
from Photoshop, graphics from Illustrator,
| | 00:18 | and 3D elements from Cinema 4D.
| | 00:20 | Then we'll animate all the pieces,
arranging them in 3D space, and using the tools
| | 00:25 | in After Effects to make them do
exactly what we want them to do.
| | 00:28 | After that we'll put the finishing
touches on, color correcting the final bumper
| | 00:31 | and even composing an original soundtrack.
| | 00:34 | This is going to be a blast.
| | 00:37 | So let's get started with
After Effects Project Workflow.
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| The project we'll be making| 00:00 | In this movie, I'm going to introduce
you to the project that we'll be making in
| | 00:04 | this training series.
| | 00:05 | [Music Playing]
| | 00:14 | So, a lot of fun there and basically let me give
you an idea of the concept that I had in mind.
| | 00:19 | What I was envisioning is that let's
say I had a reality TV show about all
| | 00:25 | the stuff that I liked.
| | 00:26 | And then when we went from the TV
show to the commercial, there will be
| | 00:30 | some cool graphic element like a Bumper that
we'll take you from the show to the commercial.
| | 00:35 | And so that's what this piece kind of is.
| | 00:37 | And there are a lot of transitional
elements like Stay tuned for more show,
| | 00:41 | that's the text on the screen there, and
also there is some reality TV elements,
| | 00:45 | kind of how the way things are kind of
grouped together behind a banner, kind of
| | 00:49 | fanning out like this.
| | 00:50 | It's very common in a lot of
reality TV and extreme TV type stuff.
| | 00:54 | Also the way that the figure kind of
changes, it's not live-action videos.
| | 00:59 | It's kind of a series of photographs.
| | 01:01 | It's also another really common
reality TV element that you see.
| | 01:05 | And so we are going to
talk about how to do that.
| | 01:07 | And there are all sorts of elements
from all over the place, the banner is from
| | 01:10 | Illustrator, the text is from After
Effects, the robots are from Cinema 4D,
| | 01:14 | dragons from Illustrator, live-action
fire from detonationfilms.com that will
| | 01:19 | stylize and colorize, still photos
here, some elements from Photoshop.
| | 01:24 | It's just going to be a great, great
opportunity for us to dig in, and really
| | 01:28 | see how to use these applications
together to make something sweet like this.
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| What this title is and isn't| 00:00 | Now before we just jump right in, I
want to give you some sense of expectation.
| | 00:04 | So what you could expect in this
title, what it is and what is not.
| | 00:08 | Now, first of all, most of my
training on lynda.com is technical in nature.
| | 00:12 | We are basically trying to teach you
how to use After Effects and so there are
| | 00:16 | better ways to do things, there are faster ways.
| | 00:19 | When it comes to art, there is no perfect art.
| | 00:22 | So this is all my opinion.
| | 00:24 | So feel free to disagree
with every decision that I make.
| | 00:28 | This is not the perfect way to do things.
| | 00:30 | This is just how I chose to do things.
| | 00:33 | The other thing is that we are not
going to be going through this project
| | 00:36 | step-by-step, every single little detail.
| | 00:38 | Say, for example, the robots here.
| | 00:40 | I'm going to be showing
you how to make the robots.
| | 00:42 | I'll give you all the basic concepts you
need to know, but we're not going to be
| | 00:46 | modeling every single component of
the arms and legs and everything else.
| | 00:51 | But I'm going to teach you what you
need to know to complete it on your own.
| | 00:55 | Now it's going to be really detailed in
some spots, and just kind of an overview
| | 00:58 | in other spots, but I'm going to share
with you all that you need to know to
| | 01:02 | create this project from absolutely nothing.
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| Using the exercise files| 00:00 | For those of you that are premium
members of the Online Training Library at
| | 00:03 | lynda.com, you will have access to
the glory that is these exercise files.
| | 00:09 | Here's how I laid them out.
| | 00:10 | Each chapter has the project files used
in that chapter, so Chapter 06 has the
| | 00:15 | project files used in Chapter 06, et cetera.
| | 00:17 | And the media that these projects link
to are stored in the Media folder, and
| | 00:22 | are grouped by folder according to their type.
| | 00:25 | The Video folder also contains this
ChadShowBumper_w_audio file and this
| | 00:30 | is the final project.
| | 00:32 | Now we'll rarely find ourselves here in
the Media folder, but in case you want
| | 00:35 | to dissect some of the components that
I use, you are more than welcome here
| | 00:39 | in the Media folder.
| | 00:40 | And for those of you that have a
monthly or annual membership to the lynda.com
| | 00:45 | Online Training Library, you won't
have access to these files, but you can go
| | 00:48 | ahead and create other assets that are
so much these or just watch the training.
| | 00:52 | Now one other word of advice for those
of you that have these exercise files.
| | 00:56 | I included in Chapter 01
the final project that I used.
| | 01:01 | As we get towards the end of the
training series, we keep building and building
| | 01:04 | and building, but that project isn't
exactly like the original that I created.
| | 01:08 | If you want to dissect and look at the
original I created, in the Chapter 01
| | 01:12 | folder, you'll have this Chad
Show Bumper Final.aep project.
| | 01:15 | And again, it has every single little
nook and cranny, the actual project I used
| | 01:20 | to create the video that we
saw earlier in this chapter.
| | 01:22 | So enough already about
exercise files. Let's get to planning
| | 01:26 | this project.
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2. Pre-ProductionPlanning the project| 00:00 | One of the topics that really doesn't
get touched on enough in video training, in
| | 00:04 | my opinion, is the process of
preproduction of the planning phase of a project.
| | 00:10 | And even when you are doing a short
project like what we're doing here in this
| | 00:14 | training series, you've
always got to start with the plan.
| | 00:17 | You can't just go in and start playing
around After Effects and expect to make magic.
| | 00:21 | And not only that, but when you are
working for a professional organization
| | 00:24 | oftentimes, a big client, they need to
sign off on the preproduction to see what
| | 00:29 | you're going to do before they'll give
you the money or the go-ahead to actually
| | 00:32 | go ahead and create the project.
| | 00:34 | So I want to show you my
preproduction on this project.
| | 00:38 | This is basically a scan.
| | 00:40 | I created the preproduction
work on the back of an index card.
| | 00:44 | It's a little rudimentary,
but that's missing the point.
| | 00:47 | The point is, is that it has to be a guide,
and this is all that I needed for this project.
| | 00:52 | So if you look here, I've got numbers.
| | 00:55 | I've got 1, and then 2, and then 3, and these
indicate the steps or the order of the animation.
| | 01:03 | So we basically start here
with step one, the top half.
| | 01:07 | You could see I have a top half
of things and I have the banner.
| | 01:09 | It says, "Stay Tuned," and then
a bunch of stuff around here.
| | 01:13 | I initially thought that there was
going to be a bunch of ink spatter, and also
| | 01:17 | some cool punk rock five-pointed stars here.
| | 01:19 | And when I actually got into After
Effects and started working with those
| | 01:22 | elements, I really just didn't like
the way they looked, for no other reason
| | 01:25 | than I just didn't like the way they looked.
| | 01:27 | So I got rid of them, ditched them,
replaced them with other things.
| | 01:30 | And then step two is the crack.
| | 01:32 | And then step three is the bottom-half
of the For More Show banner, and then all
| | 01:38 | the other junk that goes around.
| | 01:39 | And I made arrows here, top-half and
then bottom-half, so I knew what I was
| | 01:42 | talking about, cracks going along the bottom.
| | 01:45 | I actually ended up going with just
one crack instead of multiple cracks as I
| | 01:49 | was initially planning.
| | 01:50 | So as you can see things
can change a little bit.
| | 01:52 | It doesn't have to be completely etched
in stone, but you do need a guideline to
| | 01:57 | know what you are doing.
| | 01:57 | So having this guideline, I was able to
go into Illustrator, go into Photoshop,
| | 02:02 | go into Cinema 4D, and create the
elements that I needed or thought that I might
| | 02:06 | need in After Effects.
| | 02:08 | So again, obviously, it doesn't take
any kind of Da Vinci-esque masterpiece
| | 02:12 | to get you where you need to go, but
you do need a plan before starting a
| | 02:15 | big project.
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3. Creating Photoshop AssetsUnderstanding Photoshop's role| 00:00 |
In this chapter, we're going to examine
the Photoshop contributions to this project.
| | 00:05 |
We have two main categories for this:
| | 00:06 |
One is the series of still images used
for the character here that's thinking
| | 00:13 |
and then giving thumbs up
and all that kind of stuff,
| | 00:15 |
and also an array of background elements,
such as these guitars and the speakers
| | 00:21 |
in the background, some
of the dots, and so forth.
| | 00:24 |
So let's look a little at how I did that.
| | 00:27 |
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| Isolating subjects| 00:00 | Our first task here in Photoshop is to
isolate the subject, in other words you want to
| | 00:04 | get rid of the background.
| | 00:06 | That way we can have a bunch of
elements swinging up from behind him in After
| | 00:09 | Effects and have it show up, and
with this background, that won't happen.
| | 00:13 | Now there are a zillion ways to do this,
but let me show you just a couple of
| | 00:18 | quick tips and tricks to do this.
| | 00:19 | I selected the Quick Select tool.
| | 00:22 | You'll find that tool fourth from the
top of the Tools panel, right here, Quick
| | 00:26 | Selection tool. And it's really not
the best tool to use, to be honest.
| | 00:30 | It looks like it works great, like if I
were to click here in this background,
| | 00:34 | it just expands and it finds the edge
automatically, and look how much it just
| | 00:37 | goes around the contour, through our subject.
| | 00:39 | It looks perfect, right.
| | 00:40 | Well, it's not exactly perfect.
| | 00:42 | I often find that this tool creates these
really ugly edges, especially on smaller images,
| | 00:47 | so you need to be careful with that.
| | 00:48 | However, it's a phenomenal starting point.
| | 00:51 | So I was just going to click in these
areas of the background, and actually, I
| | 00:56 | want to select the foreground.
| | 00:58 | That's me, the subject, and I'll show
you why that is in just a second, but for
| | 01:01 | now I am going to select background.
| | 01:02 | Click in these areas. And if you've
accidentally selected too much, so let's
| | 01:05 | say, I go and I select the shadow. There we go.
| | 01:08 | So I've selected too much,
| | 01:09 | so what you can do is hold the Alt key
on the PC, the Option key on the Mac and
| | 01:13 | just draw on the subject to
subtract from the selection area.
| | 01:18 | So I'll de-select my pants, and there we go.
| | 01:25 | Sometimes, zooming in
with this tool helps as well.
| | 01:27 | I am going to get the ear here.
| | 01:29 | I am just going to hold the Option
key to subtract from the selection.
| | 01:40 | Now it doesn't have to be
perfect because we are going to do
| | 01:43 | this nondestructively.
| | 01:44 | So we are not going to hurt the image at all.
| | 01:46 | And so what I am going to do is I am
going to duplicate the background layer.
| | 01:49 | I am going to drag that to the New layer icon.
| | 01:52 | I am going to turn off
the real background layer.
| | 01:55 | This is so that if we really foul things
up, we have kind of an insurance policy.
| | 01:59 | We can always go back to the original.
| | 02:01 | We haven't destroyed anything.
| | 02:02 | So I'm selecting the background copy,
and what I am going to do in this layer
| | 02:06 | is create a layer Mask, but a layer Mask
is going to remove whatever is not selected.
| | 02:13 | So what we need to do is invert this
selection because right now, we have the
| | 02:15 | background selected, and not the
subject, and we actually want the subject
| | 02:18 | selected, not the background.
| | 02:20 | So I'm going to press Command+
Shift+I to invert the selection.
| | 02:25 | That'll be Ctrl+Shift+I on the PC.
| | 02:28 | Once I've inverted the selection and
the subject is selected and not the
| | 02:30 | background, I can create a layer mask by
going to the bottom of the Layers panel
| | 02:34 | and selecting the square with
the circle in the middle of it.
| | 02:37 | That will create a layer mask there. Very nice.
| | 02:40 | And we start to see some of the problems
from that Quick Select tool, but that's okay.
| | 02:45 | That's actually the reason why we
created a layer mask because it was
| | 02:48 | nondestructive. We could go back
and fix anything later if we want to.
| | 02:51 | So what I am going to do is hit the
letter D on the keyboard to reset my colors,
| | 02:55 | white to the foreground,
black to the background.
| | 02:57 | Then, with the layer mask selected, not
the layer itself but the layer mask on
| | 03:01 | this top layer, I am going to zoom in.
| | 03:04 | I can see we've got a huge like San
Andreas Fault going through my chin here.
| | 03:08 | So what I am going to do is I'm going
to hit B for the Brush tool, and then I'm
| | 03:12 | going to paint, to fix these areas
where there is undesired transparency.
| | 03:18 | So by painting white, I'm
actually restoring the subject.
| | 03:21 | Now if I go too crazy with this you
could see that I actually can paint back the
| | 03:25 | background, which is not what I want to do.
| | 03:27 | So I'm going to undo that, and I
could go in and fix these areas.
| | 03:32 | Now there are some areas that
we kind of don't care about.
| | 03:35 | It's not really worth the time and
effort, and that's like around my shoulders
| | 03:39 | here, and that probably looks good enough.
| | 03:41 | Somewhat way around my pants these
edges might be a little bit choppy, but if
| | 03:46 | they are kind of ugly, it's not
going to be that big of a deal.
| | 03:49 | For one, this is a lot bigger than
we're going to need our final project to be.
| | 03:53 | So if there is a little bit of detail that's
not quite perfect, it's going to be okay.
| | 03:57 | We could live with it.
| | 03:58 | So the thing that is not going to look that great
though is the subjects hair right here.
| | 04:02 | I got some spiky hair going on
and selecting it's kind of a mess.
| | 04:05 | So what I'm going to do is paint with
white and this is kind of weird, but go
| | 04:10 | with me here for a second, and I'm
actually going to get back all of the stuff
| | 04:14 | that we lost around the sensitive
areas of the head, where there is a lot of
| | 04:19 | these kind of spiky hairs
that are hard to select.
| | 04:22 | Next, what I am going to do is I am
going to select the Lasso tool so I can
| | 04:25 | create a free-form selection.
| | 04:27 | Then I want to select an area that's
only the black part of my hair and the
| | 04:34 | background, and nothing else.
| | 04:38 | There we go, and then with the main
image area selected, not the layer mask, I'm
| | 04:44 | going to go to the Select menu
at the top and select Color Range.
| | 04:47 | So what we are going to do is we are
going to have Photoshop work for us to
| | 04:51 | select the differences
between the hair and the background.
| | 04:54 | So I am going to click once on my
hair and adjust the slider, the Fuzziness
| | 04:59 | slider until it looks like I have
a pretty good mat here, and that's
| | 05:03 | looking pretty good.
| | 05:04 | It's doing a pretty good job with my
hairs. There's some semi-transparency hair,
| | 05:07 | which is kind of cool.
| | 05:08 | It looks like these spikes
are pretty well preserved.
| | 05:11 | So we can go ahead and click OK.
| | 05:13 | And then we have a selection area.
| | 05:16 | So we could go back over here to our
layer mask, hit B for the Brush tool.
| | 05:22 | Now if you zoom out, what you can do
by holding Option+Spacebar on the Mac or
| | 05:25 | Alt+Spacebar on the PC, you'll see that
there is no selection border around the
| | 05:30 | edges of our image, only around the hair here.
| | 05:33 | They indicate that only that area is selected,
but we actually want to get rid of this junk.
| | 05:39 | So we don't want the hair selected.
| | 05:41 | We want this junk selected.
| | 05:42 | So I'm going to hit Command+Shift+I
or Ctrl+Shift+I on the PC to invert the
| | 05:47 | selection, and now
everything but the hair is selected.
| | 05:51 | So I can go back here and I could hit
the letter X to paint with black, and we
| | 05:58 | could paint just on the background.
| | 06:00 | Don't go start painting away my face or
anything, and you could go around this
| | 06:04 | background here and go through
and get rid of the background.
| | 06:10 | Now the problem is that we kind of
got rid of some of those spikes, because
| | 06:13 | there are some semi-transparency here.
| | 06:15 | If I de-select that, you could see
that we've got some of those spikes came
| | 06:19 | through okay, but not as many as we liked.
| | 06:21 | So I am going to undo that, Command+Z
or Ctrl+Z and then Command+Option+Z, or
| | 06:25 | Ctrl+Alt+Z, and I'm just going to, maybe
soften the edge of my brush. I can right-click.
| | 06:33 | Take down the Hardness.
| | 06:35 | You could also alternatively take
down the opacity if you wanted to.
| | 06:39 | I am not going to do that here, but
it'll allow us just to kind of go around
| | 06:43 | little more softly,
around those soft edges. Oops!
| | 06:49 | Actually got little bit of my head
there, got to be careful with that.
| | 06:53 | See, this stuff I'm not worried about
because I could always go back in with
| | 06:58 | white and repaint it in.
| | 06:59 | And so, as you go back and forth in Photoshop
here you might want to zoom in a little closer.
| | 07:04 | That's kind of what it's like.
| | 07:06 | I want to make sure that your edges
are looking good, which that one wasn't.
| | 07:09 | I'm going to go back and fix that, but
those are some tips for creating fine
| | 07:14 | selection areas and making a good
little area here for these spikes,
| | 07:21 | that when we take this back into After
Effects, that will composite really well.
| | 07:25 | And for some of these areas again you
might want to harden up the brush and you
| | 07:29 | could do that by hitting Shift+Right Bracket.
| | 07:31 | That will harden the brush.
| | 07:32 | Shift+Left Bracket will increase the
softness of the brush or decrease the
| | 07:36 | hardness of the brush.
| | 07:37 | And so it's kind of like a little back
and forth, where you erased too much and
| | 07:40 | then you don't erase enough
and all that kind of stuff.
| | 07:43 | So you kind of got a go
around and fix these edges here.
| | 07:46 | It's a long, tedious process.
| | 07:48 | Doesn't make for the most
interesting of tutorials.
| | 07:52 | So you now have the information, so you
can now go on your own and practice this
| | 07:56 | until you have a great outline of our character.
| | 08:01 | And again if you need to restore some
stuff, you can just go ahead and paint
| | 08:05 | with white on the layer mask to
restore that missing information.
| | 08:08 | Sometimes with Color Range you
get these semi-transparent areas.
| | 08:11 | You've got to go in and paint them back in.
| | 08:13 | But, that being said, at the end of the
day, we have some really fine selections
| | 08:18 | that'll be impossible to make any other way.
| | 08:21 | So there we have our selection,
background free, and we're ready to put this
| | 08:26 | character into After Effects.
| | 08:28 | Now because of my extremely pasty white
skin you also might want to go ahead and
| | 08:33 | add maybe levels here or something.
| | 08:36 | Maybe darken this a little bit.
| | 08:38 | And then go to Color Balance
maybe, and we'll select Highlights.
| | 08:43 | Maybe add a little bit of red, little
bit of magenta, little bit of yellow.
| | 08:48 | Somewhere around there.
| | 08:50 | And maybe even in the shadows
a little bit, in the midtones.
| | 08:53 | Add a little bit of red.
| | 08:54 | I don't want to go too much.
| | 08:56 | Now before we jump over to the next
movie, we are going to look at playing with
| | 08:58 | brushes and shapes and stuff like that.
| | 09:00 | We need to save this, but you'll notice that my
image is actually in JPEG form. That's not good.
| | 09:07 | If we save this, it's going to actually
degrade the image if we save it again as a JPEG.
| | 09:12 | So what I want to do is I want to
hit Command+Shift+S or Ctrl+Shift+S, or
| | 09:16 | alternatively I can go to File>Save As,
and I want to go over to Media>PSDs, and
| | 09:23 | then change the Format to Photoshop and
make sure layers is checked and then we
| | 09:27 | can save this as a PSD file.
| | 09:29 | Then you could save as many times you
want and you don't have to worry about
| | 09:32 | hurting the image in anyway.
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| Using custom shapes and brushes| 00:00 |
The other important element from
Photoshop is basically this one PSD file full of
| | 00:04 |
all sorts of miscellaneous little items.
| | 00:06 |
Some of them we use for the background textures.
| | 00:09 |
Some of them we have exploding
with me as I pop out of the banner.
| | 00:12 |
And so let's take a look at
this document really quick.
| | 00:15 |
I'm going to hold the Option key on the
Mac, the Alt key on the PC while I click
| | 00:17 |
the Visibility icon, so we
could solo each layer here.
| | 00:20 |
So we have a guitar, some piano keys,
some music notes and clefs, a mixer, a
| | 00:26 |
speaker, a keyboard, a ninja sword, of
course, just a few random things that we
| | 00:31 |
may or may not use later on.
| | 00:33 |
Now all these elements were
created from either brushes or shapes.
| | 00:37 |
I want to show you how I did that.
| | 00:39 |
You are not going to have all these
exact brushes because some of them were
| | 00:41 |
taken from materials that I
purchased on the Internet.
| | 00:44 |
So you won't have the original brushes, but
I'll still show you what I did to create these.
| | 00:48 |
Also in the next movie you'll have a
little bonus tutorial on how to make your
| | 00:52 |
own brushes out of photos.
| | 00:53 |
Now before we leave this image, I want
to cover the size of it really quickly.
| | 00:57 |
I am going to hold Command+
Option+I, or Ctrl+Alt+I on the PC.
| | 01:00 |
You'll see that it's 1280x1080 pixels.
| | 01:03 |
That's significantly larger than our final
output size, which is SD. We have 720x480.
| | 01:09 |
The reason why this is so big is
because the final 720x480 composition is kind
| | 01:14 |
of like a window into our much
bigger composition in the background.
| | 01:18 |
So when I'm exporting stuff that's
pixel-based, I always try to make sure
| | 01:22 |
it's extra, extra big.
| | 01:24 |
That way I can resize it up in
After Effects and not lose any clarity.
| | 01:27 |
So what I am going to do is go to
File>New, and I'm going to make a
| | 01:31 |
new Photoshop document.
| | 01:32 |
I am just going to leave this at the
Photoshop size because we're not actually
| | 01:34 |
going to replicate this document.
| | 01:36 |
I just want to teach you a little bit
about using custom brushes and shapes.
| | 01:40 |
First thing's first.
| | 01:41 |
We need to create a new layer if
we are going to be using brushes.
| | 01:45 |
If we were to paint directly on the
background layer, those brushes would become part
| | 01:49 |
of the background layer, and would not
be able to be transparent or isolated.
| | 01:52 |
So we need to create a new
layer so that they are separate.
| | 01:54 |
And I am going to select the Brush
tool by hitting letter B on the keyboard.
| | 01:58 |
Let's go over to the
Brushes panel. If it's not showing,
| | 02:01 |
you could also hit this little icon up here.
| | 02:03 |
Now what I did here is I went to
flyout menu and I loaded this set, Special
| | 02:07 |
Effect Brushes. And when this dialog popped up,
I just clicked OK to replace those brushes,
| | 02:12 |
that are current brushes.
| | 02:13 |
Let's say for example, I like this butterfly.
| | 02:16 |
Now there's a bunch of cool mechanics
built into this brush so that when I
| | 02:19 |
paint, there is a big flurry of butterflies.
| | 02:22 |
And that's fantastic and awesome, but
that's not what I'm looking for right now.
| | 02:25 |
So I'm going to undo that by hitting
Command or Ctrl+Z. Go back to our little
| | 02:29 |
butterfly here, and let's uncheck all
these little extra little goodies that
| | 02:33 |
change the way the butterfly is and then we
could just click once, and create a butterfly.
| | 02:38 |
We could also hit the Right Bracket to
bump that up as large as it will go and
| | 02:43 |
we could make more butterflies.
| | 02:44 |
Most brushes have a built-in resolution.
| | 02:48 |
So if we go too high, let's say we make
this butterfly really, really big here,
| | 02:52 |
you could see the edges start to
lose clarity and look really terrible.
| | 02:57 |
Even at this size right now, it looks pretty bad.
| | 03:00 |
So I am going to undo that and shrink my brush.
| | 03:03 |
And one of the things you can do also,
is you can check in the Brushes panel and
| | 03:07 |
see the size of the brush.
| | 03:09 |
So with this pixel, with this rose here,
being 117 pixels, we could probably get
| | 03:15 |
bigger with this one, and still have
all the clarity that we need as opposed to
| | 03:19 |
the butterfly one which is
intended to be a little bit smaller.
| | 03:22 |
The cool thing about these brushes is
that we could then take this into After
| | 03:26 |
Effects and then use it, let's say, for
a particle generator, a particle system.
| | 03:29 |
We could spit out millions of
roses or butterflies or whatever we want.
| | 03:33 |
Custom shapes are also a really
important source of goodies like that.
| | 03:36 |
I am just going to turn off the
visibility of the layer here and I am going to
| | 03:40 |
go to the Custom Shape tool.
| | 03:42 |
And with custom shapes, we don't have to
create a new layer because as long as we
| | 03:46 |
have this first little icon
selected here, which is Shape layer,
| | 03:49 |
it will automatically make a shape for us.
| | 03:51 |
So then we go to this Shape
dropdown here with this tool selected.
| | 03:55 |
If you have any other shape tools
selected, you won't be able to select a
| | 03:57 |
custom shape here like this.
| | 03:58 |
I went to the flyout menu,
and I just selected All.
| | 04:01 |
So that way it loaded all of the shapes that
we have available to us, which are pretty cool.
| | 04:06 |
And there's actually a few music
notes, such as these right here.
| | 04:12 |
And we could just click-and-drag to
put this onto on our canvas here.
| | 04:16 |
If we hold the Shift key, it will
constrain the proportions so that we have
| | 04:21 |
equal proportions that otherwise you can
just kind of get these all skewy and yucky.
| | 04:25 |
Hold the Option key or the Alt key
on the Mac to scale up from the first
| | 04:30 |
place that you clicked.
| | 04:31 |
And if you don't hold Alt or Option,
then the first place you clicked becomes the
| | 04:35 |
upper left-hand corner of
where the shape scales from.
| | 04:38 |
I know it's pretty confusing, right?
| | 04:40 |
So I'm going to hold Shift and Option.
| | 04:43 |
And I'm also going to hold the
Spacebar if I want to, and that'll allow us to
| | 04:47 |
move our shape around.
| | 04:49 |
And your fingers are probably playing
some awesome twister on the keyboard
| | 04:52 |
there as you try to hold the Shift+
Option+Spacebar keys down at the same time,
| | 04:55 |
but those keyboard shortcuts really
do help you as you are creating shapes.
| | 04:59 |
So I let go of this, and now we have a
vector-based shape, meaning that we could
| | 05:03 |
scale this up as big as we want. We're
not going to lose any detail or whatever.
| | 05:06 |
We could export this as is to After
Effects, and it will create a mask on a layer.
| | 05:12 |
So this will come over still as vector,
but that's actually not what I want.
| | 05:15 |
So I could right-click on this layer
and select Rasterize layer, and then it
| | 05:19 |
becomes a regular old layer of pixels.
| | 05:21 |
That way, when we're playing around with
this in After Effects, we don't have to
| | 05:24 |
worry about dealing with those masks.
| | 05:26 |
So when I was creating this sword and
music stuff PSD file, I wasn't really
| | 05:30 |
exactly sure what I wanted.
| | 05:31 |
I know I wanted a ninja sword and I
know I wanted some guitars to be sticking
| | 05:35 |
up in the background.
| | 05:36 |
But as far as texture, I
kind of left that up in the air.
| | 05:39 |
I just kind of created a bunch of
different elements and I didn't know what I
| | 05:43 |
would use or what I wouldn't use, but
I thought I would just get a bunch of
| | 05:45 |
stuff anyways and see what I
could come up with in After Effects.
| | 05:49 |
One of the things that I did end up
doing, as you'll see, is that I actually
| | 05:52 |
liked the way that these 16th notes look
right here, these little ones with the brackets.
| | 05:56 |
So what I did is I isolated those in
After Effects and I used those as the thing
| | 06:00 |
that foam the particle generator spit out.
| | 06:03 |
Some of these other elements,
like the mixer, added some great
| | 06:06 |
background texture as well.
| | 06:08 |
So we'll see how these work
together in later chapters.
| | 06:11 |
In the next movie, again, we are going
to have a little bonus tutorial on how to
| | 06:14 |
create custom brushes that look
kinda like this out of a photograph.
| | 06:19 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating custom brushes| 00:00 |
Because I use custom brushes in the
project, I want to have this kind of
| | 00:03 |
like bonus tutorial:
| | 00:05 |
How to Create your Own Custom Brushes.
| | 00:06 |
This really doesn't have
anything to do with our project, per se.
| | 00:09 |
But the cool thing about brushes in Photoshop
is that you can make brushes out of anything.
| | 00:14 |
And they are 8 bit, meaning that
they can take in 256 shades of gray.
| | 00:19 |
Now I'll explain a little bit
more about that in just a moment.
| | 00:21 |
First, we have this image
here and I like these branches.
| | 00:24 |
Basically this is branches against a
frozen pond here, so it's kind of light.
| | 00:29 |
So what I am going to do is I am
going to Image>Adjustments>Threshold.
| | 00:33 |
Now usually you'd always want to use
this little dilly bobber down here at the
| | 00:37 |
bottom of the layers panel, which is
the adjustment layer pop-up menu, and then
| | 00:41 |
adjust threshold from there so
it doesn't destroy the layer.
| | 00:43 |
But in this case, we need to actually
destroy the layer because it's going
| | 00:46 |
to become the brush.
| | 00:48 |
So need to add that little disclaimer.
| | 00:49 |
So Image>Adjustments>Threshold. There we go.
| | 00:52 |
It forces every pixel to be pure white
or pure black and then use the slider to
| | 00:56 |
determine what's pure
white and what's pure black.
| | 00:59 |
So I might go for something, I
don't know, in that neighborhood.
| | 01:03 |
And I'm going to use 63 is my level here.
I am going to click OK.
| | 01:06 |
Then once that's done, I am going to
hit the letter M for the Marquee tool.
| | 01:10 |
Click and drag a Marquee selection
around some cool-looking branches.
| | 01:14 |
Looks pretty good right there. And then
with that selection, go to Edit>Define
| | 01:19 |
Brush Preset, and then you
could name your new brushes.
| | 01:22 |
So I might call this twigs or something.
| | 01:25 |
So then we can go to this blue layer here.
Select that. Hit the Brush tool.
| | 01:30 |
Actually I should
probably paint on the new layer.
| | 01:32 |
Go to the Brushes.
| | 01:33 |
Make sure that's selected.
| | 01:36 |
And then when we paint,
we paint with these sticks.
| | 01:39 |
Actually let me hit the letter D to
get the default colors here, so I can
| | 01:44 |
paint with black, and then I paint on here and
then we are painting with these cool branches.
| | 01:51 |
You see what happened is, is that the
dark areas or the pitch black pixels that
| | 01:55 |
we had in our branches became
completely opaque in our brush, and those pixels
| | 02:01 |
that were white in the original image
were knocked out. They became transparent.
| | 02:06 |
So we basically have in our brush
completely opaque and completely
| | 02:10 |
transparent pixels.
| | 02:11 |
However, if we were to undo all this,
I am going to go to File>Revert, and
| | 02:17 |
you'll notice that even though we reverted, we
still have that same brush in our Brushes panel.
| | 02:23 |
It's kind of cool thing about
having these custom brushes.
| | 02:26 |
They kind of stick with Photoshop.
| | 02:28 |
So before create a new document, this little
brush that we just made would still be here.
| | 02:32 |
We could also go to the flyout menu here
and save these brushes, which would save
| | 02:37 |
our selected brush included.
| | 02:39 |
But getting back to task at hand here,
hit V for the Move tool so my cursor isn't
| | 02:42 |
super annoying branches.
| | 02:43 |
And I am going to select this again.
| | 02:45 |
And this time I am going to go to the
Image menu, go to Adjustments and instead
| | 02:48 |
of Threshold, which forces every pixel to be
white and black, I am going to go to Levels.
| | 02:54 |
And I'm going to tweak these levels
just a little bit here until I increase the
| | 03:03 |
contrast, but you can still see
the texture in the frozen pond.
| | 03:08 |
And so then, I'm going to again make a
selection and go to Edit>Define Brush Preset.
| | 03:17 |
I'll call this new twigs 8 bit.
| | 03:21 |
Now I am going to say it's 8 bit because
it's not just pure black and pure white.
| | 03:24 |
We have all the degrees of luminance here
from white to black and everything in between.
| | 03:29 |
So the cool thing about brushes is
that these black areas are going to remain
| | 03:34 |
completely opaque in our brush and the
white areas are going to be remaining
| | 03:37 |
completely transparent.
| | 03:39 |
But everything else is going
to fall somewhere in between.
| | 03:42 |
So I'm going to hit Command+D
or Ctrl+D to deselect that.
| | 03:46 |
Go to our blue layer.
| | 03:47 |
Make a new layer above that.
| | 03:49 |
Hit letter D to reset our colors.
| | 03:51 |
Hit B for the Brush tool.
| | 03:54 |
Go to our new brush, and now when we
paint once with that you see that we are
| | 03:59 |
actually kind of like painting a picture.
| | 04:01 |
And in reality it's not really a picture.
| | 04:04 |
It's basically just
different degrees of transparency.
| | 04:08 |
So it's all black pixels but some of
them are faded and very, very transparent
| | 04:13 |
and some of them are completely
opaque such as these branches here.
| | 04:17 |
So the moral of the story is if you want
to add certain graphic elements but you
| | 04:21 |
don't have any custom brushes simply
take a photo and then you can adjust and
| | 04:25 |
tweak using either levels or threshold
to get the desired opacity that you want
| | 04:30 |
for your brush and then to
make your own custom brush,
| | 04:32 |
you could add those elements
to your After Effects projects.
| | 04:36 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
4. Creating Illustrator AssetsUnderstanding Illustrator's role| 00:00 |
In this chapter, we are going to
examine Illustrator's role in this project.
| | 00:04 |
Basically again we have two main features here.
| | 00:06 |
We have the banner, which is a
vector I made in Illustrator,
| | 00:10 |
I'll show you how to do that in
this chapter, and also these cool
| | 00:12 |
vector dragons here.
| | 00:14 |
These dragons were made by a great
artist named Will Kindrick from Mummy Space
| | 00:18 |
Island Productions, works on Yo
Gabba Gabba, the TV show for kids.
| | 00:22 |
Great animator and illustrator as well.
| | 00:24 |
So he has already made this art.
| | 00:25 |
But there are some things that we
need to do to this art in preparation for
| | 00:29 |
bringing it into After
Effects and we'll look at that.
| | 00:31 |
So let's jump into Adobe Illustrator.
| | 00:33 |
Now for those of you that don't
know Adobe Illustrator, that's fine.
| | 00:36 |
It's a really handy and very
powerful vector drawing tool.
| | 00:40 |
It's the world's most popular choice
for vector graphics, just an amazing
| | 00:45 |
application, as I'm sure you'll
see as we go through this chapter.
| | 00:49 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Distributing components into layers| 00:00 | First up in Illustrator, we
are going to look at this dragon.
| | 00:03 | What we need to do is
separate it into individual layers.
| | 00:07 | If I go down here to the bottom of the
panels here and I click on the Layers
| | 00:11 | panel to open that up, we could
see that we only have one layer.
| | 00:15 | And the problem with that is that when
we bring this over into After Effects
| | 00:18 | everything will be compressed
and flattened onto one layer.
| | 00:21 | In Illustrator, layers are not as
important as they are in Photoshop.
| | 00:25 | In Photoshop you put everything on the
same layer, you're toast because it's all
| | 00:28 | amalgamated into one pixilated hole.
| | 00:31 | In Illustrator, even though
things are on one layer, they are still
| | 00:34 | separate little components.
| | 00:35 | But you see in the final video, we want
to be able to play with these components.
| | 00:40 | So, for example, with these dragons
here, I didn't want these big wings.
| | 00:43 | They didn't really work with
the design that I had in mind.
| | 00:46 | And so we need to be able to get rid of
the wings and to be able to adjust other
| | 00:49 | components of the body as needed.
| | 00:51 | So we need to be able to have these on
separate layers so that we could adjust
| | 00:55 | them in After Effects.
| | 00:56 | So what we could do is click this
little triangle to open up this layer.
| | 01:00 | We can see all the various sub-layers,
and again there are still individual
| | 01:03 | components that we can remove the
visibility of or move around independently.
| | 01:08 | So the easiest way to make new
layers out of these sub-layers is to drag
| | 01:12 | them out of the layer.
| | 01:14 | Now you see if I drag this here, where
there is another horizontal line below
| | 01:18 | the name of the layer, which is Dragon, then it
will just add it as a sub-layer in that layer.
| | 01:23 | If I add it until there are sideways
arrows like this then it will just add
| | 01:27 | it to the layer again.
| | 01:29 | So what I need to do is drag it until
there is a little tiny arrow bottom on the
| | 01:34 | top of the layer and that
will remove it from the layer.
| | 01:37 | So now the eyes layer is its
own layer above the Dragon layer.
| | 01:41 | So basically you just need to keep
doing this with all of the layers in this
| | 01:45 | sub-layer so they are all separate components.
| | 01:48 | Now you don't have to do this.
| | 01:50 | But you might want to do this for every
component that you may want to animate
| | 01:56 | or adjust independently
once you get in After Effects.
| | 01:59 | So, say for example, the character's left leg.
| | 02:02 | We may not want to animate that leg and
so we could put it in the same layer as
| | 02:09 | the body in the tail.
| | 02:09 | That will actually make it easier to deal
within After Effects because it'll just be
| | 02:13 | one layer instead of multiple layers.
| | 02:16 | And finally, I might also recommend
enclosing that before you export your final AI file -
| | 02:22 | AI is the Illustrator file extension -
| | 02:24 | before you export this back to After
Effects that you close up all your layers, just
| | 02:28 | to make sure that you know what you have.
| | 02:30 | And then again when we take this
over in After Effects, import it as a
| | 02:33 | composition, all of these components,
these five things will be separate layers.
| | 02:38 | Now actually there is more to do here.
| | 02:40 | I am not going to do that, but I
just want to show you that concept of
| | 02:43 | distributing components of an
Illustrator file into separate layers for
| | 02:48 | import into After Effects.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a banner| 00:00 | Okay folks, this is a fun one.
| | 00:02 | Illustrator comes with a whole host of
cool vector stock stuff to play with,
| | 00:07 | and that's just how we are going to create the
banner that we are going to use in our project.
| | 00:11 | Now if I select the Brush tool here on
the tools panel on the left-hand side and
| | 00:15 | I go over to my Brushes panel, I
could select one of these brushes here.
| | 00:19 | These are called Art Brushes.
| | 00:21 | Basically as you make a paint stroke,
it takes that shape and it stretches it
| | 00:25 | over the shape that you've made.
| | 00:27 | Now we are not seeing that
because my shape is not black there.
| | 00:30 | My stroke needs to be black
in order for this to show up.
| | 00:33 | But then you could see, as I move this
around and make a little drawings, that
| | 00:38 | the art brush follows the shape of my brush.
| | 00:40 | So I am just going to hit the
letter V to get my Selection tool,
| | 00:43 | click-and-drag a Marquee around all
these elements and then I'll hit Delete
| | 00:46 | button to delete them.
| | 00:48 | Now if in the Brushes panel, we go to
flyout menu, just like in Photoshop.
| | 00:52 | Go to Open Brush Library, then go
to Decorative>Banners and Seals.
| | 00:57 | And then if we click that, it will
open up this Decorative_Banners and Seals
| | 01:01 | brushes and we could select one of
them and if we paint with the brush, we
| | 01:06 | can brush, and make these cool
banners and seals to follow the contour of
| | 01:11 | whatever shape we draw.
| | 01:12 | I am going to hit Command+A or Ctrl+A on
the PC to select all and then delete those.
| | 01:16 | But another thing we could do, and it's
actually how I made the banner that we
| | 01:19 | are going to use in our After Effects
project, is you can simply just drag and
| | 01:22 | drop from the panel of the
brushes here, into your Artboard.
| | 01:27 | Now we can get Selection tool, click
it and hold Shift and Option or Alt on
| | 01:32 | the PC, and drag that up to resize it, and
because it's vector you won't lose any quality.
| | 01:37 | Now if you wanted to, you could select
this and go up to Object>Ungroup, and
| | 01:42 | that will allow you to
select different pieces of this.
| | 01:44 | If you need to, you could
just keep going back to ungroup.
| | 01:47 | Alternatively you could also use the
keyboard shortcut Shift+Command+G, or
| | 01:51 | Shift+Ctrl+G on the PC.
| | 01:53 | And then if we want to, we could use
some of these will warp tools to go in and
| | 01:57 | make some kind of nice little
distortions and warp on our banner and make it
| | 02:01 | look a little bit more rock and roll.
| | 02:03 | Little bit less perfect,
little bit more organic.
| | 02:06 | And if I select my Selection tool,
click away from the banner, we can see our
| | 02:10 | completed banner, which is pretty sweet.
| | 02:12 | Now Illustrator comes with a
load of brushes, as I mentioned.
| | 02:15 | If you go to Open Brush Library, all
kinds of Arrows, Artistic, Borders,
| | 02:19 | Decorative, these cool Vector Packs
and then some Wacom 6D Brushes for that.
| | 02:25 | But I am going to go back over the symbols here.
| | 02:26 | Symbols also provide us tons
of extra little goodies as well.
| | 02:30 | So if we go to the flyout menu of the
Symbol panel, I'll go to Open Symbol
| | 02:35 | Library. New in Illustrator CS4
are these different vector packs.
| | 02:39 | Let's say for example, I
choose Florid Vector Pack.
| | 02:42 | I have all these cool floral shapes.
| | 02:44 | And again, I can just drag-and-drop
ne of these to my Artboard.
| | 02:48 | We have these really cool little shapes
that we can use in our After Effects project.
| | 02:52 | We could also use the right-on
effect, for example, to animate these
| | 02:56 | elements coming on screen.
| | 02:57 | If I am ever in a pinch, I need
something really quick for a logo, or just extra
| | 03:01 | elements, this stock stuff that comes with
Illustrator is one of the first places I go.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Preparing the Illustrator files for After Effects| 00:00 | Our final step in Illustrator is to
prepare the files for After Effects.
| | 00:03 | I have this banner UNCROPPED.ai file and
we have our banner here on the Artboard.
| | 00:09 | But when we go over to After Effects and
we import this file, I am just going to
| | 00:12 | double-click in the Project
panel and select banner UNCROPPED.
| | 00:15 | I am going to import this as
Composition - Cropped layers. Click Open.
| | 00:19 | Double-click our Comp to open that up.
| | 00:21 | We could see that it creates a
ginormous composition, at least much larger than
| | 00:25 | we need, for the size of the banner.
| | 00:27 | So when I go back to Illustrator and
I am going to use this tool here, which
| | 00:31 | is the Artboard tool.
| | 00:33 | This can create crop marks. I am
just going to zoom out by pressing
| | 00:36 | Command+Option+Spacebar, that'll be Ctrl+
Alt+Spacebar on the PC, and you can pan
| | 00:44 | around by holding down the Spacebar
and moving around just like Photoshop.
| | 00:48 | I grab these corners and these corners
will change the size of my Artboard,
| | 00:52 | in other words, the canvas that my banner is on.
| | 00:55 | So once I get my Artboard to be about
the size of the banner, I can go ahead and
| | 01:00 | hit Return, and then OK, and
then my Artboard is now this size.
| | 01:05 | I could hit Escape to see
just my banner and the Artboard.
| | 01:08 | I've already created a cropped version
here at banner CROPPED.ai and when I go
| | 01:12 | back to After Effects and I double-click
to import, import banner CROPPED.ai,
| | 01:18 | import this as Composition - Cropped
layers, open up banner CROPPED, we could
| | 01:22 | see that we now have a smaller
composition to go with our banner.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
5. Creating 3D ElementsIntroducing Cinema 4D| 00:00 | In this chapter, we are going to be
looking one of my new favorite applications,
| | 00:03 | Cinema 4D, which is a full-featured 3D application.
| | 00:07 | You'll see these little robots moving
their arms around, and their eyes kind of
| | 00:10 | bug out, and their heads turn, and
their antennas spin a little bit.
| | 00:14 | And I used Cinema 4D to create these robots.
| | 00:17 | That's what we are going to
be looking at in this chapter.
| | 00:19 | Now some of you know that back in
the day, I taught 3ds Max 9 Essential
| | 00:23 | Training for lynda.com.
| | 00:25 | It's still up there if you are
looking for some vintage 3ds Max Training.
| | 00:29 | But I recently switched over from a PC
platform to the Mac platform and 3ds Max
| | 00:34 | only works on the PC, so I had to get
a new 3D app and I am infatuated with
| | 00:38 | Cinema 4D, which works on both PC and Mac.
| | 00:41 | Now if you don't own a copy
of Cinema 4D, that's okay.
| | 00:44 | You can head over to maxon.net and
download a free demo to use for this training.
| | 00:49 | Now because of the complexities of
working in 3D, this is not going to be a
| | 00:54 | step-by-step where we go through and create
the entire robot, every step from scratch.
| | 00:59 | But I just want to give you a
feel for Cinema 4D, if you are not
| | 01:03 | already familiar with it.
| | 01:04 | Cinema 4D is also noted for having
more tight integration with After Effects
| | 01:09 | than any other 3D program out there.
| | 01:11 | Now if you are not interested in
learning Cinema 4D, that's fine, just go ahead
| | 01:14 | and skip to the next chapter.
| | 01:15 | But for the rest of us who are feeling
a little adventurous, let's go ahead and
| | 01:19 | take a peek at Cinema 4D.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Modeling the robot head and body| 00:00 | This video is going to be a very
basic, simple introduction to modeling in
| | 00:04 | Cinema 4D as we create the head and the body,
and also the neck, of this little robot here.
| | 00:10 | So using this document as our guide, I am
going to go to File>New to create a new scene.
| | 00:15 | Now in Cinema 4D, there is a bunch
of different ways to create stuff.
| | 00:18 | But the way we are going to be sticking
to in this movie is by going up here to
| | 00:21 | the top of the interface and
clicking on this little turquoise cube here.
| | 00:26 | Now we go to this menu at the
top to create what are called
| | 00:28 | Parametric Primitives.
| | 00:30 | Now parametric primitives sounds really
scary, but really it's a very simple way
| | 00:34 | to say shapes you can
control with different parameters.
| | 00:38 | In the same way, in After Effects, we
have, let's say, the Fractal Noise Effect.
| | 00:42 | Fractal Noise Effect can be controlled
by a bunch of different properties or in
| | 00:45 | other words, parameters.
| | 00:46 | So you can think of Fractal
Noise as a parametric effect.
| | 00:49 | Likewise, these are parametric 3D
objects, or in other words, primitives.
| | 00:54 | So I can click on oil tank, for example, and
this pretty much gives us the shape of the head.
| | 00:59 | If we want to adjust the properties, or
in another words the parameters, of this
| | 01:03 | oil tank, which is our head, we can go
over here on the right-hand side of the
| | 01:06 | interface, the Attributes Manager.
| | 01:08 | And come down here to the Object
Properties and we could click on these little
| | 01:11 | spinners here, say for example, radius,
if we want this to be wider or less wide.
| | 01:16 | We can click-and-drag up on
these little arrows or click here and
| | 01:20 | manually type in a number.
| | 01:21 | For our purposes right now the
head is looking pretty good,
| | 01:23 | so we'll leave that there.
| | 01:25 | Next we'll go back up to our parametric
primitives, and for the neck, which is
| | 01:29 | what we are going to create next.
We just need a cylinder here,
| | 01:31 | so I am just going to click Cylinder and
then we have this cylinder here, but it
| | 01:35 | stuck right in the middle of the head.
| | 01:36 | So what you need to do is move it down.
| | 01:38 | So I'm going to click on this green arrow here.
| | 01:41 | And notice as I put my
mouse over it turns yellow.
| | 01:43 | So I can click that and drag down
to make a neck for the robot here.
| | 01:48 | Now at this point, we kind of need to see a
better view of what's going on with this neck.
| | 01:54 | So what I am going to do is on the
upper right-hand corner of my viewport, I am
| | 01:56 | going to go over to this little icon
here, fourth on the right, in the corner.
| | 02:00 | Click that to get four views.
| | 02:02 | So now we have a better view of
what's going on with our neck and head.
| | 02:06 | So we have a right view, front view, top view.
| | 02:09 | Now we can see the neck is pretty tall.
| | 02:11 | We don't need it that tall, so we
can go over here to height and then
| | 02:14 | click-and-drag on the
spinner to reduce the size of that.
| | 02:17 | It's also really wide and we
are not making a lumberjack,
| | 02:21 | we are making a robot,
| | 02:21 | so let's go ahead and click on
Radius and take this down a wee bit.
| | 02:25 | Now this is kind of your robot, so feel
free to make your robot as you please.
| | 02:31 | I am going to click on this icon over
here in the Perspective viewport, and
| | 02:35 | click this icon to make this full size again.
| | 02:38 | If you want to rotate around your view
to get a better feel for what's going on,
| | 02:41 | you could hold down the Option key on
the Mac or the Alt key on the PC, and then
| | 02:44 | click with your mouse.
| | 02:46 | And as you drag around you'll be
rotating around your view so you can see what's
| | 02:50 | going on a little bit better there.
| | 02:52 | Now we need to create the torso.
| | 02:53 | It's going to be a little more
complicated and also a little bit more fun.
| | 02:56 | So go back up to Parametric
Primitives. Go to oil tank.
| | 02:59 | Make another oil tank.
| | 03:00 | And this time we are going to use the
arrows to drag that downwards again, and
| | 03:06 | when you get to the point where
the shoulder should be, let go.
| | 03:10 | And again, I'm going to rotate around this.
| | 03:13 | You could also hold down the Option or
Alt key and use the middle mouse button,
| | 03:18 | or the wheel if you have one of those,
and click upwards to pan. And there we go.
| | 03:24 | I am going to increase the Radius
of my oil tank, and also the Height.
| | 03:31 | After doing so you might need to grab that
green arrow again and drag that into place.
| | 03:37 | There we go.
| | 03:38 | Again, you could use the wheel
on your mouse to zoom in or out.
| | 03:42 | Now this torso/oil tank is pretty
cool, but what I want to do is kind of
| | 03:47 | taper at the base here.
| | 03:49 | In order to do that, I am going to add
something called a Deformer to this object.
| | 03:53 | Before we do that, I am going to
go up here to the Objects Manager.
| | 03:56 | I have three objects in my scene right now.
| | 03:58 | I have a cylinder for the neck, and then I
have an oil tank for the head, and for the torso,
| | 04:02 | but when you just look at the Objects
Manager you can't really tell what is
| | 04:05 | what, because we have two oil tanks.
| | 04:07 | So what I am going to do is the
one that's currently selected.
| | 04:09 | It's highlighted in white.
| | 04:10 | You could see it's
highlighted white in our scene.
| | 04:12 | By the way, to de-select objects, just
click away from them, all of them would
| | 04:15 | be deselected, and click on the one
you want to select and then it's selected.
| | 04:18 | So I am going to go over to the oil tank,
that's the torso, and double-click on it,
| | 04:23 | and just type-in 'torso'.
| | 04:25 | Next I am going to go to my Deformers here.
| | 04:27 | You could see this little bendy thing.
| | 04:29 | I am going to click on that.
| | 04:30 | And we want Taper, so I am going to
click on Taper, and right now Taper
| | 04:35 | exists just by itself.
| | 04:36 | We want it to actually be a deformer for the torso.
| | 04:39 | So I am going to drag Taper down until
I get this down arrow over torso, and
| | 04:45 | then let go, and then we
can now taper at the torso.
| | 04:49 | Now you won't see any change,
and that's for two reasons:
| | 04:52 | Number one, the strength of the
Taper is not really doing anything.
| | 04:57 | So we got to actually
increase the strength of the Taper.
| | 04:59 | The other reason why you won't see
anything happening is because only what is in
| | 05:04 | this little guide box here gets tapered.
| | 05:07 | So because our little guide, our
reference area, is not over our torso, the torso
| | 05:13 | is not being deformed.
| | 05:14 | So we need to grab the green arrow here,
drag this downwards, and now we can see
| | 05:20 | the Taper deformer deforming our torso.
| | 05:24 | Now unfortunately, this is making our
robot have a little bit of a beer-gut
| | 05:28 | because it's narrowing its shoulders
and kind of poofing out his belly, and
| | 05:32 | we don't want that.
| | 05:32 | We want our robot looking a
little bit cooler than that.
| | 05:34 | So what I am going to do is hit the
letter R on the keyboard for Rotate.
| | 05:38 | And then what we can do is grab one of
these little rings here, and hold the
| | 05:44 | Shift key and rotate that around until the
number that you are seeing there goes to 180.
| | 05:52 | And then let go of the mouse.
| | 05:54 | Effectively, what that did is it
inverted this taper box here so that now the
| | 05:59 | belly is being tapered and it looks
like our robot has some kind of broad
| | 06:02 | shoulders, which is pretty awesome.
| | 06:04 | We could also click this object
right here in the upper left-hand corner.
| | 06:07 | This is the Move too. And then we
could play with this and move this Taper
| | 06:12 | around as we see fit.
| | 06:13 | We could also, with Taper selected,
we can go and increase the Strength.
| | 06:19 | We can decrease the Curvature, also
change the Size of this box that's allowing
| | 06:26 | it to do the tapering.
| | 06:28 | You can see the effect that's having there.
| | 06:31 | So there you have it.
| | 06:32 | We have a head, a neck, and a torso,
and it was just that easy to make.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Modeling the robot arm| 00:00 | In this movie, I am going to show you a
technique that's a little bit more advanced.
| | 00:03 | I am going to show you this thing
that I'd used to model the arms and these
| | 00:08 | different leg and arm segments here.
| | 00:10 | And basically it's one of the
reasons I really love Cinema 4D.
| | 00:12 | Basically you take a
little shape and you extrude it.
| | 00:15 | And there is a lot of really cool
options for extruding simple shapes like that.
| | 00:20 | So let's go to File>New. Make a new scene.
| | 00:23 | Now the viewport that you use when you
are creating a shape is very important.
| | 00:28 | So what I'm first going to do is
click this little button here in the upper
| | 00:31 | right-hand corner to see all four views.
| | 00:34 | Then I'm going to click
the top view to select that.
| | 00:36 | You could see this little white outline
around it indicating which view is selected.
| | 00:40 | Then let's click this button
again to make that full screen.
| | 00:43 | Basically what I am going to do here is
go up to the top of the interface, and I
| | 00:46 | am going to click this
button, which is our spline.
| | 00:48 | It's one away from our primitives
that we looked at in the last movie.
| | 00:51 | Click that to open it, and we can
see all these different 2D shapes.
| | 00:54 | This is kind of like Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator, if you are
| | 00:57 | familiar with that program.
| | 00:58 | And we can click, let's say for example, Cubic.
| | 01:01 | This creates shapes kind of like
RotoBezier shapes that we see in After Effects.
| | 01:07 | I'll just going to make some crazy shape here.
| | 01:09 | After we're done creating it, we can click on
one of these vertices and move it around.
| | 01:13 | We can Shift+Click multiple vertices
and move them together at the same time.
| | 01:18 | But then what's really cool is that we
can go over to yet one more little knob
| | 01:23 | over here and create
something called Extrude NURBS.
| | 01:26 | This is going to allow us to take this
2D spline at this little shape here, and
| | 01:31 | extrude it and make it three-dimensional.
| | 01:33 | Now for this, I am going
to want to see all my views.
| | 01:36 | So I am going to click this icon one
more time to see all my views, and then I
| | 01:40 | am going to take the spline and
drag-and-drop it until I get this little icon
| | 01:43 | right here, and basically putting the
spline underneath the Extrude NURBS.
| | 01:48 | Then we select Extrude NURBS. I am
going to take this under the Object tab in
| | 01:54 | the Attributes Manager.
| | 01:55 | I'm going to take movement in Z to 20.
| | 01:57 | I am going to take up Y
this middle value a little bit.
| | 02:00 | That's given us the depth here. See that.
| | 02:04 | And we could also go over to Caps here,
this is where it starts getting really
| | 02:07 | fun, is that we can choose how we are
going to cap the top and the bottom.
| | 02:12 | So here, we have the Start Cap.
| | 02:15 | And if we choose None, this actually
influences the cap on the bottom side.
| | 02:19 | So then if we take the End Cap to None,
you could see there moves that cap and
| | 02:23 | then if we go back to the start one and then
take this to cap, you could see it fills the same.
| | 02:27 | We have like a little
swimming pool now or something.
| | 02:29 | But what's really cool is if we take
this End Cap from None or cap to a Fillet.
| | 02:35 | It's not pronounced fi-lay, it's pronounced fill-et.
| | 02:37 | Then you can see that we have
this little rounded edge here.
| | 02:40 | I'll go ahead and make that Perspective
view full screen here. Move this around.
| | 02:44 | And we could also increase the steps,
which will increase the roundness, the
| | 02:48 | smoothness of that cap.
| | 02:50 | We could also choose Fillet Cap, which
will not only cap this side, but will also
| | 02:55 | add a fillet as well.
| | 02:56 | So keep in mind what we are doing here.
| | 02:58 | We created this little outline, this
little spline, and now the Extrude NURBS is
| | 03:02 | extruding that spline in three
dimensions, but there is nothing that says that it
| | 03:06 | has to cap these off that it has to
surround or fill these areas here.
| | 03:11 | So we get control over that type of thing.
| | 03:13 | We could also increase the size by the
Radius value, the size of the cap. Look at that.
| | 03:19 | And if we get it too big and it's
getting a little bit too blocky, we increase
| | 03:23 | the steps to increase the
resolution of the Fillet cap.
| | 03:26 | Now it gets even better.
| | 03:27 | We could adjust the type of fillet.
| | 03:30 | So right here there is the Fillet Type,
Convex is kind of like this round edge,
| | 03:33 | but we might want it flat so we could
choose Linear. And we could also make it Concave.
| | 03:38 | We could also make it a Half Circle.
| | 03:40 | 1 Step, Two Steps, we could make it Engraved.
| | 03:44 | So you can see there are really cool
shapes we can make very quickly by creating
| | 03:49 | a simple spline and then using Extrude NURBS.
| | 03:52 | If we go back to our robot here, that's
what I used to create my robot here, and you can
| | 03:57 | see that we have these
rounded beveled edges here.
| | 04:00 | So let me zoom out a little bit better so
we could see that a little bit more clearly.
| | 04:07 | And see you could see how there is a
bunch of little circles that have these
| | 04:11 | grooves in them and they seem like
they are fairly complex textures, but
| | 04:14 | actually they are just circles and
ovals, ellipsis that I added Extrude
| | 04:19 | NURBS to, just played around with the
Fillet Type and create these kind of cool shapes.
| | 04:24 | Now that's all for the tutorial as far
as making the project, but I am going
| | 04:27 | to give you a little extra bonus for those of
you that are interested and want to keep watching.
| | 04:30 | Let me go File>New.
| | 04:31 | I am going to show you how to make 3D
text, which is one of those things that
| | 04:34 | everyone wants to do all the time.
| | 04:35 | So I am going to go back to another view,
go to the Top view, go to my splines
| | 04:40 | and I am going to choose Text.
| | 04:42 | And then over here in my Attributes
Manager, I'll change this text. Something
| | 04:46 | very self-centered and arrogant here.
| | 04:49 | In the Text field, the
Attributes Manager we'll type something.
| | 04:52 | Click outside of the box to accept the text.
| | 04:55 | And then we have our splines here.
| | 04:57 | Next go to the NURBS area, choose
Extrude NURBS, take your text, drag it
| | 05:04 | underneath the Extrude NURBS till you
get a down facing arrow and then select
| | 05:09 | Extrude NURBS, and here's the trick.
| | 05:11 | You've got to go down here under the
Object area and choose Hierarchical.
| | 05:15 | I am going to take this to 0.
| | 05:18 | Take up the Y. And then if we go back
to our perspective view, you can see that
| | 05:24 | we have three-dimensional
text. It was that easy.
| | 05:27 | Now not only do we have regular three-
dimensional text, and if you've seen
| | 05:31 | some of my tutorials on lynda.com here you
know that we can make this type of text
| | 05:35 | with shatter, but one of the things you
can't do with shatter is play with those edges.
| | 05:39 | So we can go to the Caps area again
and create Fillet Caps for this and make
| | 05:44 | these nice, smooth edges. Play with that there.
| | 05:48 | We might want to make these
concave, or we might want to make them two
| | 05:53 | steps, create some very interesting
patterns along the edges of our extruded
| | 05:59 | three-dimensional text.
| | 06:01 | Now remember if you are not getting
the detail that you're looking for to
| | 06:04 | increase the steps, and then we can
create these awesome beveled edges very
| | 06:09 | quickly and easily, thanks to this
great system of spline extrusion in Cinema 4D.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Animating components| 00:00 | So we have here our robot completely
modeled and we want to animate it, but we
| | 00:04 | have a problem that we need to solve first.
| | 00:06 | I am going to select this upper arm here,
his right upper arm and I am going to
| | 00:10 | click on the Rotate tool.
| | 00:11 | And if I rotate this, you'll see there's no
connection between the forearm and the upper arm.
| | 00:16 | I am just going to hit Command+Z,
or Ctrl+Z on the PC to undo that.
| | 00:19 | So just like in After Effects, we're
going to create a parenting relationship.
| | 00:23 | To do that, we use
something called a Null Object.
| | 00:26 | If you are familiar with After
Effects, you know about null objects,
| | 00:28 | basically little dummies.
| | 00:29 | And so we use them as controllers in
Cinema 4D, the same way we used them as
| | 00:33 | controllers in After Effects.
| | 00:34 | So I have here a null object in my Objects
Manager that I have already created for you.
| | 00:39 | So just click on the right upper arm and
drag that until it's a child of the Null Object.
| | 00:43 | You can see the little down arrow there.
| | 00:45 | Same thing with the right forearm, drag that.
| | 00:47 | Make sure you're not getting the down arrow of
the right upper arm of the null object here.
| | 00:52 | And also this little connector tube,
put that in there for good measure.
| | 00:56 | Now you'll notice, if I select the
Null Object and I rotate this, then I am
| | 00:59 | moving both the upper arm and the forearm.
| | 01:01 | Now if I select the right forearm
and animate that or move that around, I
| | 01:06 | should say, go back to the Null Object
and rotate this, then they both go along
| | 01:11 | for the right there.
| | 01:12 | So let's get on to the business of animating.
| | 01:15 | I want to animate the forearm, and I
also want to animate the null object.
| | 01:19 | We do not want to animate the right
upper arm, because if I move the right upper
| | 01:23 | arm by itself, then it will move
independently and we don't want that at all.
| | 01:27 | So I am going to hit Command+Z
or Ctrl+Z to undo that.
| | 01:30 | So the way we create keyframes, I can
simply click the upper tone, animate like
| | 01:34 | the null object and then come down here
below the timeline and click this little
| | 01:37 | red key icon to force it to create a
keyframe for Position, Rotation and Scale.
| | 01:42 | I am going to do that for both the
null object and the right forearm.
| | 01:46 | Then we'll move out in time,
maybe about 10 frames or so.
| | 01:49 | Just click-and-drag this little current
time indicator here, this little block,
| | 01:53 | and then I'll move the
right forearm a little bit.
| | 01:56 | Click the key icon to
created new keyframe for that.
| | 02:00 | Select the null object. Move the arm.
| | 02:03 | Create a new keyframe for that.
| | 02:06 | One of the things I did in my robot
animation that you'll see, is I did a
| | 02:09 | couple like full rotations. That's kind
of like a fun one because it looks all
| | 02:13 | robotic, and kind of weird.
| | 02:14 | So you can just grab this and just grab
it, just wrap it all the way around here.
| | 02:21 | There is a full 360. Make a keyframe there.
| | 02:27 | So then as you move this around, you scrub
in time, and it does like these cool
| | 02:31 | little ninja robot moves (robotic sound with movement of arm)
and we also might want to change the
| | 02:36 | null object at that
particular frame. We can move it up.
| | 02:40 | Hit the key icon and then as we click
to scrub, we can see this moving around,
| | 02:46 | and we can continue animating thusly.
| | 02:50 | If you want to play the animation, you
can click this icon on the left to go to the
| | 02:53 | beginning of the animation
and click here to play it.
| | 02:57 | And that's playing back at full speed.
| | 02:59 | We might want to click-and-drag these
keyframes to spread them out and to maybe
| | 03:03 | slow down the animation a little bit
the same way we would in After Effects if
| | 03:07 | animation was going a
little bit too quick. Try that.
| | 03:11 | Go to beginning.
| | 03:12 | Play it back, and that's looking pretty awesome.
| | 03:15 | So feel free to continue on with this.
| | 03:18 | We can animate both arms,
of course, and also the legs.
| | 03:21 | If you want to continue the parenting
relationship, you could parent the
| | 03:24 | arms to the torso
| | 03:26 | and the legs to the pelvis. We could
also spin the torso, so that the arms move
| | 03:30 | around and also we could
spin the pelvis around a little bit.
| | 03:33 | If you look at the animation that I
created in the final project, you'll notice
| | 03:36 | some of these things.
| | 03:37 | You'll also notice the eyes bugging in and out
and the antennas moving around a little bit.
| | 03:41 | It's kind of fun.
| | 03:42 | Next, we'll look at
applying materials to the robot.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Applying textures| 00:00 | In this movie, we are going to look at
applying textures to objects, to give
| | 00:03 | them some life and character.
| | 00:04 | And this is really where our
model starts to look pretty awesome.
| | 00:07 | If I scrub my timeline here, you'll see
that I have an animated version of our
| | 00:11 | robot, but if we render this robot,
you'll see that he doesn't quite look right
| | 00:15 | because there's no texture
applied to these objects.
| | 00:18 | I get render by hitting the
shortcut, Command+R, or Ctrl+R on the PC.
| | 00:22 | I can see what this looks like,
just dull, boring, plain gray.
| | 00:26 | That's really not going to work.
| | 00:28 | Now we could spend literally dozens of
hours talking about creating materials
| | 00:32 | for three objects, but for a very
simple discussion, we can just go to the
| | 00:36 | Window menu here, open up
something called the Content Browser.
| | 00:40 | Just like most professional applications,
Cinema 4D ships with a big library of presets.
| | 00:45 | And this Content Browser allows you not
only to browse them, but apply them to
| | 00:48 | your project as well.
| | 00:50 | So I am going to go over to
Cinema 4D, the Cinema 4D folder.
| | 00:54 | And then in Materials, open that up,
go down to the Danel folder, and you'll
| | 00:59 | find one called anisotropic and you could
browse these textures just by clicking on them.
| | 01:03 | You get this nice really big preview
here of what that would look like if you
| | 01:06 | applied it to your objects.
| | 01:08 | This is the one I'm looking for,
so I am going to double-click it.
| | 01:11 | Now I could close the Content Browser.
| | 01:13 | After double-clicking it, it will
show up here in the Materials Manager.
| | 01:17 | The Materials Managers is kind of like
the Project Panel in After Effects but for
| | 01:21 | materials in Cinema 4D.
| | 01:22 | So it doesn't really mean it that we
have applied anything to our project.
| | 01:25 | It just means that's here
in our resources to use.
| | 01:28 | So from here I can just drag-and-drop it
onto, let's say, the torso for example,
| | 01:31 | and then we see this little what they
call a tag over here, indicating that this
| | 01:36 | anisotropic material has
been applied to the torso.
| | 01:39 | So what I can do is hold the Ctrl key
on both platforms and drag to the next
| | 01:44 | element and so forth.
| | 01:46 | Ctrl+drag, Ctrl+drag, Ctrl+drag,
until all of these objects have that
| | 01:50 | material applied to it.
| | 01:52 | And now if I hit Command+R, or Ctrl+R
to render, we have something that looks
| | 01:56 | significantly better.
| | 01:58 | Now you might have noticed that the
eyes should be a different color here.
| | 02:01 | So if I wanted to, I can go to the
Materials Manager and go to File>New Material,
| | 02:05 | and then with this material
selected, just double-click it here,
| | 02:10 | and we could play around with some of these
colors if we wanted to, to get maybe a red color.
| | 02:14 | We also go to Luminance
and maybe make this brighter.
| | 02:18 | We can make it reflective or transparent,
and add a specular map, and all sorts of
| | 02:23 | things. And then we could, after
tweaking this, drag-and-drop this onto, let's
| | 02:28 | say, one of those eyeballs or
both of those eyeballs probably.
| | 02:31 | And after just a few seconds of work,
we have a much better-looking object.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Exporting for After Effects| 00:00 | So we are all done with our robot
here and now it's time to export.
| | 00:04 | Now I want to show you one
other trick real quickly.
| | 00:06 | When we render this by hitting
Command+R, or Ctrl+R, you can see some
| | 00:11 | anti-aliasing here that's really not the best.
| | 00:14 | We have some stair
stepping and it's kind of ugly.
| | 00:16 | So let's go ahead and take care of that and
learn a little bit about Cinema 4D in the process.
| | 00:21 | I am going to go up to this button
up here in the toolbar at the top.
| | 00:23 | This is our Render Settings.
| | 00:24 | So go ahead and click this to
open up our Render Settings.
| | 00:27 | Let me just give you a quick
tour of what these options are.
| | 00:30 | In the General area, pretty much
to leave that alone, go to Output.
| | 00:34 | We have, if we click this little
arrow here, we have a bunch of presets for
| | 00:37 | what size to render.
| | 00:39 | Keep in mind that 3D objects are vector-based.
| | 00:42 | So we can stretch them up and make
this a 4K film play if we wanted to,
| | 00:45 | and we won't notice any
loss of quality in our models.
| | 00:49 | Now, of course, if you are using
pixilated image maps for your materials then
| | 00:53 | you will notice some stretching
there if you make those too big.
| | 00:56 | But for just 3D models you won't
notice any problems making those as big as
| | 01:00 | you'd like to make them.
| | 01:01 | So we definitely need this bigger so, I
don't know, maybe 800x800 would probably be good.
| | 01:05 | Unless you are going out to print, you
absolutely don't need to worry about the
| | 01:09 | resolution, and there are some other
settings here as far as like the range of
| | 01:13 | frames: when you'd like it to
start, and when you'd like it to end.
| | 01:16 | Also, Fields if you need analyze it.
| | 01:18 | If you go to Save area, this is
where a lot of the magic happens.
| | 01:21 | You get to choose a format here. AS
you could see, plenty to choose from.
| | 01:26 | Here, the path as where you choose
what you want to name it and you click this
| | 01:29 | button here to determine
where you want that to be saved.
| | 01:31 | You can also click here to render
this with an Alpha channel and if you are
| | 01:35 | going to render an Alpha channel, you
could choose whether it's straight or
| | 01:37 | pre-multiplied, or you can choose
whether the Alpha is rendered with the footage
| | 01:42 | or as a separate file.
| | 01:43 | I am just going to uncheck
Alpha channel for right now,
| | 01:46 | but when I go to Export this for real,
I absolutely do want Alpha channel
| | 01:49 | selected, though I don't want a
black background behind this robot.
| | 01:51 | But one of the things I want to show
you here is this Compositing Project File.
| | 01:55 | I open that up, and this is what allows
us to create a project file from Cinema 4D.
| | 02:01 | So if we'd animated cameras and
lights, we can export that to a target
| | 02:05 | applications such as After Effects or
even Combustion, Final Cut, Motion or the
| | 02:09 | now defunct, Shake and it will create
a project file for that application.
| | 02:14 | You can even choose to include the 3D
data with that project file, and then
| | 02:18 | when you take this project file over
into After Effects you can adjust the
| | 02:22 | cameras and lights.
| | 02:23 | I have never really seen
another 3D application work this way.
| | 02:26 | It's pretty awesome.
| | 02:28 | If you go to Multi-Pass, we could also
choose to create a multi-pass rendering.
| | 02:32 | You click over here on the left to turn
that on, and then we could have choices here.
| | 02:35 | And what's interesting about this is that
we can render different types of passes.
| | 02:41 | So we can render the diffused lights and then
the specular lights, and then just the shadows.
| | 02:45 | When we're compositing them, let's say,
in After Effects, we have control over
| | 02:49 | how those things are composited together.
| | 02:51 | For the robots, I actually
didn't use a multi-pass rendering.
| | 02:53 | So I am going to go down to Anti-Aliasing here.
| | 02:55 | This is really what I want to get at.
| | 02:57 | This Anti-Aliasing dropdown is set to
Geometry, but when you go to final render
| | 03:01 | you'll want to set this to Best and
that will make things look much better.
| | 03:05 | We could even play around with
minimum level and maximum level to get the
| | 03:08 | most out of our anti-aliasing to get
an even better effect, but for right
| | 03:12 | now, this will work for us.
| | 03:13 | So I'll go ahead and close the Render
Settings, and now when I hit Command+R or
| | 03:17 | Ctrl+R to render this you'll see that this
is significantly smoother than it was before.
| | 03:23 | And once you got your render settings
the way you like them, go to this dropdown
| | 03:26 | and select Render to Picture Viewer to
make the final render of your project.
| | 03:31 | Now that's officially all for this
tutorial, but for those of you that want
| | 03:33 | extra bonus tip, here is one right here:
| | 03:35 | If you go to File>Export, you could
actually export the model itself in a variety
| | 03:41 | of formats from this drop-down.
| | 03:43 | So if you are not going for a final
render, making a movie file or an image
| | 03:46 | sequence file, you come over
here to export just the 3D model.
| | 03:50 | Now as After Effects users, that
applies to you because you can take one of
| | 03:53 | these formats such as 3D Studio or COLLADA
and then take that into Photoshop CS4 Extended.
| | 04:00 | I'll go ahead and open up his 3ds
file that I exported from Cinema 4D here.
| | 04:05 | And we can have that file here in
Photoshop CS4 Extended and then when we save
| | 04:11 | this as a PSD file, we could bring this
into After Effects and have this be a 3D
| | 04:16 | model in After Effects.
| | 04:18 | Now that's not actually what I wanted to do.
| | 04:21 | That wasn't necessary.
| | 04:22 | And I would have taken a lot of extra
computing power that I really didn't need
| | 04:25 | or want, but it's good to know that
as of CS4, this workflow is possible.
| | 04:31 | If we really wanted this 3D object in
After Effects and we wanted it to remain
| | 04:36 | three-dimensional, where we could spin
it around or rotate it or do whatever we want to do
| | 04:39 | with it, we can have that functionality.
| | 04:41 | Export is one of 3D files that
Photoshop can understand. Bring it in here, save
| | 04:46 | it as a PSD file and then when you
import it into After Effects, import it as a
| | 04:50 | composition with Live Photoshop 3D enabled.
| | 04:54 | And that about does it for
our little tour of Cinema 4D.
| | 04:57 | Hope you dug it. And now we are going
to jump into After Effects and start
| | 05:00 | putting these elements together there.
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|
|
6. Setting Up the After Effects ProjectImporting elements correctly| 00:00 | So now that we are done making our elements,
it's time to bring them into After Effects.
| | 00:04 | Let me show you how I did this.
| | 00:05 | I am going to right-click in the Project panel.
| | 00:07 | I know we have a bunch of stuff to bring in.
| | 00:09 | So I'm going to go to Import>Multiple Files.
| | 00:12 | We'll then start in the Detonation Films folder.
| | 00:14 | This is some footage from detonationfilms.com.
| | 00:17 | This is in the Media folder, by the way.
| | 00:18 | I am going to select
DVSplosion05 and I click Open.
| | 00:22 | We are going to interpret this as a
straight alpha channel. Click OK. And then
| | 00:28 | it automatically opens up the Import
Multiple Files dialog box back up again, so
| | 00:32 | that we can keep importing
stuff as much as we'd like to.
| | 00:35 | In the Graphics folder, I am
going to bring in banner.ai.
| | 00:39 | Now we don't need the layers here.
| | 00:41 | We want this to just be one banner.
| | 00:43 | We don't want a comp for it or anything else.
| | 00:45 | So I am just going to import
this as Footage and click Open.
| | 00:48 | Now with the Dragon, we need the
flexibility to be able to take it apart.
| | 00:51 | So I am going to select dragon_lynda.ai.
| | 00:54 | Import this as Composition - Cropped layers.
| | 00:57 | Again, that will make sure that the
boundaries of every layer will be only the
| | 01:02 | size of the layer, not of the entire document.
| | 01:04 | So I am going to go ahead and click
Open there. And just really quickly, before
| | 01:08 | you import anything else, notice the
Project panel, notice that the dragon_lynda
| | 01:13 | file we just imported as a composition,
it added two elements here, a whole
| | 01:16 | folder of different layers and a composition.
| | 01:19 | It added a lot of clutter, I guess
you could say, twice as much clutter as a
| | 01:23 | regular footage element, into our Project panel.
| | 01:25 | So notice how clean the banner.ai
footage is when we import just as footage.
| | 01:29 | So, if you know you're not going to
use any layers, then you might as well just
| | 01:33 | import it as footage and save
yourself some clutter in the Project panel.
| | 01:36 | Going back to Media and then
Images, we have our robot render.
| | 01:41 | This is like a targa sequence
of the robot that I created.
| | 01:44 | And I want to select the first image
in the sequence, and then make sure that
| | 01:48 | Targa Sequence is checked and click Open.
| | 01:51 | And we are going to
interpret this as Straight as well.
| | 01:54 | And it will come in as just
one solitary image sequence,
| | 01:58 | one element. And it will be
treated kind of like a movie clip.
| | 02:01 | Let's go back up to Media and then
under PSDs, we have Chad Stills FINISH, and
| | 02:09 | we actually want this same folder
structure of LOWER PSDs and UPPER PSDs and
| | 02:14 | we don't want layers.
| | 02:16 | So what I am going to do is I am going
to select this Chad Stills FINISH folder,
| | 02:18 | and just click Import Folder.
| | 02:20 | Now you can see how convenient that was.
| | 02:22 | We didn't have to bring in just one layer
after another or one image after another.
| | 02:26 | It brought it all in with the same
folder structure right here in Project panel,
| | 02:29 | pre-organized like we had it in our
operating system, nice and tidy. Love it.
| | 02:35 | We'll go back to PSDs, and this time I am
going to import sword and music stuff.psd.
| | 02:39 | This is the PSD file of random layers,
the guitars, and music notes, and
| | 02:43 | speakers and whatnot.
| | 02:44 | I am going to import this as
Composition - Cropped layers, because we are going
| | 02:47 | to want to take those apart
and play with those later.
| | 02:50 | Click Open. And we don't have any Live
Photoshop 3D in this document, and we
| | 02:54 | don't have any layer styles, so either of
these options will work just fine, and click OK.
| | 02:57 | And with that, we are done importing,
| | 03:00 | so I am going to go ahead and click Done.
| | 03:02 | Now at this point, we know that
we are going to have a big project.
| | 03:05 | So you might want to go in and start
organizing the Project panel by creating
| | 03:08 | folders and organizing elements by their types.
| | 03:12 | So I might want to say PSDs, for example,
and I could put the Chad Stills FINISH
| | 03:17 | folder in there and perhaps these
sword music stuff, layers and comp, all
| | 03:22 | according to how you want to work.
| | 03:23 | There is no rule, obviously, for how to
organize your Project panel, but this is
| | 03:27 | something that I always like to do just
to make sure that when I need something
| | 03:30 | I know where to go to find it.
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| Deciding on comp size| 00:00 | Now that we have imported our footage,
the next step is to create compositions
| | 00:03 | for us to put our stuff into.
| | 00:06 | Now this project has two main compositions.
| | 00:09 | It has the master composition.
| | 00:11 | Go ahead and create that now by
clicking this little Create Composition button
| | 00:14 | and this is going to be 720x480 Standard DV.
| | 00:18 | Now if we are going to out to
television to broadcast, then we would change
| | 00:21 | the Pixel Aspect Ratio to 0.9, but since
this is for computer-based training, we
| | 00:25 | are just going to leave it Square
Pixels for the sake of ease of use.
| | 00:28 | And so I am just going to leave this
as it is for right now and click OK.
| | 00:33 | So this is going to be the final
master comp, and actually I am going to hit
| | 00:35 | Command+K, or Ctrl+K on the PC,
to rename this MASTER comp.
| | 00:40 | And then what's going to happen is that
I need my main working comp to be much
| | 00:45 | bigger than this, because this comp, our
final comp, is going to be kind of like a window.
| | 00:50 | And then all of the other stuff that we
make is going to be panned through this window.
| | 00:55 | So we need a much bigger
composition in which to work.
| | 00:58 | So what I am going to do is create a
new composition, and this needs be much
| | 01:01 | wider than it is tall.
| | 01:03 | So I am going to make this 2400 pixels
wide, because remember in the final we
| | 01:07 | start out in one scene there with like
the top half of everything, and then we
| | 01:11 | pan over to the right with
the bottom half of everything.
| | 01:14 | So we need it to be really wide.
| | 01:15 | We don't quite need it to be as tall, even
though we kind of start up and then go downward.
| | 01:20 | So we are going to have it a height of
1080, and also Square Pixels again, Frame
| | 01:27 | Rate at 29.97. And we'll leave
that as is for now and click OK.
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| Using Kuler to select a color palette| 00:00 | One of the most crucial ingredients
for the aesthetic of our project is the
| | 00:04 | color scheme that we have here.
| | 00:06 | Now you have seen so far through
this training series, some of these
| | 00:08 | elements individually.
| | 00:09 | We know that the robots are actually kind of
more of a bluish chrome. My pants are gray.
| | 00:14 | My tie was green.
| | 00:15 | The dragons were green and my
flesh is pasty white, of course.
| | 00:21 | And there is just a bunch of
different colors. The explosion in
| | 00:23 | the background was orange-ish.
| | 00:25 | And if we try to mix these things
together it just looks terrible, as we'll see
| | 00:29 | as we start building these things
together with out color correction.
| | 00:32 | So I knew that I wanted some kind of
color scheme to my project and typically
| | 00:38 | you just want like maybe two, three
colors, very simple color palette.
| | 00:42 | So we have reds, we have this neon
green, and a few other shades of green and
| | 00:48 | then just neutral tones, just
grays and blacks and whites.
| | 00:51 | But other than that, we just
pretty much have two colors.
| | 00:54 | And the way I was able to come up with
these colors is by using a tool called Kuler.
| | 00:58 | You can find this website at kuler.adobe.com,
and Kuler is actually a lot
| | 01:03 | of different things.
| | 01:04 | It's kind of hard to
describe it. It's a community.
| | 01:07 | It's a feature.
| | 01:08 | It's a program - all of those things.
| | 01:10 | And it's basically like a place
where you could come on the web and share
| | 01:14 | different color schemes.
| | 01:16 | If I am not mistaken, there's even an
entire lynda.com training series just on Kuler.
| | 01:22 | Now let's say, for example,
we have copy of kiwi fruit.
| | 01:25 | We like this color scheme, we can click on
it once and that pops up here at the top.
| | 01:29 | And if we want to, we can click this
little button right here, which will allow
| | 01:33 | us to enter this kind of editing mode.
| | 01:36 | And we can see a color wheel.
| | 01:38 | And we can make changes here.
| | 01:40 | And I could click Add Color if
I wanted to add a color to this.
| | 01:45 | Actually, I did this here,
so let's select this color.
| | 01:48 | I'll grab that here.
| | 01:50 | Maybe make a blue, play with this
slider here and what's cool about this, is
| | 01:56 | that it not only allows you to adjust
colors in a really organic way, but you
| | 02:00 | can also use color rules, like
Analogous and Monochromatic, Complementary.
| | 02:04 | And these things make sure that you
have a harmonious color scheme if you don't
| | 02:08 | want to just start from scratch.
| | 02:10 | Of course, you can play from color.
| | 02:11 | So it is a great place not only to get
a color scheme, but also just to learn
| | 02:15 | about color and learn about the way
the different colors interact and try
| | 02:18 | different color schemes
that you might not be used to.
| | 02:21 | If your favorite color is blue, for
example, you might want to play with warm
| | 02:24 | colors, with yellows and oranges,
and see what you can come up with.
| | 02:28 | But not only that, we get all
this information about these colors.
| | 02:32 | So we look at these colors and we could
see the RGB values, the HSV, CMYK, the
| | 02:37 | LAB, HEX, all these different things.
| | 02:38 | We can copy and paste these and
use these colors in our project.
| | 02:42 | So for this project, that's exactly what I did.
| | 02:45 | I went and I found a Kuler scheme
that had a neon green, because I love the
| | 02:49 | energy of that green and then I wanted
a complementary color that would kind of
| | 02:53 | make it pop and stand out,
and red was perfect for that.
| | 02:56 | So I went and going to fine-tuned a
color scheme because that's the benefit
| | 03:00 | of Kulers is you don't have to just
take the color schemes as they come.
| | 03:03 | You could tweak them kind of as we did here,
as we added this little blue color here.
| | 03:06 | So I got this color scheme and then in
the next movie, I am going to show you
| | 03:09 | how I added that into After Effects,
so we can constantly reuse those colors.
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| Making color palette solids| 00:00 | Once you've found your desired color
palette inside of Kuler, the challenge
| | 00:04 | becomes: how do you get that into After Effects?
| | 00:07 | After Effects, unlike a lot of other
visual applications, doesn't have a
| | 00:10 | swatches panel, doesn't have a place
where you can save colors so you can reuse
| | 00:14 | them as you're working.
| | 00:16 | Now I will tell you this little trick here.
| | 00:18 | If I go in and I make a solid, I am just
going to hit Command+Y or Ctrl+Y. Click
| | 00:21 | the color picker, and then we
get this famous Adobe color picker.
| | 00:26 | To me, this is a very intuitive, simple
and yet so genius way to select color.
| | 00:32 | I love it. But it doesn't give us the
ability to save our favorite colors.
| | 00:36 | It doesn't give us ability to save swatches.
| | 00:37 | I am going to hit cancel.
| | 00:38 | Let me just show you this.
| | 00:39 | If you go to After Effects>Preferences,
and for you Windows users it will be
| | 00:42 | under the Edit menu, Edit>Preferences.
| | 00:45 | We are going to go to General, and you'll
notice that one of the options here is
| | 00:48 | Use System Color Picker.
| | 00:50 | Now the System Color Picker means
the operating system you are using is color picker.
| | 00:54 | So Windows has a color
picker and Mac has a color picker.
| | 00:57 | Both of them allow you to save color swatches.
| | 01:01 | So if, while you are working, you need
to save color swatches, you may want to
| | 01:06 | opt for your system's color picker,
rather than the Adobe color picker and then
| | 01:10 | when you pick a color, like we just
did to create new solid or whatever, then
| | 01:13 | you'll be using your system's color
picker and not the Adobe color picker.
| | 01:17 | However, in this case, that is not a right
that I'm willing to give up. So what to do?
| | 01:21 | What to do?
| | 01:22 | What I am going to do is create solids
of the colors that I want and then keep
| | 01:27 | them in my working composition.
| | 01:29 | That way I could always
refer back to them if I need to.
| | 01:32 | So I have the numbers here, the RGB numbers.
| | 01:34 | And so I am going to hit Command+Y or
Ctrl+Y on the PC, open up my color picker
| | 01:39 | and just type in these numbers: 82.
| | 01:42 | Tab. 0. Tab. 0.
| | 01:44 | So that's 82>Red, 0>Green, 0>Blue.
| | 01:47 | Click OK, Ok, and there is the color solid.
| | 01:50 | We don't even need this visible.
| | 01:51 | I just need this little color
swatch right here because as I make other
| | 01:55 | elements or tint them, I could just
use the eyedropper and then click on that
| | 01:58 | little swatch right there.
| | 02:00 | So this becomes a handy little swatch.
| | 02:02 | Same thing here, do it again.
| | 02:03 | Command+Y. Click the color swatch and
then 82, 82, Tab, 82. So 82 all around.
| | 02:11 | This is a dark gray.
| | 02:13 | That's a good balance with these other colors.
| | 02:15 | And then finally, Command+Y. Click
the color swatch and we have 82, 246, 0.
| | 02:22 | So we have 82>Red, 246>Green, and 0>Blue.
| | 02:26 | Click OK and click OK.
| | 02:28 | So again, we can turn the
visibility of these layers off.
| | 02:30 | We don't need the layers.
| | 02:31 | This just becomes kind of like
a makeshift swatches palette.
| | 02:34 | Any time we need those
colors, we don't have to guess.
| | 02:36 | We can just use the Eyedropper tool here.
| | 02:39 | If we forget the RGB values, we can
just hit Command+Shift+Y or Ctrl+Shift+Y on
| | 02:44 | the PC to open up those values again,
and we can get that swatch and look at the
| | 02:47 | RGB values right there.
| | 02:49 | You might also notice that these
all have the same Red value, all these
| | 02:53 | colors here, and that's just kind of
like a cool trick with colors the more
| | 02:57 | they have in common.
| | 02:59 | So they all have 82 for the Red, Green,
and Blue channel, and then the Green and
| | 03:03 | the Red both have 0.
| | 03:05 | This actually should be 82, 82, 82.
[00:03:09.0]
That's we create gray by all the same color
values for each of the channels, but the
| | 03:13 | Red and the Green both have the same
Red values, and the same Blue values.
| | 03:16 | and all we have changed the Green value.
| | 03:18 | For some magical reason, that just
makes these colors blend together better.
| | 03:22 | So often times when I find a color
palette on Kuler that's really awesome, I
| | 03:26 | have to go in and tweak it a little bit
and play with the colors so that these
| | 03:29 | color schemes line up and that usually
makes for a more harmonious color scheme.
| | 03:34 | So there you have it.
| | 03:35 | That's how I create makeshift
swatches panels in After Effects.
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| Finding the comp midpoint| 00:00 | Before you start working in this
project, I need to know where the midpoint
| | 00:04 | of my composition is.
| | 00:05 | We know that we want to set up
elements on the left-hand side, leave a gap in
| | 00:09 | the middle, and then set up
stuff on the lower right-hand side.
| | 00:12 | But where is the middle, both
vertically and horizontally?
| | 00:17 | The way we could find this
out is by creating a Shape layer.
| | 00:21 | Select the working comp.
| | 00:22 | Make sure all the layers are deselected.
| | 00:23 | You could use the F2 key or just click
somewhere in the blank area here in the
| | 00:27 | working comp composition
and deselect all the layers.
| | 00:30 | Select, let's say, for example, the
Rectangle tool and then anywhere in your
| | 00:34 | composition, just click and drag and
what that will do is it will automatically
| | 00:38 | place an anchor point for the
layer in the center of the composition.
| | 00:43 | No matter where you place your Shape
layer it will be this little anchor point
| | 00:46 | in the center of the composition.
| | 00:49 | This becomes very helpful because
it's, again, the horizontal and vertical
| | 00:53 | midpoint of the composition.
| | 00:55 | Next, we'll look at how to
create guides using this midpoint.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating guides| 00:00 | So we have created our Shape layer so we
could find the midpoint of our composition.
| | 00:03 | Now it's time to create some guides.
| | 00:05 | I am going to click on the
Selection tool, the Black arrow in the upper
| | 00:08 | left-hand corner of the tools panel, and I
am going to select the Composition panel.
| | 00:12 | That's the Viewer here.
| | 00:14 | And then I am going to hit Command+R,
or Ctrl+R on the PC, to show my rulers.
| | 00:19 | And then with my Shape layer active,
so I could see this little midpoint, I'm
| | 00:23 | going to click and drag from
the bar here to create guides.
| | 00:28 | And you can line them right up with the
little anchor point in the center of the layer.
| | 00:34 | And there we have it. And zoom in.
| | 00:37 | Make sure we got it. We are at 800%.
| | 00:39 | It still looks razor-sharp.
| | 00:40 | So now we have guides giving us the
exact dimensions of our composition,
| | 00:46 | splitting it into four perfect quadrants.
| | 00:49 | By the way, if at anytime you want to
remove the visibility of your guide, you
| | 00:54 | can just hit Command+Colon or Ctrl+Colon on
your keyboard to hide or show those guides.
| | 01:00 | Also Ctrl+R or Command+R will hide the rulers,
which we don't really need too much anymore.
| | 01:06 | Now if you want to take this a step
further, you could bring those rulers back
| | 01:09 | and then find the halfway point between these
two guides or between the edge and the guides.
| | 01:16 | So for example, if our halfway point is
1200 pixels in, because our entire width
| | 01:20 | of our opposition is 2400 pixels, then
the halfway point would be 600 pixels
| | 01:25 | and then splitting the far right half in half,
we could take this to the 1800 pixel mark.
| | 01:30 | So we have four even columns that way.
| | 01:32 | We could do the same thing vertically
with horizontal guides, but I don't think
| | 01:36 | we really need that because we just
want to make sure that we can center the
| | 01:40 | work on the left and then
center the work on the right.
| | 01:43 | So add the guides that you think you might need.
| | 01:46 | Hide the rulers again.
| | 01:47 | And then we can delete the Shape layer
because we no longer need it.
| | 01:50 | And that completes the setup of our project.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
7. Creating a Layout of the AssetsCreating a rough arrangement of assets| 00:00 |
So now I am going to start bringing
elements from my Project panel into my composition.
| | 00:04 |
I am going to start in the Graphics folder here.
| | 00:06 |
banner.ai is what I want in front.
| | 00:09 |
So I am going to bring that over first
and I might want to drag us over so that
| | 00:13 |
the anchor point is lined
up right there on that guide.
| | 00:17 |
What I am going to do is just drag
elements beneath this layer, but you could
| | 00:21 |
bring it in however you want.
| | 00:22 |
You can just drag it all in at once
and then rearrange them afterwards or
| | 00:25 |
whatever you want to do.
| | 00:27 |
I know, for example, under Images or PSDs,
that I want some Chad Stills here.
| | 00:31 |
So I might go to UPPER and I
might Shift+Click the bottom one.
| | 00:36 |
Drag those all in beneath the banner.
| | 00:38 |
Change the layer order by
this black line here. There we go.
| | 00:41 |
You can see the size is ridiculous-huge.
| | 00:44 |
So I am going to hit S for scale.
| | 00:46 |
And let's say, for example, I don't know, 35%.
| | 00:50 |
That's still too big. Let's try 15%.
| | 00:53 |
Maybe 20 will be good for right now, and
then we could just move all these over,
| | 00:56 |
while they're selected.
| | 00:58 |
And that looks about right,
still a little big, but whatever.
| | 01:00 |
We are just getting a
rough arrangement right now.
| | 01:03 |
Click these arrows while they
are all selected to collapse them.
| | 01:05 |
We are going to arrange
these later so that they animate.
| | 01:07 |
That's coming up later in
this chapter. Close that up.
| | 01:10 |
Well, we want sword and
music stuff for the background.
| | 01:12 |
Drag that pre-comp in below that stuff.
| | 01:15 |
Again, we'll want to scale this down and
just dump it in the background for right now.
| | 01:20 |
We'll fiddle with that later as well.
| | 01:22 |
We know that we're also going to have
these three renders of the robot and
| | 01:26 |
I'll put that behind me but in
front of the background stuff.
| | 01:29 |
Again, we could move him over.
| | 01:31 |
We are going to want two robots on
each side as well as two dragons, which we
| | 01:35 |
could bring in by going in
the Graphics folder > dragon_lynda.
| | 01:38 |
And put dragon_lynda behind the robot
but in front of the background stuff, over
| | 01:44 |
to the left-hand side here.
| | 01:46 |
Now we are going to want actually two
different copies of the robot and the
| | 01:49 |
dragon, one on the left
side and one on the right.
| | 01:51 |
In the next movie, I'll show you how to do
that in a quicker and faster way than duplicating.
| | 01:55 |
Now one last thing I want to bring in
here is under Video, I want to bring
| | 01:59 |
in this detonation films clip and we'll put
that in front of the sword and music stuff.
| | 02:06 |
Drag that into place and we can
move out in time to where it blows up.
| | 02:14 |
Maybe about right there. And then we
could hit Option+Left Bracket to chop the
| | 02:20 |
footage so that it starts at that
point and then we could drag it to move it
| | 02:24 |
forward, so that way we have this cool
explosion starting a little bit sooner.
| | 02:28 |
Now, this is really where the design
portion of the project comes into play
| | 02:33 |
because right now if I zoom
in on this, it's just a mess.
| | 02:36 |
This is just stuff everywhere.
| | 02:37 |
There's just no rhyme or reason for it.
| | 02:40 |
It looks like what it is, just a
bunch of elements slopped together.
| | 02:43 |
So this is where we would start
grabbing some of these elements.
| | 02:46 |
I'll turn off the visibility of these
other Chad layers here, where we start
| | 02:49 |
moving these elements around, resizing
according to our taste to create a
| | 02:55 |
given layout or feel.
| | 02:57 |
Now, I should also point out here,
this is where you are going to need a
| | 02:59 |
little bit of vision.
| | 03:00 |
Things aren't going to look super great
before you apply the color adjustments,
| | 03:04 |
and before we crop off the bottom
elements, and before we do a whole bunch of
| | 03:08 |
stuff, and before we get the background.
All that kind of stuff. It's just not going
| | 03:11 |
to look that great.
| | 03:12 |
But you have to have the vision.
| | 03:13 |
You have to be able to see what this
is going to become so you can know where
| | 03:17 |
you want to put stuff right now
for how it's going to look later.
| | 03:20 |
Of course you could always tweak it, but
if we were to look at this project right
| | 03:22 |
now, it just looks like garbage.
| | 03:24 |
Now, if you don't have this
prophetic vision of the future right now where you
| | 03:27 |
could see exactly what this is
going to look like, it's okay.
| | 03:30 |
We are going to play with it a little
bit and over time you will be able to see
| | 03:34 |
things in your mind's eye before you
put them out here in After Effects and
| | 03:38 |
start working with them.
| | 03:39 |
Now before I call this movie off,
one last thing we want to do.
| | 03:42 |
I want to go to the banner.
| | 03:42 |
I am going to hit R for rotation.
| | 03:45 |
I am going to rotate this 180 degrees.
| | 03:47 |
I actually wants this to be kind of,
well, the other way around here.
| | 03:51 |
You also might have noticed if I zoom in
on this to 100% that we have some weird
| | 03:56 |
anti-aliasing stuff.
| | 03:57 |
This is the way the file was in
Illustrator for some weird reason.
| | 04:00 |
But what we are going to do is we are
going to show you a way to fix that here
| | 04:04 |
in After Effects a little
bit later on this chapter.
| | 04:06 |
So let's go over to the next movie.
| | 04:07 |
We are going to talk about how to
duplicate, quickly and efficiently, the dragon
| | 04:11 |
and the robot on both sides of the equation.
| | 04:15 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Increasing efficiency with the Mirror effect| 00:00 |
For a few of these elements, namely the
robot and the dragon, we want to split
| | 00:03 |
it up so they have a duplicate on
both sides of the whole design here.
| | 00:08 |
We are going to save some time by
doing that with the Mirror effect.
| | 00:12 |
So I am going the select
the Eddie Technology layer.
| | 00:14 |
Eddie Technology is the name of our robot.
| | 00:16 |
Select the Mirror effect from the
Effects & Presets panel and apply that.
| | 00:20 |
And what we could do is click this
little crosshairs for the effect control
| | 00:23 |
point, for the reflection center.
| | 00:24 |
I am going to put that right in the middle
there and now we have a robot on each side.
| | 00:28 |
Now that was really quick and convenient,
but ideally, I would like the robots
| | 00:32 |
to kind of jut from a
diagonal point from the center.
| | 00:36 |
So if I hit Rotation here, hit
letter R for the rotation and then rotate this
| | 00:39 |
around, you can see that they're not
really rotating from the center, they're
| | 00:42 |
both rotating the same way, which is
great for some mirror effects, but not what
| | 00:47 |
I am looking for here.
| | 00:48 |
So what we can do is change the
reflection angle so that they are kind of bent a
| | 00:52 |
little bit and then I could change the
rotation angle, so it looks like they're
| | 00:56 |
coming out from the center.
| | 00:58 |
Likewise, I want to have the
same effect working on the dragon.
| | 01:00 |
So I am going to select the dragon_lynda layer,
apply the Mirror effect,
| | 01:04 |
click the effect control point for
reflection center and click right there in the middle.
| | 01:09 |
Now we have a problem here, of course,
because the boundaries of the layer are
| | 01:13 |
only this big and when we make a
duplicate with the Mirror effect, the duplicate
| | 01:18 |
goes beyond the boundaries of the layer.
| | 01:19 |
So in the next movie,
we'll look at how to fix that.
| | 01:22 |
But the Mirror effect
does two really cool things.
| | 01:25 |
Number one, of course, is it saves us from
having to duplicate the layer and move it over.
| | 01:29 |
That's not really that big of a deal,
but the other cool thing that it does
| | 01:33 |
is it's kind of like expressions, in that
it makes it so that if we want to make
| | 01:37 |
changes later, we don't
have to change two copies.
| | 01:40 |
We make one change.
| | 01:41 |
So let's say, for example,
the robots, I hit S for scale.
| | 01:44 |
I decide, you know what, I actually
want these to be a little bit smaller.
| | 01:47 |
When I scale these down, they both scale down.
| | 01:50 |
Now you'll notice that they scale
from the original layers, or the original
| | 01:54 |
robot's anchor point.
| | 01:56 |
So what I want to do before I did that -
actually I want to take this back up to 100 -
| | 02:00 |
hold down the letter Y. Move the anchor
point over to the center and now when I
| | 02:04 |
scale, they both scale in and out.
| | 02:07 |
That's much easier than creating a
duplicate and that's also scalable and
| | 02:11 |
changeable later on.
| | 02:12 |
So I am going to take this back up to,
say, about 98% or so, and then in the next
| | 02:16 |
movie where we're going to fix this
problem that we have with the dragon.
| | 02:19 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using Grow Bounds to fix the dragon| 00:00 | Where we left off in the last movie,
we used the Mirror effect to duplicate
| | 00:03 | this Illustrator dragon.
| | 00:05 | But the problem is, is that the
duplicate extended beyond the borders of
| | 00:09 | the original layer.
| | 00:10 | So we are going to fix that here.
| | 00:11 | I am going to go to the dragon_lynda
layer and we are going to use an effect
| | 00:15 | called Grow Bounds, which you probably
figured out by the name of this movie.
| | 00:20 | Applying Grow Bounds to this layer.
| | 00:22 | It does nothing until you drag it up in the
Effects stack so it comes before the Mirror effect.
| | 00:30 | So Grow Bounds actually grows the
boundaries of the layer so that the entirety
| | 00:34 | can be used for effects.
| | 00:36 | So if we click and increase the pixels'
value, that increases the amount of the
| | 00:40 | bounds that we are increasing.
| | 00:42 | And putting this before the Mirror
effect means that we can grow the layer
| | 00:47 | and then mirror it.
| | 00:49 | So if we mirror it and then grow the
bounds, it really doesn't do any good.
| | 00:53 | Now although this design is
certainly rudimentary, it doesn't look good.
| | 00:57 | It certainly looks better than
it did a couple of movies ago.
| | 01:00 | Now, we'll probably do some tweaking
later on but as for right now, I am really
| | 01:03 | starting to like this kind of
triangular shape that we are hinting at here.
| | 01:07 | Good design always seems be
based around very simple shapes.
| | 01:12 | Anyways, that's how to use the Grow
Bounds effect to fix little problems like
| | 01:15 | that when using effects.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Simulating motion with stills| 00:00 | One of the things I was trying to
emulate in this project was this common
| | 00:03 | reality show intro thingie that I see
all over the place, where they take just
| | 00:07 | still snapshots of the subject of
reality show and just cut them in time, so
| | 00:12 | they just kind of have like
these poses frozen in time.
| | 00:14 | It's not really full motion video,
just photographs kind of cut together.
| | 00:18 | So that's actually what we are going
do in this brief tutorial here.
| | 00:21 | The first thing I want to do is
make sure my comp is the right length.
| | 00:23 | So I am going to hit Command+K, or
Ctrl+K on the PC, to get my composition
| | 00:27 | settings, after selecting the
Timeline panel, of course. There we go.
| | 00:30 | And I am going to change the
duration here to 10 seconds.
| | 00:33 | So I am going to type '10.', which will
automatically make this composition 10
| | 00:38 | seconds after I click OK.
| | 00:40 | Now basically, I have four clips here.
| | 00:43 | I have the UPPER giddy, and I want
him to go in this order, by the way.
| | 00:46 | I want him to be like happy like, "Hey,
I'm Chad," and then, "Hm, what's the answer
| | 00:51 | to that question?" and then, "Hm, I don't know,"
followed up by a distracting pose as
| | 00:58 | if to say, "Look what I can do. It doesn't matter
if I don't know the answer to your question."
| | 01:03 | So what we are going to do is we are
going to go out to a second in time and we
| | 01:06 | are going to use our time indicator for that.
| | 01:08 | Make sure we are at 1 second even and
we are going to start with UPPER giddy.
| | 01:12 | So what I am going to do is I am going
to hit Option+Left Bracket to chop that
| | 01:16 | layer at 1 second and I want each of
these clips to go for about two seconds.
| | 01:21 | We might change that later on, but
that's approximately what I am going for.
| | 01:24 | So I am going to move out to the 3-second mark.
| | 01:27 | That would be two seconds later.
| | 01:28 | Then I'm going to advance one frame
beyond that by hitting the Page Down key.
| | 01:32 | Then I am going to go to the next
layer up and hit Option+Left Bracket, or
| | 01:38 | Alt+Left Bracket on the PC, and we are
going to advance in time another two seconds.
| | 01:44 | That would be 5:01.
| | 01:48 | And actually you'll notice here
that everything is disappeared on us.
| | 01:52 | That's because our original
comp was only five seconds long.
| | 01:54 | So we'll fix that in a little bit.
| | 01:55 | For right now let's not worry about Out point.
| | 01:57 | Let's just worry about In point.
| | 01:58 | So I am going to select UPPER stumped.
| | 02:00 | That's the next clip.
| | 02:01 | And then we'll go ahead and hit Option+Left Bracket
there and also, because
| | 02:07 | this was ended at little five seconds,
we need to drag the Out point out just a
| | 02:11 | little bit there. So another couple of seconds,
this a little longer than we want it to be.
| | 02:15 | Seven seconds in one frame.
| | 02:17 | And I am going to select
the UPPER showoff layer.
| | 02:19 | This time what we could do is
just hit the left bracket key.
| | 02:21 | That's going to jump the In point to my
current time indicator. That's okay to do.
| | 02:27 | Just be aware that if it's on video then
it's going to jump to a different spot.
| | 02:32 | So because we're using still images,
it doesn't matter whether we use
| | 02:35 | Option+Left Bracket or just Left Bracket
because it's going to move the end point.
| | 02:39 | It's all going to look the same
anyways, because it's just a still image.
| | 02:42 | At this point, now we need to make
sure the all of our layers are turned on.
| | 02:45 | And what I am going to do is I'm
going to hit Page Up to go back one frame.
| | 02:49 | So I am at seven seconds and
then I'm going to select the layer before
| | 02:53 | it, that's UPPER stumped,
and hit Option+Right Bracket.
| | 02:56 | That will make it so the Out point of
that layer goes to the current time.
| | 03:01 | Then I am going to select the layer above it
by hitting Command+Upper Arrow or Ctrl+Up Arrow.
| | 03:05 | I am going to hit the letter O to
jump my current time indicator to the Out
| | 03:09 | point of that layer.
| | 03:11 | Now you notice that there is actually two
subjects going on here at the same time.
| | 03:16 | So we know that we need to fix this.
| | 03:18 | So if we go to 5 seconds even in time,
this should be the last frame of the
| | 03:22 | UPPER thinking layer and the UPPER stumped
layer should not start until the next frame.
| | 03:27 | So I'm going to hit Option+Left Bracket
on UPPER thinking to crop it at that layer.
| | 03:32 | Then I am going to advance one frame,
select UPPER stumped and hit Option+Left Bracket there,
| | 03:38 | so that we have thinking and then stumped.
| | 03:41 | Next let's select the thinking layer.
| | 03:43 | I'll select I to get the In point of
that layer, and again, Command+Up Arrow or
| | 03:49 | Ctrl+Up Arrow to select the
first layer that we'll see.
| | 03:51 | Page Up to go one frame in. That's at
three seconds. And then we are going to
| | 03:56 | go Option+Right Bracket to trim that
so that UPPER giddy begin or ends at
| | 04:01 | that particular frame.
| | 04:02 | So if I hit minus on my keyboard to
zoom out a little bit, we have the
| | 04:06 | first couple of seconds, next couple
of seconds, next couple of seconds,
| | 04:10 | and next couple of seconds.
| | 04:11 | Now you might notice that
these are not all centered.
| | 04:15 | So if this jump went to that
jump, that would not look good.
| | 04:18 | So what we need to do is go in and
independently adjust these images, scale them
| | 04:24 | down if we need to so that they all
kind of look like they belong together.
| | 04:29 | One of the guidelines I try to follow
was that my belt was about the same place.
| | 04:34 | That was the guide that I decided to
use to make sure that that was consistent
| | 04:38 | from frame to frame.
| | 04:40 | The poses that I had didn't seem
like my belt should have moved too much.
| | 04:44 | So that's kind of like the frame of
reference that I used to line everything up.
| | 04:47 | But that's really all there is to
creating this staggered reality show TV effect.
| | 04:51 | Again it's just a series of
photographs that we cut in order.
| | 04:55 | If we wanted to, we could pre-compose
these still images and use some of After
| | 04:59 | Effects' frame blending to kind of
make them morph into one another.
| | 05:03 | I definitely didn't want to go for that
here because that's not the reality show
| | 05:06 | thing that I was trying to go for,
but that could be done for sure.
| | 05:09 | So that's how we create this thing and
again, this is going to look much better
| | 05:13 | once we unify these scale values and
the position of these different layers.
| | 05:18 | Next, we'll talk about performing
a slip edit on the detonation film's
| | 05:22 | explosion footage.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using the Slip Edit tool on video| 00:00 | In this tutorial, we are going to be
looking at what is one of my favorite video
| | 00:04 | editing tools, and that is the Slip Edit tool.
| | 00:07 | And basically, we are continuing
where we left off in the last movie except
| | 00:10 | that I've made a few little tweaks to bring
this more into conformity with the real project.
| | 00:14 | So I tightened up some of these stills,
made them a little bit shorter and I
| | 00:18 | also trimmed up the explosion in the background.
| | 00:22 | You notice that I created
an In point and an Out point.
| | 00:25 | Now when we see these faded frames here,
this is critical for this tutorial,
| | 00:30 | these faded frames mean that we've chopped
the In point and the Out point of the layer,
| | 00:35 | so it starts here and ends here. But
this extra filler, this faded stuff means
| | 00:40 | that that's video content
that's part of the layer that we're not seeing.
| | 00:44 | For this tutorial, just to make things
a little bit clear, I am going to chop
| | 00:46 | the visibility of the dragon and the
robot here so we can see that - and also
| | 00:51 | I'll turn off this sword
and music stuff layer as well.
| | 00:54 | So we have our banner, we have our
subject popped up, and then we have the
| | 00:58 | explosion just kind of like pops on, and then
it kind of turns into this just wispy smoke
| | 01:04 | that's not all that awesome.
| | 01:06 | that's fonr this purpose anyways,
for our motion graphics here.
| | 01:09 | So we actually want the explosion to
start right here and we want the explosion
| | 01:12 | to end right here. Well, we are
looking at the wrong part of the footage.
| | 01:16 | We want the explosion that happened
earlier to start here and then it still
| | 01:20 | to be kind of more intensely smoky
over here at the tail end and not
| | 01:25 | completely faded out already.
| | 01:27 | But I do like, again, my
In point and my Out point.
| | 01:30 | It does need to start and it does
need to end here, but we want to see
| | 01:33 | different part of our video.
| | 01:34 | So that's where Slip Edits come in handy.
| | 01:35 | So what I can do is move my current
time indicator here and then once I put my
| | 01:39 | cursor over this faded video
area, it becomes the Slip Edit tool.
| | 01:43 | So I can move my video content without
changing the In and Out points of this layer.
| | 01:49 | So now I move this around and that's
about where I want it to start, right about there.
| | 01:56 | Actually, I don't want any of
that detonation films stuff.
| | 01:59 | So we jump to the In point of the layer
by hitting I, move this ever so slightly,
| | 02:04 | and there we have it.
| | 02:06 | So now the layer explodes where it should,
and the end is still kind of powerful
| | 02:11 | with smoke there, and it's not
completely faded out, and we didn't have to
| | 02:14 | change our In point and our Out point.
| | 02:17 | The Slip Edit feature in video editing
programs here in After Effects is just
| | 02:21 | critical when you want to
time something just right.
| | 02:24 | Let's say you're working with a music
video and you need to cut to the rhythm.
| | 02:28 | Well, you might cut to the rhythm and
you take the time to do that and then you
| | 02:33 | realize that you have
the wrong part of the shot.
| | 02:35 | So Slip Edit allows you to tweak that
by still keeping the program In point and
| | 02:40 | the program Out point the same.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating text for the banners| 00:00 | Now we are going to create some
text, which is actually going to be
| | 00:03 | cooler than it sounds.
| | 00:03 | I am going to use this keyboard
shortcut that I learned a little while back.
| | 00:07 | It's all the modifier keys.
| | 00:08 | That's Ctrl+Alt+Shift on the PC,
Command+Option+Shift on the Mac, and the
| | 00:12 | letter T at the same time.
| | 00:14 | That automatically puts a cursor at
the center of our composition, which,
| | 00:17 | because of our composition is
massively huge, is over here in the center.
| | 00:21 | I am just going to type, 'STAY TUNED...'
and actually let me select the Selection
| | 00:28 | tool, hold down the Spacebar,
move this over, double-click. Dot dot dot.
| | 00:34 | And what I have done is I've
used the font: Mesquite Standard.
| | 00:38 | Now you might not have that
font on your machine. That's okay.
| | 00:40 | Feel free to use whatever you want.
| | 00:42 | And I also increased the stroke value to 14
and what I did is that I put Fill Over Stroke.
| | 00:51 | That kind of gave me this cool, spiky
outline that we can't really see too good,
| | 00:56 | because our colors need to be fixed.
| | 00:58 | So what I am going to do is I am going
to make sure that the Fill is active.
| | 01:01 | This is what it looks like
when the stroke is active.
| | 01:03 | We'll get to that in a second.
And I am going to click the Fill icon.
| | 01:05 | Then click the Eyedropper tool. And I'm
going to - actually I can't see it yet
| | 01:10 | - scroll down to my Lime Green Solid
here that we got from Kuler, from our
| | 01:14 | color scheme, and just click right
there on the little thumbnail of the color
| | 01:18 | swatch for the solid.
| | 01:19 | I am going to make that my Fill. And then
what I am going to do for the stroke is
| | 01:25 | click the Eyedropper and then click the Fill.
| | 01:27 | So we have the same color
for the Fill and the Stroke.
| | 01:29 | Then I am just going to drag this color
down in the color picker until we have
| | 01:35 | like a darker green color. And click OK.
| | 01:38 | So what we are doing is using the
Fill color, which is one of our original
| | 01:42 | colors from our color palette.
| | 01:43 | We are using that as the
basis for the stroke color.
| | 01:45 | I am going to hit Enter on the
numeric keypad to accept that.
| | 01:48 | 'V' get back to the Move tool and
we can move this back over to our banner.
| | 01:54 | Now I'll probably want to double-click that
and maybe increase the tracking a little bit.
| | 02:00 | I don't want to do it too much because I
don't want to have like a western look.
| | 02:03 | This is kind of like a Western font,
but I want it to look kind of spiky.
| | 02:07 | When these letters are close together
and the stroke is behind them, it does
| | 02:12 | have this kind of stroke look,
if I zoom in here to 100%.
| | 02:15 | We can see that the stroke
exaggerated with the big number here, 15 pixels,
| | 02:20 | it kind of creates this
spiky outline that I'm digging.
| | 02:22 | Now if we want to take this further,
we could play around with the horizontal
| | 02:27 | and vertical sizing of the text, but
again, I want to make sure that I don't
| | 02:32 | get the space between all the letters
because then we have these weird holes in between.
| | 02:37 | So play with the text until you get it
the way you like it, realizing that we do
| | 02:41 | have horizontal and vertical scaling.
But be aware that you can easily skew your
| | 02:46 | text where it looks kind of tacky
without realizing it by playing with this.
| | 02:51 | And also, in the next movie, we are
going to be warping this text, so you don't
| | 02:54 | need to make it exactly perfect right now.
| | 02:56 | One other thing that I want to do is
I want to go to this banner here and I
| | 03:00 | actually want it to be a little bit taller
so we have more room for this text to fit.
| | 03:04 | So I am going to hit S for scale,
unlink horizontal and vertical scale and
| | 03:09 | increase vertical scale until
we have a taller banner here.
| | 03:15 | Actually, if I take off the visibility
of my text, we could see that this is
| | 03:18 | starting to get little soft
and low quality, but that's okay.
| | 03:21 | Because we got this from Illustrator,
this banner is vector and so we can call
| | 03:26 | back that vector data whenever we want to.
| | 03:28 | All you have to do is click this
continuously rasterize button in this column -
| | 03:32 | here is the timeline panel - and
that will cause it to go back to the
| | 03:36 | Illustrator data and make
this all nice and smooth again.
| | 03:39 | We're still having these anti-aliasing
issues around the edges of
| | 03:43 | the rolled up part of the scrolls, but again,
we'll fix that later on in this chapter.
| | 03:46 | And that's how we create
our really awesome spiky text.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Warping the text| 00:00 | In this movie, I am going to show you
the technique that I used to warp this
| | 00:03 | text to make it look like it was on our banner.
| | 00:06 | Now, to be honest with you, the
first method that I looked at when I was
| | 00:09 | creating this was the Puppet tool, just
the heaven's answer for warping stuff.
| | 00:14 | The Puppet tool is so amazing.
| | 00:16 | But the thing is, is when we click on
these things to apply puppet pins, it only
| | 00:21 | applies to our text and not to the stroke.
| | 00:25 | So the Puppet tool is actually that
intelligent that it's not looking at the
| | 00:30 | raster outline of what's going on with our text.
| | 00:33 | It's actually looking at the
subject of the layer itself.
| | 00:36 | Now, well that's all genius and
everything that the Puppet tool can do that.
| | 00:40 | I want to adjust this text as one solid
block all letters and all strokes as one.
| | 00:47 | So adjusting these things as one
letter at a time isn't going to give me the
| | 00:51 | results that I want.
| | 00:53 | Now, of course, we could pre-compose
this and then apply the Puppet tool to the
| | 00:57 | pre-composed layer, but that adds an extra step.
| | 00:59 | So what we are going to do instead is
use an effect called the Mesh Warp effect.
| | 01:04 | So I am going to apply that to my text here
and granted this does take some finagling.
| | 01:09 | This is one of the more challenging
parts in this training series to try to
| | 01:12 | get this just right.
| | 01:14 | But what I usually do when I'm using
this tool is to not even think about it,
| | 01:18 | not try to get it just right.
| | 01:20 | What I am trying to do is line up the
points around the banner so that the
| | 01:25 | B?zier lines match up
the curvature of the banner.
| | 01:27 | So for example, this point is in a good
spot but its B?zier handle needs to be
| | 01:31 | adjusted, pulled down a little bit.
| | 01:34 | This one needs to go over here.
| | 01:36 | So again, this is going to
make my text look terrible.
| | 01:38 | I'm okay with that for the
time being, just for right now.
| | 01:42 | I'll put this up in that corner and
pull that down and pull this down, like so.
| | 01:51 | Click on that handle, shorten that, and then
put this point up over here, do the same thing.
| | 02:00 | Drag this handle downwards and
shorten this handle. Click on this.
| | 02:07 | Shorten this handle. Drag it over.
| | 02:11 | There we go.
| | 02:12 | Okay, so once I get it in the
general ballpark, from there I kind of
| | 02:15 | fine-tune what I have.
| | 02:16 | So actually I might want to bring these
points back over - looks that the text is
| | 02:19 | too far over to the right - and maybe
tweak this a little bit, maybe
| | 02:25 | pull this in a little bit.
| | 02:28 | So it does take a little bit of
finagling before we get it to look like the text
| | 02:31 | is actually on our banner.
| | 02:35 | But with just a little bit of tweaking
it shouldn't be like end-of-the-world
| | 02:40 | hard, just kind of
frustrating-that-it-couldn't-be-a-little-bit-faster hard.
| | 02:44 | You'll notice that there is this drop-off
curve right here and these dots are
| | 02:49 | kind of emulating that curve.
| | 02:51 | So we actually need to go a little bit
farther out here and grab this point and
| | 02:55 | bring that one up and that's going to
make things look a little cleaner there.
| | 02:58 | And we are going to bring this back down,
and take this curve up a little bit.
| | 03:03 | So it's not perfect, but this is now
starting to look a little but more like our
| | 03:07 | text is on our banner.
| | 03:09 | Later on in this training series, in
later chapters, we are going to be covering
| | 03:12 | how to animate this text and also how
to apply some color correction to make it
| | 03:16 | look like it belongs on this banner even more.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Smoothing the banner's edges| 00:00 |
So I have complained several times now
about these jaggedy anti-aliased edges
| | 00:06 |
from this Illustrator banner file.
| | 00:09 |
So we are going to fix that now, in this movie.
| | 00:10 |
Interestingly enough, we are going to
smooth out these rough edges with an
| | 00:14 |
effect called Roughen Edges.
| | 00:16 |
I know that's backward logic, but it works.
| | 00:17 |
So I am going to apply the
Roughen Edges effect to the banner layer.
| | 00:23 |
It does two things right off the bat.
| | 00:25 |
First of all, it gets rid of the
anti-aliasing around the edges.
| | 00:28 |
Now there's some internal on these
curls right here on the inside of the file.
| | 00:31 |
Because they are not on the edges,
there's not really a way we can get rid of
| | 00:35 |
that without blurring, which is an option.
| | 00:38 |
But as far as the outside edges, just
applying the Roughen Edges effect on the
| | 00:42 |
outside kind of smoothes the edges.
| | 00:44 |
The second fact is that it kind of
wrinkles the edges a little bit, which makes
| | 00:48 |
this banner look a little worn and
kind of cooler in a way, a little bit more
| | 00:52 |
organic, and I kind of like that.
| | 00:53 |
So right there with the
default settings, we're good to go.
| | 00:56 |
Now of course, if you wanted to, you can
play with something like the fractal influence.
| | 01:00 |
Take this down a bit and we can get
some of the detail back from these
| | 01:04 |
corners and kind of smooth out the
remainder of the edges, and still get rid
| | 01:09 |
of that anti-aliasing.
| | 01:10 |
So here is the before and we are
getting this yuckiness and even around the top
| | 01:15 |
and bottom edges where it's not so bad.
| | 01:17 |
It's still not super-attractive.
| | 01:19 |
Turn on Roughen Edges and
it kind of smoothes that out.
| | 01:22 |
It gets us a little yucky corner
right here, but I think that's better than
| | 01:25 |
having the jagged edges all the way around.
| | 01:28 |
So, quick and easy way to smooth
out our outer edges using the Roughen
| | 01:32 |
Edges effect.
| | 01:33 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Making other tweaks | 00:00 | Now, this is going to be a little fun.
| | 00:01 | This is going to be like a grab bag
tutorial where we are going to do tons of
| | 00:04 | little tiny tweaks to this project.
| | 00:07 | First, I am going to
zoom into 100%. There we go at 100%
| | 00:11 | So I can see my dragons here, and
we are going to fiddle with these dragons.
| | 00:14 | We're going to scale
these dragons up a little bit.
| | 00:17 | However, once we do that you'll notice
that now they are outside of the banner.
| | 00:23 | That doesn't quite look right and
also they are little bit too far away.
| | 00:27 | So what you're going to do is
adjust that position of the dragon.
| | 00:33 | Now I am not worried about the copy
right now, I've realized that he's way
| | 00:36 | off base here, but I am just focused
on our original, getting that one into
| | 00:41 | their right position.
| | 00:42 | Then I could select this effect.
Go up to my Effect Controls panel.
| | 00:46 | Let's resize this so we could see
that a little bit, and let's just change
| | 00:50 | Reflection Center to go back to
the center of the document again.
| | 00:55 | And actually that's not where we want it.
| | 00:56 | I am going to hit Command+Colon to
show our guides, after selecting the
| | 00:59 | Composition panel, and then we can
click on the Effect Control point and
| | 01:04 | actually that's where our
center is. There we go.
| | 01:07 | Now, our copy is sticking out a little
bit too far, so if we wanted to, we could
| | 01:11 | drag this back over.
| | 01:12 | Nothing is etched in stone here.
| | 01:14 | Now I did resize this, but in doing so,
I created a little bit of a problem.
| | 01:18 | Now it might be hard to see on your
screen, over the Internet, but scaling this
| | 01:22 | up made it a little bit soft.
| | 01:24 | So you might say, "well just as the
banner, we scaled that up as well and we
| | 01:27 | just added continually
rasterize and it looked clean."
| | 01:30 | However, when we add continuously rasterize
to this nested composition, not only do
| | 01:35 | we still have the softness, but
we lose the mirrored copy as well.
| | 01:40 | So let me show you how to fix this.
| | 01:42 | To fix this, we're going to go inside
of this nested composition and work on
| | 01:46 | that, in the layers inside of that.
| | 01:47 | And while we are there, we also need to
take off the visibility of the wings and
| | 01:51 | the arms, which we don't
really need for this project.
| | 01:54 | So I am going to tap Shift on my keyboard.
| | 01:56 | Use the Right Arrow to go up to the
dragon_lynda composition there, and hit
| | 02:01 | Return to enter that comp and I am
going to take off the visibility of the
| | 02:05 | left arm, right arm and left and right
wing layers, so we just have the main
| | 02:13 | part of the dragon here.
| | 02:14 | Then I am going to select one of the layers.
| | 02:16 | Hit Command+A, or Control+A on the PC,
then click in continuously rasterize,
| | 02:20 | so all the layers are being
continuously rasterized. And then if we
| | 02:24 | Tab+Shift+Left Arrow, Enter to go back
to the main comp, we'll see that this now
| | 02:30 | looks really clean, but we've lost
our mirrored copy. So let's fix that.
| | 02:34 | Now this fix is actually really quirky.
| | 02:37 | What we have to do is delete the Mirror
effect and then go over to the Effects &
| | 02:43 | Presets panel and apply Mirror again.
| | 02:47 | Zoom out and click the Reflection
Center as near the center guide there and
| | 02:56 | again, we might need to tweak this,
fine-tune this just a little bit, and that's how
| | 03:00 | we get our copy back. Next thing.
| | 03:04 | Let's go ahead and create a background solid.
| | 03:07 | Now actually you want to use this Dark
Gray Solid as a background, or at least a
| | 03:10 | starting point for a background.
| | 03:11 | So I am going to select this layer, hit
Command+D to duplicate it, and then just
| | 03:15 | so I know it's the background
solid and not the color swatch solid,
| | 03:19 | I am going to hit Enter and then
just call this 'Background solid', genius!
| | 03:24 | And let's go ahead and turn
the visibility on of that layer.
| | 03:27 | Now that I am looking at this, I am
thinking it's a little too bright,
| | 03:29 | so what I am going to do is with the
layer selected, hit Command+Shift+Y. That
| | 03:34 | will enable us to go into this color
swatch, click this and let's actually bring
| | 03:38 | down the brightness of this.
| | 03:42 | And we reserve the right as always
to go back and change this if we want.
| | 03:45 | So we're going to add some background
elements here in a second that's going to
| | 03:48 | appear to darken things up.
| | 03:49 | So we might want to go back and
lighten this after all, but for right now I
| | 03:52 | kind of like this as is.
| | 03:54 | I should also point out that because our
initial comp was five seconds long, this
| | 03:58 | layer ends at five seconds.
| | 04:00 | So what I am going to want to do is hit the
End key to go to the end of my composition.
| | 04:04 | So then what I am going to want to
do is hit Option+Right Bracket, or
| | 04:06 | Alt+Right Bracket on the PC, to make
it so that this layer is the entire
| | 04:11 | duration of the composition.
| | 04:14 | Now next thing I want to do is
add some magic to the background.
| | 04:17 | I want to use this sword and music
stuff PSD file that we have, but it's
| | 04:22 | not going to do too much good to us as one
block, one super huge chunk of nested stuff.
| | 04:28 | So I am going to actually delete this
and go back to the Project panel, open up
| | 04:32 | PSDs and open up this sorted music stuff layers.
| | 04:36 | So again, when you bring a PSD file
in you have a composition made for you
| | 04:40 | already, if you choose to import like
that, which is what we did, and so now I
| | 04:43 | have like this cool little repository
of goodies that I can choose from to
| | 04:48 | play with, as I need.
| | 04:50 | So I might bring a couple of
guitars in here for the background.
| | 04:53 | We'll put that behind the dragon.
| | 04:56 | Press S for scale and scale this.
| | 04:59 | You can also rotate this, move that
into position, and again, we could use
| | 05:05 | mirror and all that jazz to make a
duplicate copy on the other side.
| | 05:08 | I am not going to worry
about that for right now.
| | 05:09 | We'll also have this speaker, and I
am just going to drag this into my
| | 05:13 | composition, right above
my Background solid layer.
| | 05:16 | It's really ample so we can
use scale to shrink this down.
| | 05:20 | We can also use blend modes.
| | 05:22 | We can also use opacity, whatever we
want to kind of like fade this out.
| | 05:26 | I think I also use a little bit of fast
blur on mine to make this kind of blend
| | 05:29 | a little bit more, but we could
hit Command+D and duplicate these.
| | 05:32 | That's what I did in my original one.
| | 05:34 | And I basically wanted to make it so that
we have these speakers as kind of a texture.
| | 05:39 | But one of the things I also try to do
is make it so that when you zoom in here
| | 05:43 | at 100% that the speaker - actually
let's zoom out to 50%, this is the one
| | 05:49 | I am looking for right there - kind of
made like a little halo, like a frame.
| | 05:53 | So see how this speaker goes
thematically with our themes of robots, music,
| | 05:59 | fantasy, weird stuff.
| | 06:01 | But just by the fact that it is a
cool design element, and we have a bunch of
| | 06:04 | floating around the project here, it
kind of ties everything together here
| | 06:08 | because it is circular.
| | 06:10 | Another thing that I did is I went
through and I randomly changed the opacities
| | 06:15 | of these different speakers, just to
kind of randomize things a little bit, make
| | 06:19 | them seem like a little bit more, I
don't know, independent, just texturally not
| | 06:24 | really trying to show the speaker, per se.
| | 06:27 | Likewise, I added a mixer here and I
think I flipped that if I am not mistaken.
| | 06:34 | Don't have to take the time to do that here.
| | 06:36 | But again with the mixer, I kind of faded
in, just to add a little bit of texture.
| | 06:41 | So feel free to continue to
add these files to the project.
| | 06:46 | I also used swords, this cool
ninja sword here, in the background.
| | 06:51 | I rotated it, and I scaled it down.
| | 06:56 | So kind of like the guitar,
it kind of stuck out there. That's kind of fun.
| | 07:01 | We are going to be talking about
that later in this chapter as well.
| | 07:03 | So this is pretty much where
your artistic sense comes in.
| | 07:06 | You could look at the final file to
see what I did, but I think it's more
| | 07:10 | important at this point to just kind
of play and experiment with like kind of
| | 07:14 | texture you like to create.
| | 07:15 | There is no rule for the amount of
opacity these speakers should be, or blend
| | 07:19 | mode they should be, or whether they
should be blurred or not or anything else.
| | 07:22 | This is just totally a creative
thing for you to have fun and play with.
| | 07:25 | Now, one final thing I want to do
before we ended this movie, I want to go to
| | 07:28 | my detonation films footage, right
there, and I am going to solo this.
| | 07:34 | Now because this is a wicked cool
explosion, you'll notice that some of the
| | 07:38 | smoke elements trail off the edge of the frame.
| | 07:41 | That's all well and good, but when
we're using this in our composition, these
| | 07:44 | flat edges look really fake.
| | 07:46 | So what I am going to do is solo this
and then I am going to create a mask
| | 07:51 | around this footage, and actually
what I can do is just double-click this
| | 07:54 | Rectangle tool icon in the tools panel to
make a mask around the edges of this footage.
| | 08:00 | And then what I could do is hit M, M,
M, M, there we go, to see the mask
| | 08:05 | parameters and then I could use Mask
Expansion to kind of collapse this a little
| | 08:09 | bit if I want to or I could manually
go in here with the Selection tool and
| | 08:15 | bring these edges in a little bit if I want to.
| | 08:17 | Again, my purpose here isn't really
to remove the detonation films edges.
| | 08:22 | That's really not what I want to do.
| | 08:24 | That's kind of a byproduct of what I
want to do, but I just want to make
| | 08:26 | sure that it looks good,
| | 08:27 | that you don't have the abrupt edges.
| | 08:29 | So what else I might want to do is just
feather this quite a bit, so these edges
| | 08:34 | come in and we don't have any
hard fast edges that you can see.
| | 08:38 | I realize that feathering the edges
isn't the best solution, but it's going
| | 08:41 | to look pretty good because we have
smoke and it's better than these hard
| | 08:45 | edges that we had before.
| | 08:46 | Now, one other thing I am going to do
is I am going to select this layer, hit
| | 08:49 | Command+D to duplicate it, and then on
this bottom copy, I am going to hit R for
| | 08:54 | rotate at 180 degrees so this flips upside down.
| | 08:59 | Hold the letter Y to move
the anchor point to our center.
| | 09:03 | That's right there on the
edge, snapping. There we go.
| | 09:10 | And so I could move this into place, and
then type 'S' for Scale. Shrink this down.
| | 09:15 | So we have little of something coming
from the bottom of the banner as well and
| | 09:18 | maybe we might also want to do a
little bit of a Slip Edit here, just so that
| | 09:21 | they are at different places in time.
| | 09:23 | It doesn't seem like an exact
mirrored replica of what's going on up top.
| | 09:27 | And then when we unsolo these, we have a
little bit more of a filled out explosion here.
| | 09:34 | Now, later on in this chapter, we're
going to clean up the bottom of the banner
| | 09:36 | and get rid of all this extra junk down
here, and that will make our explosion
| | 09:40 | from detonation films, on the
bottom here, look even better.
| | 09:43 | And we also will color correct this
later on this training series, and that will
| | 09:47 | make it stand out against the
background, look all great as well.
| | 09:50 | But for right now, for the layout
purposes, this is looking pretty good.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Fixing the sword with Simple Choker| 00:00 | In this quick tutorial, we are just going
to do a little quick fix on this sword here.
| | 00:05 | Right now everything looks like garbage,
so this isn't really that big of a deal,
| | 00:08 | but come later on when everything
starts looking super awesome with the colors,
| | 00:11 | then this is going to
really standout and annoy us.
| | 00:13 | So let's go ahead and take care of it now.
| | 00:15 | This sword, well, it's awesome.
| | 00:17 | It does have this like weird halo, this white
edge around it, so we need to take care of that.
| | 00:22 | So what we are going to do is select the
layer and apply the Simple Choker effect.
| | 00:28 | And what this is used for typically, is
keying, to remove some extra edge pixels.
| | 00:34 | But we are going to use it here to remove
some of these extra pixels on this sword.
| | 00:39 | If we decrease the amount, then
we'll be actually adding more white.
| | 00:42 | But as we increase this to a positive
amount, we'll be removing edge pixels and
| | 00:48 | cleaning up that edge nicely.
| | 00:50 | Ideally, we'd like to get rid of the
white pixels here in the corner, where
| | 00:54 | they seem to be the most stubborn, and still
retain some of the black outline around the blade.
| | 01:00 | So I think a value of
like 3.3-ish is getting that.
| | 01:07 | If you want to be more fine with your
numbers, then you could hold down the
| | 01:09 | Command key, or the Ctrl key on the PC,
while you're scrubbing your values.
| | 01:14 | And so there we have the before,
all junky and garbage-y, look at that.
| | 01:19 | All the way around we have just
junk and garbage. Turn this on.
| | 01:22 | Oh, yes.
| | 01:24 | Beautiful and clean.
| | 01:26 | We are missing out on some of the
outline right here, but it was pretty
| | 01:30 | faint to begin with anyways.
| | 01:31 | And most of the original outline was
just the white gunk we didn't want anyways.
| | 01:36 | So with the Simple Choker, we've
cleaned this up nicely, and we have a
| | 01:40 | fighting sword for the ages.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Masking with precomposing and mattes| 00:01 | In this tutorial, we're going to get rid of
all this junk hanging down below the banner.
| | 00:04 | We are going to do this by
pre-composing, and then using a track map.
| | 00:09 | So I am going to select UPPERgiddy.psd,
and then Shift+Click the sword.
| | 00:14 | That selects all of the elements above
the explosion, and also beneath the banner.
| | 00:20 | So everything in between the banner and the
explosion as far as 3D space, the layer stack goes.
| | 00:24 | We are selecting all those things.
| | 00:26 | And I am going to pre-compose
them by hitting Command+Shift+C, or
| | 00:30 | Ctrl+Shift+C on the PC.
| | 00:32 | I am going to type 'PRECOMP left side
objects', we'll just call that. OK.
| | 00:38 | And then, what I am going to do is
I am going to deselect this layer.
| | 00:41 | Then I am going to select the Pen tool.
| | 00:44 | And making sure that RotoBezier is
checked, or you can just use B?zier pass, I
| | 00:48 | guess, same difference.
| | 00:49 | And I'm going to click around.
| | 00:51 | Zoom into about 50%, and just click
around from the midpoint of the banner all
| | 00:57 | the way around the objects that might
stick out from the bottom of the banner.
| | 01:04 | And again, it doesn't have to be
accurate, obviously, just a big sloppy thing
| | 01:07 | that make sure that it encompasses all of
the bottom stuff we want to remove and
| | 01:11 | none of the top stuff
that we don't want to remove.
| | 01:14 | Then in the layers stack, I am going to
drag this down so it's immediately above
| | 01:18 | the PRECOMP we just made.
| | 01:20 | Then I am going to switch to the modes side
of this column so I can see my Track Mattes.
| | 01:27 | Expand this if I want to.
| | 01:28 | And then in the Track Matte column with
the PRECOMP layer, not the Shape layer,
| | 01:33 | I'm going to change this drop-down
to Alpha Inverted Matte.
| | 01:37 | And what's that going to do,
| | 01:39 | it's going to make it so that our PRECOMP
only shows up where the Shape layer is not.
| | 01:46 | So because the Shape layer is here, it
basically removes all that junk, and now
| | 01:50 | everything kind of pops out of the top.
| | 01:53 | And we can animate these objects in the
PRECOMP to pop out of this Track Matte.
| | 01:59 | And we won't see anything below them.
| | 02:01 | So that enables us to do some
pretty cool things later on when we
| | 02:04 | start animating.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
8. Animating the ElementsAnimating the text on the banner| 00:00 |
Now we're going to apply a
simple animation to our text.
| | 00:03 |
I am going to open up
the text layer, Stay Tuned.
| | 00:05 |
And under the animate, the little
flyout here, I am going to animate Scale.
| | 00:11 |
And what we want do is animate this text
kind of like blossoming on from left to right.
| | 00:15 |
We want it to be really fast, just
kind of popping on here a little bit.
| | 00:18 |
So I am going to take scale down to 0%.
| | 00:21 |
And right now, if we touch our Range
Selector, basically what we'll see is that
| | 00:27 |
we have, I will just animate the Start
value up a little bit so you can see this,
| | 00:31 |
we have this little Range Selector
here and everything is falling within the
| | 00:36 |
bounds of the range selector by default.
| | 00:38 |
And so since our scale is 0%,
everything is scaled to 0%.
| | 00:42 |
So what we are doing here is changing
the bracket of the Range Selector, so that
| | 00:48 |
the Start value moves along to the right.
| | 00:52 |
And so then when it ends up, it
both starts here and ends here.
| | 00:55 |
So we can grab these range values here.
| | 00:58 |
Grab one of the sides.
| | 00:59 |
Move it left or right.
| | 01:00 |
So I am going to start with it at 0.
| | 01:03 |
Let's just go over right, when right
before it switches to the second character
| | 01:08 |
of the stills, and I'll click the
stopwatch for Start, moving time a little bit.
| | 01:13 |
Take that to 100%, and then
this kind of pops on like that.
| | 01:18 |
Let's go ahead and I am going to hit 'B'
for beginning of the work area, 'N' for the
| | 01:22 |
end of the work area.
| | 01:23 |
I am just going to do a
little RAM preview of this
| | 01:26 |
to preview the speed of this
text and see how it looks.
| | 01:31 |
Yep. That's exactly what I am looking for.
| | 01:33 |
I wanted to go quickly, but not too quickly.
| | 01:35 |
I kind of want to look like it was
popping on, but I didn't want it to fade in.
| | 01:39 |
So that's what I was looking for,
and that's how to animate the text.
| | 01:44 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Arranging the elements in 3D space| 00:00 | Now one of the next steps is
to erase the elements in 3D.
| | 00:03 | We really don't need to cover that too much.
| | 00:05 | That's covered extensively in After
Effects Essential Training Beyond the Basics,
| | 00:08 | but I do want to give you a couple
little tips as it applies to it here.
| | 00:12 | Just by way of review, we
can go into Switches modes.
| | 00:15 | And the layers we want to be in 3D.
| | 00:16 | Click this little switch to make them 3D.
| | 00:18 | And then if we want to, we can hit P
for position, and adjust them in Z-space
| | 00:24 | to move them forward or backwards.
| | 00:26 | And I recommend that that
might be done in the top view.
| | 00:29 | So you can arrange things that way.
| | 00:32 | Move them backwards like that.
| | 00:33 | It's really not what I want to get to in
this movie, because that's kind of simple.
| | 00:38 | What I do want to show you is
some little trick with this text.
| | 00:40 | If we grab this text and move it around,
you'll notice something really weird.
| | 00:45 | Notice it's deforming while we're
moving it around, and as beautiful and
| | 00:51 | psychedelic as this looks, that's kind of fun,
but that's actually not good for business.
| | 00:56 | It's not good for what we want to
accomplish here, because it's deforming as we
| | 01:00 | move, and we want to keep it
this same shape as the banner.
| | 01:03 | So if we move them together, it's
not going to look like it belongs to
| | 01:07 | the banner anymore.
| | 01:08 | This is because the nature of the warp
effect, the mesh warp effect that we used
| | 01:12 | to deform this text. It creates this grid.
| | 01:15 | And as you move the object within this
grid, it distorts based on where the grid
| | 01:21 | is and the grid is stationary.
| | 01:22 | So I am going to undo that.
| | 01:24 | Get it back to where it belongs.
| | 01:24 | And yeah, a few times here.
| | 01:27 | The way that we overcome
this is by pre-composing.
| | 01:30 | I am going to select these two layers,
not make them 3D, select Stay Tuned in
| | 01:34 | the banner.ai, Command+Shift+C or Ctrl+
Shift+C on the PC, PRECOMP, left banner,
| | 01:42 | hit OK. And then now as I move this, we
don't have any problems with it messing up.
| | 01:48 | And so we can make it 3D, hit P for
position, move it along the Z-axis and not
| | 01:54 | having any issues with the
warping getting messed up.
| | 01:57 | Now if you want to use the final result
as a guide, one of the things that I did
| | 02:02 | is I applied very little 3D.
| | 02:04 | We have the background elements you
could see moving quite a bit, just to give
| | 02:08 | it some depth back there.
| | 02:10 | I have this main halo speaker in the
background, not moving too much, still
| | 02:13 | wanting to keep that design framing,
just moving just a little bit, and then
| | 02:18 | we have the banner moving quite a
bit left and right as it depth cue.
| | 02:21 | And we also have a few of these
elements moving a little bit from side to side
| | 02:25 | but nothing too much.
| | 02:26 | Now you might choose to parent all
these layers to a null, spin them around on
| | 02:30 | the y-axis in z-space. Totally up to you.
| | 02:33 | That's not the look and feel that I
chose to go for with this project.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Making cracks with Advanced Lightning| 00:00 |
In the final video, the
elements pop out of the banner.
| | 00:03 |
And if you look in the bottom left-hand
corner here, a little crack starts, and
| | 00:08 |
then you see that pop in
right here, in this area.
| | 00:11 |
And then it goes behind the elements,
and then the virtual camera, which we'll
| | 00:16 |
animate later, pulls back and zooms into it.
| | 00:21 |
And then we follow this crack, and
the crack is what leads our view over to
| | 00:27 |
the right-hand side.
| | 00:29 |
And then we pan back out and see all
the other stuff kind of fall down there.
| | 00:33 |
But this crack was made with Advanced
Lightning, the Advanced Lightning Effect.
| | 00:37 |
So I am going show you just a
couple of tips to get you started.
| | 00:39 |
It is kind of tricky, it
does take some fiddling with.
| | 00:41 |
It's not an exact science.
| | 00:43 |
You'll never create this exact
crack, again, just because it's just a
| | 00:46 |
randomly generated pattern.
| | 00:48 |
But I can teach you the principles and
concepts I used to make it, and that's
| | 00:52 |
what we are going to go over here.
| | 00:52 |
So what I am going to do is I am
going to create a new solid by hitting
| | 00:56 |
Command+Y, or Ctrl+Y on the PC, select
the Timeline panel first, then again,
| | 01:01 |
Command+Shift+Y or Ctrl+Shift+Y on the PC.
| | 01:04 |
I am going to call this 'crack', and it
doesn't matter what color it is because as
| | 01:08 |
soon as you apply Advanced
Lightning it's going to replace the color.
| | 01:11 |
It's going to be completely gone.
| | 01:12 |
Let's go ahead and double-click
Advanced Lightning to apply the effect to
| | 01:15 |
this layer, and I need to search for it
in Effects and Presets panel to find it.
| | 01:19 |
I am going to zoom out here, and let's
go ahead and get it into crack position,
| | 01:24 |
the top point, the origin point. Drag
it over to the left-hand side, and the
| | 01:28 |
direction point, we'll move
that over to the right-hand side.
| | 01:32 |
Now obviously it looks a little bit like
a crack, because of it's lightning, but
| | 01:35 |
the glow is really what's turning us off.
| | 01:37 |
So first of all, let's go
ahead and go to Glow Settings.
| | 01:41 |
Take the Glow Radius to 0
and the Glow Opacity to 0.
| | 01:44 |
So now there is no glow,
just what they call the core.
| | 01:47 |
That's the main part of the lightning.
| | 01:50 |
And we are going to open up Core
Settings, change the Core Color.
| | 01:53 |
Clicking on the Color
Swatch, take this to black.
| | 01:56 |
It's a little intense for my liking, so I am going to
take this to maybe 1.2 or so. Maybe even just 1.
| | 02:03 |
And of course you can play with the Opacity if
you wanted to have this back a little bit more.
| | 02:07 |
Just for the tutorial purposes though,
I am going to leave this a little bit on
| | 02:09 |
the strong side, so you
could see what I'm doing.
| | 02:12 |
And let's zoom in to 100%, so we can
see this a little bit more closely here.
| | 02:17 |
We have a lot of elements going on.
| | 02:18 |
It takes a little bit more time to render.
| | 02:20 |
I want to take down some of this Forking.
| | 02:23 |
The Forking are these little things
that splinter off from the main core.
| | 02:26 |
If I take Forking to 0%, then we
have a complete absence of forking.
| | 02:32 |
So what I want to do is maybe have a
little bit, so there's some splinter cracks
| | 02:36 |
popping off of this, but nothing too much.
| | 02:40 |
I am also going to need to use
these expert settings to play with the
| | 02:43 |
Complexity a little bit.
| | 02:44 |
So if you take the Complexity down
completely, we just get a straight line.
| | 02:48 |
So as I increase the Complexity then
we have a lot of intensity, a lot of
| | 02:52 |
branching off, a lot of
intricacies to this line.
| | 02:55 |
And also same thing with Turbulence.
| | 02:58 |
If I take this down, it will
smooth out the line a little bit.
| | 03:01 |
We don't want to smooth it out too much,
because we start getting like this, and
| | 03:03 |
then all the edges are
round, it looks fake-tastic.
| | 03:06 |
So I want to bring this up a little bit.
| | 03:09 |
And again, it's a balance between
Turbulence and Complexity, and then as you play
| | 03:13 |
with them, you'll probably need to go back
and adjust the Forking value just a little bit.
| | 03:16 |
Now you'll also want to animate the
lightning, or the crack, coming on and
| | 03:21 |
cracking through the screen.
| | 03:22 |
I did this with a mask set to
Feather, just a regular old rectangular
| | 03:25 |
mask that I animated.
| | 03:27 |
Again, you could find out more about
that in After Effects Essential Training and
| | 03:29 |
Beyond the Basics courses on lynda.com.
| | 03:32 |
But one other way that you might
choose to animate like that is by using Decay.
| | 03:37 |
As I increase the Decay value you could
see that the forks over here are kind of
| | 03:43 |
receding away as we take down the decay value.
| | 03:47 |
But the thing is I'll want to
actually decay the entire core as well, so we
| | 03:52 |
need to check Decay Main Core here, and then we
could actually animate this coming on and off.
| | 03:58 |
You may want to use Shift or Ctrl or
Shift or Command on the Mac to make this to
| | 04:03 |
slow down or speed up.
| | 04:04 |
If you hold the Shift, it's going to go faster.
| | 04:05 |
If you hold Ctrl or Command, it's
going to go slower, but that might help.
| | 04:09 |
So we might want to start
here with a little bit of a crack.
| | 04:13 |
Maybe I'll click the stopwatch, move
in time a little bit, and then take
| | 04:17 |
down the decay value.
| | 04:18 |
Again, we might want to hold Shift a
little bit, there we go, so that the crack
| | 04:23 |
kind of appears to animate on.
| | 04:26 |
Now this happens a little too quickly.
| | 04:28 |
And one of the things I tried to do
when I was animating the lightning bolts
| | 04:32 |
or the crack here, is I tried to
stagger it, like usually when things crack,
| | 04:36 |
they kind of crack and then go a
little bit and then more, and then crack a
| | 04:39 |
little bit and then more.
| | 04:40 |
There's kind of like these bursts and
then kind of slow periods of cracking,
| | 04:44 |
and that's kind of where I was going for there.
| | 04:46 |
So you'll need more than two keyframes
if you want to also achieve that effect.
| | 04:50 |
That's a few tips for creating
cracks in Advanced Lightning.
| | 04:55 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating music note particles with Foam| 00:00 | One of my favorite components of this
project are these little music notes,
| | 00:04 | these little music note particles that
kind of spit out from the sides of our
| | 00:08 | little Design Elements here.
| | 00:10 | I love the way they contrast with
everything else that's going on here.
| | 00:15 | They are these kind of like little, dainty
music notes, kind of doing their own thing.
| | 00:18 | And meanwhile there is like these
really hard, sinister-looking dragons, robots
| | 00:23 | explosion, and these little music notes
are kind of leisurely doing their own thing.
| | 00:27 | That's kind of fun.
| | 00:28 | I created these particles with an
effect called Foam in After Effects.
| | 00:32 | Now there is extensive
Foam training on lynda.com.
| | 00:36 | I have created a series called After
Effects Effects, and I've also gone really
| | 00:39 | into detail on Foam in my After
Effects Beyond the Basic Series.
| | 00:43 | So there's plenty of information on the
Online Training Library already, but I
| | 00:46 | want to show you, in this movie, some
of the additional challenges I had when
| | 00:49 | creating these particles
for this specific project.
| | 00:53 | Now the music notes that I used for
the particle itself were from this layer
| | 00:59 | music notes from this PSD sword music stuff.
| | 01:02 | It has a bunch of stuff here, just
this one layer is what we are looking at.
| | 01:06 | I created this solid Music Note Particles,
and I am going to drag this layer over
| | 01:10 | that solid, just so we can
see what's on this layer.
| | 01:13 | As you can see, there's a whole bunch
of musical garbage on this layer, and I
| | 01:16 | only want to use the 16th note. These are these two
notes that are connected by this double bar here.
| | 01:21 | But the problem is let's say I mask this
out, so I can use just those 16th notes.
| | 01:28 | The problem is that foam
will not recognize the mask.
| | 01:32 | It will see everything as if there
was no mask, and so what I need to do is
| | 01:37 | pre-compose this layer.
| | 01:39 | Now I could actually just delete this
layer, and select it here in the project
| | 01:44 | panel, and drag it to the new
composition icon to create a whole new composition
| | 01:48 | with it, and then I can create a mask as before.
| | 01:53 | One of the problems that you might run
into, right now I have a Transparency
| | 01:57 | Grid showing which you can toggle with
this button here, but sometimes you might
| | 02:01 | not have the Transparency Grid on,
and so you see just black on black.
| | 02:06 | So you might want to create a new solid
layer of any other color, any non-black
| | 02:11 | color, the size of the composition.
| | 02:13 | You might want to create that layer, and
just have it on the background, just so
| | 02:16 | you could see what you're doing.
| | 02:18 | However, if we go back to this working
composition and drag this new composition
| | 02:22 | that we are going to use for the
particles here, we are actually going to have
| | 02:25 | this layer turned up.
| | 02:26 | I just want to show you
this cool little trick here.
| | 02:28 | As you can see, this background is
something that will not work for us because
| | 02:34 | we can still see the background.
| | 02:35 | We just wanted to use it temporarily,
just so we can see that what we were doing.
| | 02:38 | So we didn't have black on black here
in the child comp, but in the master comp
| | 02:43 | it's going to create some problems,
especially if this was our particle.
| | 02:46 | They are not going to be
music-note shaped particles.
| | 02:47 | They're are going to be rectangular particles.
| | 02:49 | That's not what we want.
| | 02:50 | So here's a cool trick.
| | 02:51 | I am going to right-click on
this bottom red solid layer.
| | 02:53 | We just want to use this as a guide,
just as a helper temporarily, while we are
| | 02:57 | in this composition.
| | 02:58 | So if I right-click on it,
and select Guide layer,
| | 03:01 | we'll see this little pound sign and
that indicates this layer is a guide layer,
| | 03:04 | which means that if we were to put this
into a parent composition such as this,
| | 03:09 | then that layer would not render.
| | 03:12 | After Effects recognizes that it's
just a working helper, and it's not a
| | 03:16 | permanent fixture or something
that we actually want to see.
| | 03:18 | So it gets rid of it
automatically, which is really handy.
| | 03:21 | So I am going to keep that as a Guide layer.
| | 03:22 | I am going to go back
and select this music note.
| | 03:24 | I am actually going to center this,
and put this right in the middle.
| | 03:28 | That makes it easier to deal
with, I find from my experience.
| | 03:31 | You know what that particle is going to be.
| | 03:33 | Now we don't actually want
to apply Foam to this layer.
| | 03:36 | This is just going to be the custom
particle shape we'll be using, or the custom
| | 03:39 | particle layer, I should say.
| | 03:41 | I am going to turn off this layer's visibility.
| | 03:43 | I am going to select the
Music Note Particles solid layer.
| | 03:46 | Nothing special about this old solid.
| | 03:48 | It's just a regular old
run-of-the mill solid layer.
| | 03:50 | And I am going to apply the Foam Effect
to that solid layer, and let's go ahead
| | 03:56 | and do some fiddling with said Foam Effect.
| | 03:58 | I am going to take the
view from Draft to Rendered.
| | 04:02 | Next I am going to open up Rendering.
| | 04:04 | I am going to take the Bubble texture
from default bubble up to User Defined.
| | 04:09 | Then I am going to change bubble
texture layer from None to Music Notes.
| | 04:14 | And there we have it.
| | 04:15 | You could actually even just scrub in
time and see all these cute little music
| | 04:18 | notes spewing forth. Great!
| | 04:21 | Now if you want to colorize them, of
course, we could applying something like
| | 04:25 | Tint, and then maybe we could Map
Black To, and choose the Eye Dropper tool
| | 04:30 | and sample that red color, so they are
kind of red - that's a little bright actually.
| | 04:33 | We'll talk a little bit more about
color correction in the next chapter, but
| | 04:37 | that will work for right now.
| | 04:38 | And of course, we'll want to open up
the Producer and click on the Producer
| | 04:42 | Point, and click on, let's say, the
left side of our design group.
| | 04:47 | And what I did is I also duplicated
this layer, and I made another copy on
| | 04:50 | the right-hand side.
| | 04:52 | I might want to reduce the
producer's size, so it's a smaller point that
| | 04:56 | it's emitting from.
| | 04:57 | I might also want to
decrease the production rates.
| | 05:00 | They are not making as many particles.
| | 05:03 | We also might want to open up physics and
push things to the left or what have you.
| | 05:07 | Again, this is totally customizable the
way you want, and for more information, of
| | 05:10 | course, go back to lynda.com and check
out all the great training on Foam there.
| | 05:15 | And actually if you wanted to see all
the settings that I used to create these
| | 05:19 | music note particles, I created an
animation preset for you in the Chapter 8
| | 05:23 | folder that you can use.
| | 05:25 | Now if you put the animation presets
folder in your After Effects Directory,
| | 05:29 | it will show up in this animation
presets dropdown, and also in the Effects
| | 05:32 | and Presents panel.
| | 05:33 | Otherwise, you can go to the
Animation menu at the top of the screen and
| | 05:36 | choose Apply Animation preset,
navigate to that preset from the Chapter 8
| | 05:41 | folder, and apply that.
| | 05:43 | And have those bubbles or those music
notes that I created just the same way I did.
| | 05:47 | So you can see what settings I used there.
| | 05:48 | Now I should point out one last thing.
| | 05:50 | There's zillions of
particle systems that we could use.
| | 05:53 | Now one of the reasons I actually
wanted to use Foam for this, is that these
| | 05:57 | music notes kind of feel foamy.
| | 05:59 | They feel like little bubbles.
| | 06:00 | They kind of have this
little dance-y personality.
| | 06:03 | They kind of pop like bubbles would.
| | 06:05 | They kind of drift along like floating.
| | 06:07 | They kind of bounce a little bit.
| | 06:09 | Again, from a Design
perspective, I wanted that balance.
| | 06:13 | I am not really like a super like
tough guy, so having like these cool red
| | 06:16 | dragons with the black eyes, like
that's a little on a tough side for me.
| | 06:19 | So I need something to balance out to
show my sensitive loving side, which I
| | 06:24 | think these little happy
animated music notes do nicely.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Animating characters entering the scene| 00:00 | So in this movie we are going to
talk about how to animate these
| | 00:02 | characters entering the scene.
| | 00:04 | Now by this point you should already
know how to animate things moving, and you
| | 00:08 | could probably tell from watching
the intro movie here that we just use a
| | 00:12 | simple position animation.
| | 00:15 | So we just start at one
place and end at another.
| | 00:18 | We'll cover this bouncing
effect in another tutorial.
| | 00:21 | It's actually coming up in the next movie, but
everything else is just pretty much a simple position.
| | 00:26 | So you might be wondering why are
we even taking time to cover this.
| | 00:29 | Well, the reason is, is that as you
start to get into that with this
| | 00:32 | particular project you'll notice a
problem that's very common in many
| | 00:35 | After Effects projects.
| | 00:37 | As you have been going through this
training series you have seen that we've
| | 00:39 | needed to pre-compose for certain reasons.
| | 00:41 | We have needed to pre-compose the
banner because of that weird psychedelic mesh
| | 00:45 | thing that happened when we moved the
text, and we had to pre-compose all these
| | 00:48 | other elements, so we could mass
them out, and remove the bottom of them.
| | 00:53 | So now we go to Animate, and we have a problem.
| | 00:56 | You see everything that we want to
animate, all of these goodies right here:
| | 01:00 | me, the robots, the dragons,
the sword, the guitars.
| | 01:02 | They are in this left
side object pre-composition.
| | 01:06 | Actually I think there's a couple
things that aren't in there, maybe the swords.
| | 01:09 | The guitars aren't in there, but the
majority of these items are in there.
| | 01:13 | So then you might say in response,
"Well, all you have to do now in CS4 is just
| | 01:16 | double-click that composition, and
then we can animate these things."
| | 01:19 | However, the problem comes because we
need to use this banner as a guide for how
| | 01:25 | far to animate these things.
| | 01:27 | So, let's say, for example, I have this upper
giddy layer, and I animate the position here.
| | 01:31 | And I drop him down.
| | 01:32 | How do I know how far to drop him down?
| | 01:34 | I might say, "Okay.
| | 01:35 | That's low enough, I'll just use that
as my starting point," but when I go back
| | 01:39 | over to my original comp,
my head is still showing.
| | 01:42 | So ideally, we'd be working in this
composition in the Timeline panel, and
| | 01:49 | we'll be looking at this
composition in the Composition panel.
| | 01:53 | The way to do that is by locking this view.
| | 01:57 | While you're looking at the
working comp, click this lock icon.
| | 02:01 | That will force it so that
this view will stay there.
| | 02:05 | So in other words, we are going to keep
looking at this composition even when we
| | 02:08 | toggle down here in the Timeline
panel over to a different comp.
| | 02:11 | So now what we can do is move the head
as we need to, and by the way, the live
| | 02:16 | up it doesn't quite work as good when
you're working in this workflow where you
| | 02:19 | are locking that view.
| | 02:21 | So you kind of have to move, and
then let it update, and then animate.
| | 02:24 | But at least now you can see what
you're doing before you animate or while
| | 02:30 | you're making adjustments in the pre-comp,
| | 02:32 | you can see what the
final results will look like.
| | 02:35 | This feature comes in handy all
the time, like when you are color
| | 02:37 | correcting something.
| | 02:39 | If we want to color correct or when we
go to color correct these objects, we
| | 02:42 | want to see what they
look like in the final thing.
| | 02:44 | We want to lock the view.
| | 02:45 | So this comes in handy all the time.
| | 02:47 | It comes in handy with the Effect controls.
| | 02:49 | You might lock the Effect controls and
then you might go to a different comp,
| | 02:53 | while you are still playing with the Effects
from a nested composition or what have you.
| | 02:58 | So I'll leave it to you to animate
the Y position of these objects as they
| | 03:02 | animate on screen, but just be aware
that that trick exists where you can lock
| | 03:08 | the comp, and then once you have
locked the view of it, you can work in
| | 03:11 | different composition and see the end results.
| | 03:13 | In the next movie, again, we are going
to look at how to create that kind of
| | 03:16 | bouncy effect, and by the way once
you're done with that view you can just go
| | 03:21 | ahead and click this padlock to unlock it.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using scale to simulate bounce| 00:00 |
So we are basically continuing on where
we left off in the last movie, where we
| | 00:03 |
animated this character
kind of popping on screen here.
| | 00:06 |
Let's do a little preview of
that so you can see what I did.
| | 00:09 |
The character basically just starts off from
the screen, and then just kind of pops on there.
| | 00:14 |
It looks okay, I mean it's starts -
it just animates on the Y position.
| | 00:17 |
And that's all what we are
going for in the last movie.
| | 00:19 |
And that's what it does, but there's
something really cheesy I guess about it.
| | 00:24 |
The whole thing is supposed to be
lighthearted and goofy, but this motion just
| | 00:28 |
seems so kind of like robotic and
really cheesy, just kind of doesn't fit.
| | 00:33 |
And when you have a cheesy element
like this, artistically speaking you
| | 00:36 |
really have two choices:
| | 00:37 |
Number one, obviously you can get rid of it.
| | 00:39 |
We can have everything kind of animate
on slow or whatever, or the other option
| | 00:43 |
is we can just acknowledge the
'problem' and say, "Yeah, it's cheesy, and we are
| | 00:48 |
going to exaggerate it and go crazy with it."
| | 00:50 |
Remember folks, one of the most
important ingredients in art is repetition.
| | 00:55 |
If you have one element that just really
doesn't fit, then it looks out of place.
| | 00:59 |
If you have two elements that don't fit,
well, then you are an artist my friend.
| | 01:03 |
And so what we want to do is we don't
want anything to stick out on its own.
| | 01:06 |
If something happens, if something
animates in a certain way, then ideally we
| | 01:10 |
like to replicate that somewhere else.
| | 01:12 |
And it just ties everything together.
| | 01:14 |
There's some innate thing in art where if
there is repetition it just feels better.
| | 01:19 |
And so what we want to do, is have
this spring on cheesy, but add to the
| | 01:25 |
cheesiness by having it bounce as well.
| | 01:28 |
So I am going to go back with my
Composition panel still locked.
| | 01:30 |
I am going to go down to the pre-comp,
the nested composition, and what we can
| | 01:34 |
do is hit 'S' for scale.
| | 01:36 |
And now I'm going to click this chain,
this little link icon, to unlink the X and
| | 01:40 |
Y scale, so I can scale them independently.
| | 01:43 |
So now I am going to back up until
I'm springing on the screen here,
| | 01:47 |
somewhere like that.
| | 01:49 |
And what I want to do is take down the X scale.
| | 01:53 |
I want it to be kind of like I am being
unfolded as I'm popping up, kind of like
| | 01:58 |
a little rocket that unfolds, or like a
tent or something like that that kind of
| | 02:02 |
like shoots up and then kind
of expands when it gets up.
| | 02:06 |
So I'm going to click the stopwatch
for scale, and then move in time a little
| | 02:10 |
bit, until I get to the top, at which
point I will actually take this value up.
| | 02:19 |
And actually let's just get this
keyframe over, and then we'll take this value
| | 02:23 |
to maybe 25, so it's a little bit
bigger, and then we are going to go out to
| | 02:27 |
maybe two or three frames.
| | 02:29 |
And take this down to let's say 13.
| | 02:32 |
And then back up to let's say 20, and
then down, and actually move in time a
| | 02:40 |
couple of frames over.
| | 02:42 |
Take this to 14 frames, and
then finally rest at 16 frames.
| | 02:48 |
Now it might actually add some easing
right here, but apparently After Effects
| | 02:53 |
has this weird quirk.
| | 02:54 |
I am not sure if it's a bug or what,
but you can't add easing to keyframes when
| | 02:59 |
you have this locked view.
| | 03:00 |
You actually have to unlock the view
and go back to this composition, and then
| | 03:04 |
add the easing when the view is
not large for whatever reason.
| | 03:07 |
I am not sure why that is.
| | 03:08 |
I'm not going to take the time to
do that now, but just be aware of it.
| | 03:11 |
So basically what I have done is I've
animated this X scale so that it gets big
| | 03:16 |
as it expands, and then it
overcompensates because it bounces, so it goes
| | 03:20 |
smaller than normal.
| | 03:22 |
And then it kind of starts regulating
where it goes a little bit bigger then
| | 03:24 |
normal, a little bit smaller than
normal, and then finally back to normal.
| | 03:29 |
So then if I Tab+Shift+left arrow
to get back to my main parent comp.
| | 03:33 |
Hit Enter to get there.
| | 03:34 |
Let's turn on Motion Blur for the comp.
| | 03:37 |
Turn on Motion Blur for the layer.
| | 03:40 |
And then let's do a ramp preview here hitting
0 on the numeric keypad, and see what we have.
| | 03:44 |
And that's actually rendering pretty
quick, so I am just going to keep talking.
| | 03:47 |
So here we go, and see that says, "You know
what? It's cheesy, and I love it being cheesy.
| | 03:54 |
So deal with it." I love that.
| | 03:56 |
So you might decide that this is a
little bit too fast. If that's the case, we
| | 04:00 |
can go and maybe a select some of these
keyframes, hold the Option key, and do a
| | 04:05 |
temporarily roving keyframe thing where we
hold down option on the Mac or Alt on the PC
| | 04:10 |
and stretch this out to
make this a little bit longer.
| | 04:12 |
I kind of like it how it is.
| | 04:14 |
It's fun being super fast like that,
and then if people don't like it or want
| | 04:17 |
to whine about it, they don't have that much
to whine about, because it happens really fast.
| | 04:21 |
But just as an extra element of
personality, and energy to your file, and
| | 04:25 |
anytime you can take a project or
something in your project, and add this kind
| | 04:28 |
like organic animation, all the better.
| | 04:31 |
And if you've watched any of my tutorials,
then you know that I'm always talking
| | 04:34 |
about how things animate too slow.
| | 04:36 |
People animate things really,
really slow, and it just drives me nuts.
| | 04:39 |
It just looks really, really fake, so
if you could animate things happening
| | 04:43 |
really fast like that, it just
seems, it just feels more realistic.
| | 04:48 |
Now you may hate this, and that's fine.
| | 04:50 |
It's a little over the top, but
that's what I chose to do, and that's how I
| | 04:53 |
did what I chose to do.
| | 04:56 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Making the final comp| 00:00 | Okay folks, super quick tutorial here.
| | 00:02 | Basically what we want to do now, we know
that we created this massively huge composition.
| | 00:07 | It's kind of like the big
comp, where everything resides.
| | 00:10 | And then we are going to have a smaller
composition that's going to be kind of
| | 00:12 | like window that's going to be
the viewer for this big composition.
| | 00:16 | So what I have done is created this master comp.
| | 00:19 | Now if you look at this it's 720x480
standard DV, except that they were just
| | 00:22 | using square pixels, because I know
it's only creating it for this training
| | 00:25 | series, so there is no point in
fiddling with pixel aspect ratios for that.
| | 00:29 | So what I am going to do is make
this composition 720x480 square pixels,
| | 00:33 | 29.97 frames per second, and also the
duration I'm going to make this 10 seconds as well.
| | 00:39 | So 10, period, then click OK.
| | 00:41 | Then we could go over to our Project panel.
| | 00:44 | I am just going to do a search
for a working comp. There we go.
| | 00:48 | Then I could drag this into my Master comp.
| | 00:51 | Of course, we'll need to scale this down,
so that it fits within this window here.
| | 01:00 | And get that about like that.
| | 01:03 | And then, so this is kind of how it's
going to be, we are going to be looking at
| | 01:07 | this part of the area here.
| | 01:09 | Now we could even zoom in on it
and see what this side is doing.
| | 01:14 | Then we'll zoom out a little bit, and
then we'll zoom into the crack, animate
| | 01:20 | this moving over, and then
we'll look at the right side.
| | 01:23 | So that's basically the modus operandi
of what we were doing with this project.
| | 01:28 | Of course, we're not going to take time to do
all of that in this training series, but
| | 01:31 | that's the methodology
behind these two major comps.
| | 01:35 | So we have the working comp where we
mail the stuff, and then we have the master
| | 01:38 | comp that's kind of like the viewer.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Animating the virtual camera| 00:00 | This movie is going to be less of a hands-on
tutorial, more of just kind of like a demo.
| | 00:03 | I wanted to give you some insight to how I
created this virtual camera, because we
| | 00:08 | want to get the effect that there
this camera kind of like panning in, like
| | 00:12 | zooming into the crack, and then
panning back out again or whatever.
| | 00:15 | But I didn't want to deal with a camera.
| | 00:17 | This is a very linear plane that we
have all of these objects on, and when you
| | 00:21 | introduce an After Effects Camera, you have
all these kind of like tilting issues a
| | 00:25 | lot times when you are moving side to side.
| | 00:27 | And so it's just easier to animate
this comp left and right, just to kind of
| | 00:31 | simulate a camera doing that.
| | 00:33 | So what I did here, you can see in my
keyframes, we have our composition, our
| | 00:37 | big composition in the background.
| | 00:38 | This is the real project file that I made.
| | 00:40 | And then what I did, is you can see
that I just kind of zoom out, and you could
| | 00:43 | see the big comp moving here,
the outline of the main comp.
| | 00:47 | And I moved it up, and then zoomed into it.
| | 00:51 | And you can see the scale got all the
way up to 100% as I zoomed in on the crack.
| | 00:56 | And then right here at this frame, there
is another keyframe where I pull back out.
| | 01:00 | And I adjust the position, and the scale.
| | 01:03 | So really all I'm doing here, is
playing around with the position and the
| | 01:07 | scale of the nested composition,
and using the position and the scale to
| | 01:12 | simulate a camera move.
| | 01:14 | Now don't get me wrong, there are tons
of benefits to After Effects cameras,
| | 01:19 | being able to play with the lenses and
depth of field, all that kind of stuff.
| | 01:23 | Very, very powerful stuff.
| | 01:24 | I'm not knocking After Effects cameras.
| | 01:26 | But for this particular project it
would've been a little more work than just
| | 01:30 | animating position and scale, and
the benefits, I don't think would have
| | 01:34 | been all that great.
| | 01:35 | So it was just easier, simpler for me,
in this project, to animate position and
| | 01:39 | scale, rather than all that jive.
| | 01:43 | And by the way, another way you could
have done that is to create a null
| | 01:46 | object and parent the big comp to the null object.
| | 01:49 | So that way you could actually animate
the comp's position, and then animate the
| | 01:54 | null object independent of that as well.
| | 01:56 | So maybe if you want to add some wiggle
to the null, and not to the comp or vice
| | 02:00 | versa, you can do that if you had two
separate controllers, in other words the
| | 02:04 | layer, and then the null object as well.
| | 02:07 | So there's a bunch of
different ways to do the same thing.
| | 02:08 | That's just how I chose to do it.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
9. Correcting ColorColor-correcting the subject| 00:00 | So now we get to one of my favorite parts
of the workflow and that is colorizing stuff.
| | 00:04 | And I put this at the end of the training
series because this is the way most people work.
| | 00:08 | Colorizing is definitely something done
at the end of the workflow. But that's
| | 00:12 | not always how I choose to work.
| | 00:13 | As a matter of fact, when I did this
project, colorizing is one of first things
| | 00:17 | I did once I brought it in
and laid out the basic design.
| | 00:20 | The reason why, is because
for me work needs to be fun.
| | 00:24 | The whole reason I am doing this for a
living is because I enjoy it. I love it.
| | 00:28 | And so while I am working on this
project, I want it to be as fun as possible.
| | 00:32 | And working with these assets that
just don't match at all and look atrocious
| | 00:37 | together initially, it's not
pleasing to me. I don't like that.
| | 00:40 | So I don't care that it's the
natural way that people do things.
| | 00:43 | They colorize stuff at the end.
| | 00:45 | I want to work with the
beautiful project right off the bat.
| | 00:48 | So for me, I color correct upfront.
| | 00:51 | Again, that's not the order of the day.
| | 00:52 | That's not what most people do, but I'm not
really concerned with what other people do.
| | 00:56 | I want to have a blast while
I'm working here in After Effects.
| | 00:58 | That's one of things that helps
me have a more enjoyable time.
| | 01:02 | Now while there are many ways to color
correct things in After Effects, tons
| | 01:06 | of different effects to play with, I
find that I never get where want to go
| | 01:10 | from just one effect.
| | 01:11 | I kind of need to have like a recipe,
like a smorgasbord, a little bit from a
| | 01:15 | bunch of different effects.
| | 01:17 | So I'm going to look at this footage, and we are going
to color correct this subject in this movie.
| | 01:21 | And it's just a little bit too clean for me.
| | 01:24 | So one of the things I like doing is applying
the Noise Effect, in the Noise and Grain
| | 01:29 | category, probably not use color noise,
and increase noise just a little bit.
| | 01:35 | If we go crazy now too much it's going
to look like that, which is atrocious, so
| | 01:40 | we might try just 10%.
| | 01:42 | And there is the before, and there is the after.
| | 01:45 | It's a very subtle difference.
| | 01:46 | We could even bump that up just a little
bit, but sometimes adding just a little
| | 01:51 | bit of noise, add some texture,
some character, and I like it.
| | 01:55 | Again, you may choose to not go with
that, and also we may correct this later
| | 01:59 | based on other color adjusting things
that we add, but that's one of the things
| | 02:03 | that I applied here.
| | 02:04 | Next I applied a Levels effect, and as
I move the Midtone slider around, I kind
| | 02:09 | of want to get a little bit more
contrast here, because what we were going to do
| | 02:12 | is colorize this, so I can crush the
blacks, which I normally wouldn't do if
| | 02:16 | I were going for like a full-color type thing.
| | 02:19 | But in this instance, I kind of want to
make the brights brighter, and the darks
| | 02:23 | a little bit darker then they need to be,
| | 02:25 | so when I colorize them they
are a little bit more intense.
| | 02:28 | So there is before levels and after levels.
| | 02:31 | And actually I might even
overdo this a little bit more.
| | 02:35 | It doesn't look good by itself, but I
know that it's going to look a little
| | 02:39 | better once I started to
applying tinting and stuff.
| | 02:42 | And speaking of tinting, I am going to
apply the Tritone Effect, which allows
| | 02:46 | you to colorize the highlights,
midtones, and shadows independently.
| | 02:50 | So what I'm going to do is
I'm going to lock this view.
| | 02:55 | This will enable me to go back to my
working comp where I see our color swatch,
| | 03:01 | the deep red solid, then for the
midtones, eyedropper, I can click the
| | 03:04 | eyedropper, and click that color swatch
to colorize the subject with that color.
| | 03:10 | So I am going to go back to my main comp
that I'm working in here, pre-comp left
| | 03:13 | side objects, and we'll go ahead and
unlock that Effect Controls panel.
| | 03:17 | Now obviously this is a little intense.
| | 03:19 | So I am going to increase
Blend with Original, a little bit.
| | 03:23 | So it's a little bit more of a subtle tint.
| | 03:25 | And this is again where I had want it
to go back, maybe to Levels, and maybe
| | 03:29 | not crush the blacks quite so much, maybe not
pop the highlights as much or pop them more.
| | 03:35 | And so we have a little bit of control
and flexibility, and that way we can go
| | 03:38 | back and make changes as we need to.
| | 03:42 | And what I found when I was working
with this particular file is I really just
| | 03:47 | couldn't get what I was after
with just noise levels and Tritone.
| | 03:51 | So I called in my good old buddy Color
Balance, and Color Balance helped me to
| | 03:57 | get where I wanted to go.
| | 03:58 | So I might get a little
bit more red in the Shadows.
| | 04:02 | I might get a little bit more red in the
midtones there, more red in the highlights.
| | 04:08 | And we could try to preserve luminosity.
| | 04:11 | And I am actually really
liking the way that looks.
| | 04:13 | We also might want to increase Blend
with Original if it's getting a little bit
| | 04:16 | too saturated, and this kind of is a
little bit saturated for my liking.
| | 04:21 | You also might want to play with Noise
now that we have everything in our image,
| | 04:25 | and there are all these color
adjustment effects on our image here.
| | 04:29 | We are going to see a
different result with Noise.
| | 04:31 | So there is before the
noise, and after the noise.
| | 04:34 | You can see that it's kind of
adjusting our luminance as well.
| | 04:37 | So I might want to take this down to
about 35 or so, and there you have it.
| | 04:43 | It's still a little dark for my taste,
| | 04:46 | so I might want to bring that up a
little bit, and again, we could crush
| | 04:51 | the blacks if we need to, because this is
kind of like a stylized-looking thing anyways.
| | 04:56 | Now what we could do is one of two things:
| | 04:58 | we could select one of these effects,
Shift+Click the bottom effect to select
| | 05:02 | all of them, and then copy them, and
then paste them to the other clips here,
| | 05:06 | or with these effects selected, we
could go to the Animation menu, and create a
| | 05:13 | new animation preset, and apply the new
Animation preset to all of the other clips as well.
| | 05:18 | So to see before and after, we can go
to our layer, and then click off the
| | 05:22 | Effects icon, and click on the Effects icon.
| | 05:24 | So there is before, and there is after.
| | 05:28 | Now it's still little dark, so we are
going to basically end the movie here.
| | 05:31 | But feel free to go in and experiment and play
with this, and see what you can come up with.
| | 05:37 | Again, there is no right or wrong answer here.
| | 05:39 | But you can just kind of experiment
until you are getting the look that you want.
| | 05:43 | To see the end result here, scrub in time
here, and this is what the end result was.
| | 05:48 | Now it's a little bit softer and
more blurred out in the original.
| | 05:53 | And I actually kind of like that look
because it just looks more fake, and
| | 05:56 | stylized, and cartoony, and fun, and
that's kind of what I was going for.
| | 06:00 | And this looks like I was just doing a bad job.
| | 06:02 | So I might want to play with Levels a
little bit and keep going back and forth
| | 06:06 | with the different effects, and
honestly that's the way that I work.
| | 06:08 | I never go into these effects, and I
don't think anybody does, apply these
| | 06:12 | effects, and say, "I know
exactly what I'm looking for here."
| | 06:15 | You can have a general feel for it,
and if that's not working, then you add a
| | 06:18 | new effect, to kind of tweak that a little bit.
| | 06:20 | Then you might have to go back in
your layers stack to this effect or that
| | 06:23 | effect, and make the changes, and
that's kind of what it is when you are doing
| | 06:26 | color corrections, kind of like this
push-pull-back-and-forth type thing,
| | 06:29 | until you get the results
that you are looking for.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Color-correcting the dragons| 00:01 | Now we are going to colorize the dragon.
| | 00:03 | This is actually a little bit more
complicated than it seems at first.
| | 00:07 | If we play the original movie here,
you'll notice that at first glance it seems
| | 00:12 | like I just tinted the dragon red, but
if you look closely between the two here,
| | 00:18 | you'll see that there is a lot going on.
| | 00:19 | This black stripe down at the dragon here,
we actually brightened, rather than darkened.
| | 00:25 | And the eyes and the teeth
I turned pure Black.
| | 00:29 | So this is basically just a red and
black dragon, but we've actually flipped
| | 00:34 | some of the colors, but not all the colors.
| | 00:37 | So let me show you what I did here.
| | 00:38 | It's kind of interesting fun little
trick, something I have never really done
| | 00:41 | anything like before.
| | 00:42 | So what I am going to do in this
composition, is first I'm going to apply the
| | 00:47 | Tint Effect, and interestingly enough
what I am going to do is I am going to
| | 00:53 | turn off the visibility of the Tint
Effect so that that way we can sample some
| | 00:57 | of the colors of the original Dragon.
| | 00:59 | So I am actually going to map black
to green, maybe a brighter green here.
| | 01:06 | And then I am going to map white to
black, and when we turn this on,
| | 01:13 | there's something that looks kind of
like the dragon, but not all the way.
| | 01:17 | And actually I am going to take
this white to pure black. There we go.
| | 01:22 | So it's very similar to the dragon,
but again, we are already getting the
| | 01:25 | brightness of the lines
and the darkness of the eyes.
| | 01:29 | I kind of want it to look a little bit
more of a sinister-looking dragon than this.
| | 01:32 | Like this is a cute.
| | 01:33 | It's definitely not Puff-the-Magic-
Dragon cute, but still a little kind of
| | 01:37 | cutesy, and I want it to look like
more sinister or something, I don't know.
| | 01:42 | So I am going to apply the Levels
Effect, and what I am going to do is I am
| | 01:46 | going to crush the blacks a little bit,
and generally lighten the whole thing,
| | 01:53 | and brighten some of
those highlights a little bit.
| | 01:58 | So somewhere in there, now we are not
totally done yet. We are going to apply
| | 02:04 | Hue/Saturation, and this
is how we get it to be red.
| | 02:10 | I am going to take Master Hue.
| | 02:11 | I am going to take this down to about,
I don't know, somewhere around there.
| | 02:21 | And you can use the subject
coloration that we did last time as a guide.
| | 02:24 | That looked to be about the right color family.
| | 02:28 | But the thing is I need to take this
Master Saturation down just a little bit,
| | 02:34 | and it's a little bit too blue.
| | 02:35 | So let's make that a little
bit warmer, not that warm.
| | 02:38 | And that's looking okay.
| | 02:42 | I might need to bump up the Saturation just
a little bit, and I also might want to
| | 02:46 | hold down your Command or Ctrl key to
really finely tune this dragon, so you get
| | 02:50 | exactly the right color
family that you're looking for.
| | 02:54 | And now to test this, we can go over
to the working comp and see this against
| | 02:58 | the background, so we can see all the
teeth and stuff, and our project has
| | 03:02 | really started to take shape here.
| | 03:03 | It's starting to look a little bit
more decent, a little bit more attractive.
| | 03:06 | I am probably too desaturated, this
subject is, and we probably want to change
| | 03:11 | the tint of these music notes, but I
think these dragons look really sexy,
| | 03:14 | especially in front of that background
with the black teeth and the black eyes.
| | 03:18 | It's pretty wicked man.
| | 03:18 | It's pretty wicked.
| | 03:19 | So I'm starting to like this.
| | 03:21 | There is a few more things obviously
we need to do, and one of biggest things is
| | 03:23 | to take care of this orange
explosion that really doesn't fit, and that's
| | 03:26 | actually going to be really fun.
| | 03:26 | So let's actually go to the next
movie where we'll take care of that.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Stylizing the explosion| 00:00 |
Now we are not only going to colorize
the explosion, but we're also going to
| | 00:05 |
stylize it as well.
| | 00:06 |
If we look at our original video here
on the left, you can see that we have -
| | 00:11 |
it's very kind of cartoony and
it looks quite awesome actually.
| | 00:14 |
The edges are very different.
| | 00:15 |
And if we look here at the original,
we'll see that it's a little bit too
| | 00:20 |
realistic to blend with all the other
stuff going on in our project and also
| | 00:25 |
these edges are very smoky and wispy.
| | 00:27 |
And again, we want something a little
bit more stylized and artificial looking.
| | 00:31 |
Now this is a really interesting series of
processes that we are going to go through.
| | 00:36 |
So I am going to select
DVSplosion05, one of these layers.
| | 00:41 |
This top one, layer number 6 in the
Working Comp, is the top explosion.
| | 00:45 |
So that's what we are going to work on.
| | 00:46 |
We'll just copy and paste the effects
to the lower explosion after we are done.
| | 00:51 |
The first thing I am going to
do is I'm going to apply Levels.
| | 00:55 |
And to do this I am going to drag these
Highlights, so it gets kind of cartoony.
| | 01:00 |
I'm also going to crush the blacks, so those
edges get a little bit more intense and dark.
| | 01:07 |
And also darken all the
rest of the Midtones here.
| | 01:13 |
This looks really terrible, but what
I'm trying to do here is I'm trying to
| | 01:17 |
isolate these different tones.
| | 01:20 |
So instead of having it like if you
look at the bottom one for contrast here,
| | 01:24 |
where just everything is kind of midtone-ish,
I want to make it pop so that the
| | 01:28 |
Highlights are very strongly
differentiated from the Shadows.
| | 01:33 |
Now if you see most of my After
Effects training, when I talk about
| | 01:36 |
colorization, I am always very
careful to say, "Don't crush the blacks."
| | 01:39 |
Don't force dark areas like this to be
pure black and don't do the same thing
| | 01:44 |
with the Highlights.
| | 01:45 |
But we are not
trying to create realism here.
| | 01:47 |
We are absolutely trying to create
something more stylized, and like I said, artificial.
| | 01:52 |
So the fact the we are crushing the Highlights is okay.
| | 01:55 |
We just want to kind of pull out the
Highlight and brighten Midtone data and
| | 01:59 |
then crush everything else to black.
| | 02:01 |
Now the next thing I am going to
do is apply the Cartoon effect.
| | 02:05 |
What better way to create stylized
footage than with the Cartoon effect.
| | 02:09 |
Now I have a kind of love-hate
relationship with the cartoon effect.
| | 02:13 |
Occasionally, I'll love it. Usually I hate it.
| | 02:16 |
That's my relationship with it.
| | 02:17 |
But in this case it really helped to
achieve the look that we are looking for.
| | 02:21 |
I am going to take Detail Radius to 2,
and under Film, I'll take Shading
| | 02:26 |
Steps to 2 as well.
| | 02:28 |
And Shading Smoothness to 68.7.
| | 02:33 |
And then in the Edge area, I am going to
leave the Threshold at 1.6, the Width at 1.5.
| | 02:39 |
although I am going to
take the Softness up to 95%.
| | 02:43 |
Then we will open up the old Advanced
area over here, and I'm going to take Edge
| | 02:47 |
Enhancement up to 13, and then Edge
Black Level to .1, and Edge Contrast to .53.
| | 02:57 |
So you can see what we have done here is
made this even more artificial looking, and
| | 03:02 |
kind of smoothed out little bit
more comic bookie, cartoonish if you will.
| | 03:06 |
So here's the original footage.
| | 03:08 |
Here is after Levels.
| | 03:09 |
Here is after Cartoon.
| | 03:10 |
Now we are going to make this look cool.
| | 03:12 |
I am going to apply the Tint effect.
| | 03:15 |
And what we are going to do is scroll
down our Timeline till we can see the
| | 03:19 |
Lime Green Solid, click the Map White
To eyedropper, and click on the swatch
| | 03:25 |
for Lime Green Solid.
| | 03:27 |
And there is our explosion.
| | 03:29 |
Now as a final touch, one of things I
really don't like about the way this
| | 03:32 |
looks, these edges are just too wispy and weird.
| | 03:37 |
For an explosion, a real life
explosion those little soft edges are
| | 03:40 |
perfect, they are amazing.
| | 03:41 |
But what I want here, I want these to
be little more concrete and stylized.
| | 03:45 |
So I am going to apply the Roughen Edges effect.
| | 03:47 |
Now the default settings already
kind of look cool enough, looks like a
| | 03:52 |
cross between and explosion and ink splatter, and
that's actually kind of the look I was going for.
| | 03:57 |
To enhance this though, I am just
going to take the Border value to 23.4.
| | 04:02 |
I'm also going to take the Edge
Sharpness value right below that to .48.
| | 04:07 |
And finally, I'll take the Scale value to 77.
| | 04:09 |
So we kind of get some smoke-ish edges
around here, but they're definitely kind
| | 04:16 |
of stylized and artificial.
| | 04:18 |
So I decided to go for a little bit of
an organic look. Of course you're more
| | 04:23 |
than welcome to leave the edges
like so or to change the Roughen Edges
| | 04:28 |
settings to your taste.
| | 04:29 |
But that's basically what I used
to create a stylized explosion.
| | 04:34 |
Once you're done, of course, as
before we can select the first effect,
| | 04:37 |
Shift+click the last one,
Command+C or Ctrl+C to copy.
| | 04:40 |
Select the bottom explosion,
and Command+V or Ctrl+V to paste.
| | 04:44 |
And now both explosions are
stylized and looking good.
| | 04:50 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding banner highlights with Ramp| 00:01 | Another reason why we adjust colors is
not just to make things look better, but
| | 00:06 | also to aid in compositing, to make
them look a little bit more realistic.
| | 00:09 | So what we are going to do is add a
little bit of gradient touch to our text to
| | 00:13 | make it more fully appear that
it's actually on this banner here.
| | 00:17 | Let's go ahead and apply the Ramp
effect to the Stay Tuned text here, and at
| | 00:21 | first we are not seeing too much.
| | 00:23 | So what I am going to do is click the
Start of the Ramp, the black point to be
| | 00:26 | in the center of our text, and then I'm
going to click the end of Ramp to be on
| | 00:32 | the outside edge of our text.
| | 00:34 | And then what I am going to do is I
am going to change the Ramp Shape from
| | 00:37 | Linear Ramp to Radial Ramp so that we
have kind of black in the center and
| | 00:41 | white on the Highlights.
| | 00:43 | So I kind of want it to look like it's dipping.
| | 00:45 | And there is a little bit of Shadow
area where it's dipping and then where it
| | 00:48 | comes to this edge it kind of is
exposed to the light a little bit more and
| | 00:52 | picks up on some of these Highlights here.
| | 00:54 | And now we need to blend with the
original, so I am going to take this up pretty
| | 00:58 | high maybe to about 73 or so.
| | 01:02 | You could take this higher or lower to taste,
but that's pretty much what I'm looking for.
| | 01:08 | Now if we select Ramp, we have our
little effects control points here so we
| | 01:11 | could change the white effect control
point on the edge, bring that closer.
| | 01:15 | If we want to have more Highlights
we'll drag it further away, if we just have
| | 01:18 | Highlights just on the outer edges there.
| | 01:20 | I kind of like mine sitting right
where it was on the edge of the text.
| | 01:23 | It doesn't seem like it really
made that much of a difference.
| | 01:26 | This doesn't look that believable anyways.
| | 01:28 | But if we take off the Ramp, you'll
see that it is a considerable difference.
| | 01:32 | It does add a lot of texture.
| | 01:34 | The inside text here, isn't changed
all that much, but the outside edges are
| | 01:39 | really changed and that
just difference in Luminosity.
| | 01:42 | You'll be surprised that how much that
adds to the character of an object like
| | 01:47 | this when you are trying to
composite or blend them together.
| | 01:49 | Now I didn't choose to do this, but I
suppose if you wanted to, you could also
| | 01:52 | select the banner and do the same thing
with the banner, which actually now that I am
| | 01:56 | looking at it, the banner
is only five seconds long.
| | 01:58 | I should drag the end point there
and make that 10 seconds while we are
| | 02:01 | talking about the banner.
| | 02:02 | And the same thing here, Start of Ramp is black.
| | 02:04 | Put that in the middle. End of Ramp.
| | 02:06 | Put that along the outer edge.
| | 02:09 | And then change this from Linear to
Radial, and so the edges are whitened.
| | 02:13 | And then we could just blend with
originals to a really high value, and take
| | 02:18 | this down a little bit.
| | 02:19 | We start to lose some details in the
Shadows. That's one of the reasons why I want to
| | 02:22 | stay away from it, but there's that.
| | 02:24 | One of the reasons why I frequently
add gradients and things like that to
| | 02:28 | text or things that blend, it's
just better to have any type of degree of
| | 02:33 | variation in Luminosity, just
anything helps with a composite.
| | 02:37 | It makes things look more believable.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Colorizing other elements| 00:00 |
At this point, things are really
starting to come together and it's a good time
| | 00:03 |
to kind of take stock of your
project and how you like things.
| | 00:07 |
At this point, when I was creating this
project I decided that I didn't really
| | 00:10 |
like the swords too much.
| | 00:12 |
So I just went and took the visibility
off of the swords, and I also decided
| | 00:16 |
that I need a little bit of something
on the edges here when the dragons are
| | 00:20 |
kind of popping out of the banner.
| | 00:21 |
This is just like a
little empty feeling right here.
| | 00:24 |
So what I decided to do was to go into
our PSD file where we had our music notes
| | 00:30 |
that we used for Foam.
| | 00:32 |
Just double-click that comp to open
it up, and if I turn this Mask to None
| | 00:37 |
temporarily, we can see we
have other elements here.
| | 00:40 |
And so what I did is I decided to take
this treble clef and isolate it with the
| | 00:44 |
Mask, and then put that right here on
the sides, on the left and right sides so
| | 00:49 |
you can see what that looks
like here in the final project.
| | 00:53 |
So you could see no swords but I do
have these little treble clefs sticking out
| | 00:58 |
of the left and right sides of my banner.
| | 01:00 |
By the way, just little inside joke for
those of you that know about music, on
| | 01:03 |
the left-hand side where I had stuff on
top, I had treble clefs and then on the
| | 01:08 |
other side I had bass
clefs coming out the bottom.
| | 01:11 |
Okay, so getting back here we are going
to colorize a few things starting with
| | 01:14 |
these robots, the Eddie Technology layer.
| | 01:16 |
What I am going to do here, if I apply
Tint it's going to remove either the dark
| | 01:21 |
Shadows or the bright Highlights,
and I don't want them fiddled with.
| | 01:24 |
So I am just going to
use Color Balance for this.
| | 01:31 |
And what I am going to do is just increase the
Green in the Shadows, and Midtones,
| | 01:37 |
little bit in the Highlights until we
get the green that we are looking for.
| | 01:41 |
And as we go back over to the Working
Comp to test this, we could see that
| | 01:46 |
little bit, maybe too much blue here.
| | 01:48 |
We need this to be more of a yellowish-green,
so what we can do is just
| | 01:52 |
remove a little bit of blue from, maybe not the
Shadows, maybe the Midtones. There we go.
| | 01:58 |
That's probably about the
green that we are looking for.
| | 02:00 |
We might want to turn on
Preserve Luminosity.
| | 02:02 |
Oh yeah! That's good.
| | 02:03 |
And that's getting there.
| | 02:06 |
We could spend some more time fiddling with it,
but that's good enough for our purposes now.
| | 02:10 |
We also might want to go to things
like the guitar, and the guitar is black.
| | 02:15 |
I am not sure I like that a lot.
| | 02:18 |
So I am just going to apply Tint, and
then Map Black To one of the colors from
| | 02:23 |
the dragon and then we might
want to Map White To black.
| | 02:28 |
So we have black hardware on a red guitar.
| | 02:33 |
See how that looks. Yeah, looks better.
| | 02:35 |
Now of course you can also see the
problem I created by opening up that music notes.
| | 02:38 |
I turned off the Mask and you can see
all this junk, so I don't want that.
| | 02:41 |
So I am going to take this back
to Add and everything looks good.
| | 02:46 |
Now at this point we are pretty much
done color correcting these elements.
| | 02:50 |
However, that doesn't mean that you
have to be done playing with this.
| | 02:53 |
If this were a real project, I
might go in and fine tune here.
| | 02:56 |
For example, the robot.
| | 02:58 |
The green is little bit too intense.
| | 02:59 |
I might want to dial that back.
| | 03:01 |
You can do that easily by just taking
down little bit of Hue/Saturation or
| | 03:04 |
adding Hue/Saturation and
removing a little but of Saturation.
| | 03:08 |
Do that really quickly, just
take this down a little bit.
| | 03:11 |
His eyes are a little bit too saturated
as well so if they are a little bit less
| | 03:17 |
alive and attention grabbing all the better.
| | 03:19 |
See I like that a little bit better there.
| | 03:21 |
Then when we finally move in time and
get the big explosion with green there,
| | 03:25 |
that just looks all the better.
| | 03:27 |
If we could find a frame
with some extra green stuff in there.
| | 03:31 |
Everything seems to be hiding behind me.
| | 03:34 |
But you could kind of see these little
speckles of green make the banner pop,
| | 03:37 |
and make the robots pop a little bit.
| | 03:38 |
But again there's room for fine-tuning here.
| | 03:41 |
We might want to play with the Hue of
the green on Stay Tuned and the robot to
| | 03:45 |
make sure that they are a little
more in harmony with each other.
| | 03:48 |
Now we might want to change some of the
reds or the color of me, or whatever you
| | 03:52 |
want to do to kind of customize the tone here.
| | 03:54 |
The last thing I want to do as far as
color goes for this project, and this
| | 03:57 |
training series, is to add a little
bit of color to the background using
| | 04:01 |
layer Styles.
| | 04:02 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using Layer Styles to color the background| 00:00 | In this movie we are going to use some
of the Photoshop Layer Styles in After
| | 00:04 | Effects to create some pizazz
and interest in our background.
| | 00:07 | I am going to select the Background
solid layer, right-click on it, go to layer
| | 00:11 | Styles, and select Gradient Overlay.
Resize this a little bit.
| | 00:16 | Open up Gradient Overlay in the
Timeline panel, and we are going to take the
| | 00:19 | Style from Linear, which means just
solid black to solid white, to Radial.
| | 00:25 | So it starts out in the center, and
then goes out to black at the edges.
| | 00:29 | Now we actually need to this to be a lot bigger.
| | 00:32 | Although, if I take Scale, one of the
annoying things about this is you are
| | 00:36 | going to take this to 150%,
this is as big at it gets.
| | 00:38 | So you've got to play with the Angle value.
| | 00:40 | So if we play with the Angle value,
then we can get some of the darkness back
| | 00:44 | in some of the edges.
| | 00:45 | I am also going to take the Blend mode
from Normal to Overlay, and that gives
| | 00:50 | us a little bit more dark stuff back in the
center, doesn't brighten it quite so much.
| | 00:55 | And so we could play with the
Opacity of this if we wanted to as well.
| | 00:59 | We do appear to get a little bit of banding.
| | 01:01 | But if we keep playing with this, I
think you'll find that we get something that
| | 01:06 | adds a little bit of interest to our background.
| | 01:08 | Again, I don't like,
just with our Stay Tuned text.
| | 01:10 | I really don't like the plain
colored, flat colored things.
| | 01:13 | Just adding a little bit of a
gradient somewhere, even if it doesn't really
| | 01:17 | line up quite right, it still gives a bit
of interest and make things just look better.
| | 01:23 | Now I realize that when we put
this in as a nested comp in the final
| | 01:27 | composition, we are never going to see
all of the outer edges, but that's okay.
| | 01:32 | What I wanted to do was to add a dark
edge here so when we are looking at this
| | 01:37 | main shot first it's kind of light
colored around it and there is some dark
| | 01:41 | stuff on the edges to kind of
not let your eye go wandering.
| | 01:45 | And then we have it bright in the
center for when our camera zooms into the
| | 01:50 | crack, and then again just like it is
the first part there is darkness on the
| | 01:53 | edges, and it's kind of brighter in the center.
| | 01:56 | And what we are going to do too, in the
final comp in the next chapter actually,
| | 01:59 | we are going to add a Vignette.
| | 02:00 | So in the Master comp there is a
Vignette around the edges that we are looking at,
| | 02:04 | but I still wanted this texture
here on this background for the big Working
| | 02:09 | Composition so that we still have that
context, that texture no matter where our
| | 02:14 | virtual camera happens
to be looking at the time.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
10. Applying Final TouchesFaking rack focus| 00:00 |
In this movie we are going to
look at how to fake rack focus.
| | 00:03 |
Now rack focus is basically when you
have something that's blurry up front and in
| | 00:09 |
focus far away, and then they shift or
something basically that's out of focus
| | 00:14 |
becomes in focus or vice versa.
| | 00:16 |
So here's a music video I
directed and this is a little clip.
| | 00:18 |
You'll notice that there is a
little object right here.
| | 00:21 |
You can't quite see it because
everything seems blurry, and then the focus
| | 00:25 |
changes and this becomes clear and
the background becomes even more blurry.
| | 00:30 |
So something that was blurry
initially, if I can find that spot again, then
| | 00:36 |
switches focus and becomes - something that was blurry
becomes in focus, kind of a cool little trick.
| | 00:42 |
So that's what we are going to do
in this project, we are going to fake
| | 00:45 |
this rack focus effect.
| | 00:47 |
The challenge we have here though is in
the Master comp you might think that we
| | 00:51 |
could just apply an adjustment layer
and blur things, but the Master comp just
| | 00:56 |
has everything so if we were to blur
stuff then it would just blur everything,
| | 01:01 |
background and foreground included.
| | 01:04 |
On a lot of After Effects projects
you'll be using a traditional After Effects
| | 01:07 |
camera, and an After Effects camera has
depth of field, and so you create this
| | 01:12 |
rack focus effect by
animating that depth of field value.
| | 01:15 |
We don't have that here so we've have to
kind of make do and figure out what's going on.
| | 01:19 |
Come up with a hack solution.
| | 01:21 |
So what I did is I basically went
into the Pre-comp for the left banner.
| | 01:27 |
I added a Fast Blur effect, and
I had it at 0 and animated it on.
| | 01:32 |
And I also went down to my
background layers, and I created an Adjustment
| | 01:37 |
layer and added the Fast Blur Effect there,
and I started out with it a little bit blurry.
| | 01:40 |
So just by default we have a little bit
of blur on the background, which is good.
| | 01:44 |
You don't to want to have
everything in focus all the time.
| | 01:47 |
When you're shooting video one of the
most important things you can have or one
| | 01:50 |
of the most attractive features is
having a shallow or narrow depth of field.
| | 01:55 |
In other words, you don't want to have
everything in focus if you are going for
| | 01:58 |
that nice cinematic film look.
| | 02:00 |
And so if we had the foreground in focus
and the background in focus then we are
| | 02:04 |
not really directing the viewer's eye
anywhere, and most of art and design is
| | 02:09 |
about guiding the
viewer's eye to a certain point.
| | 02:13 |
So by blurring the background a little
bit and having this sharp we tell the
| | 02:16 |
viewer, this is where you should be looking.
| | 02:19 |
And then once we zoom in you will
notice that things change a little bit, if I
| | 02:24 |
scrub my Timeline enough.
| | 02:26 |
And actually, we are not going to zoom
in here, because I forgot that we are zooming
| | 02:29 |
in the Master comp.
| | 02:30 |
But about this point then we are zoomed in.
| | 02:34 |
You'll notice that the blur is kind
of removed from the background and it's
| | 02:39 |
definitely added a lot to the foreground.
| | 02:41 |
So this is a totally
bubblegum-and-duct-tape way to do this effect.
| | 02:45 |
And again, usually you
would in a bigger 3D project,
| | 02:48 |
you would just animate that depth
of field property on the camera.
| | 02:51 |
But this is one way that you can
hack it, or one way that you can make a
| | 02:54 |
substitute effect by using Fast Blur on
different elements and animate them so
| | 02:59 |
that they change depending on what's in focus.
| | 03:01 |
And when the camera zooms in, in the
Master comp here, if we advance just a
| | 03:05 |
little bit here actually, we can see
that the crack now is actually becoming the
| | 03:11 |
focus and our eye naturally goes to
the details of this crack, because the
| | 03:17 |
foreground elements are blurred out.
| | 03:19 |
And this is the area with the most detail
and so that's naturally where our eyes go.
| | 03:24 |
So rack focus not only looks
pretty cool, but it's also a good
| | 03:27 |
design element as well.
| | 03:29 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding a vignette| 00:00 | In the last chapter we added a gradient
layer style to the outside edges of our
| | 00:04 | main Working Comp, but once we bring
this nested Working Comp into the Master
| | 00:09 | comp we can see that the
framing isn't quite right.
| | 00:13 | Now I still like this layer Style.
| | 00:14 | I like the variation in
luminance in the background.
| | 00:17 | Add some cool texture and
it does put some focus here.
| | 00:20 | But I think what I really want is a Vignette.
| | 00:22 | So what I am going to do is I am going
to right-click in the Timeline panel,
| | 00:25 | create New > Solid, make it Comp
Size, make it black, and click OK.
| | 00:32 | Next, what I am going to do
is go to the Ellipse tool.
| | 00:35 | Let's go ahead and use that one.
| | 00:36 | I am just going to double-click that to
create an elliptical mask in our project.
| | 00:41 | I am going to go down to Masks at
the bottom in the Timeline panel.
| | 00:45 | Change this from Add to Subtract.
| | 00:48 | Hit F on the keyboard for Feather
and we will feather that quite a bit.
| | 00:53 | Then hit T for Opacity and lower
the Opacity of that Mask to taste.
| | 01:00 | And now, not only do we have the
border darkness from the Layer Style in
| | 01:05 | the nested composition, but in this
composition we also have a Vignette, which
| | 01:10 | also continues to pull in focus to our main
little area here with all of our main stuff.
| | 01:17 | So here is before the
Vignette and after the Vignette.
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| Fading the project in and out| 00:00 | So we will talk a little about
fading the project in and out.
| | 00:02 | I realize that fading Opacity is
one of the most basic things you could do
| | 00:06 | in After Effects, and we'll
beyond that point by now.
| | 00:08 | But I want to talk about some of the
issues about fading in and out this composition.
| | 00:12 | First of all, I think it's important, or
you may want to do this depending on
| | 00:16 | your workflow and depending
on who you're working with.
| | 00:18 | You might want to render this and then
you might be sending it out to a video
| | 00:22 | editor for them to put into a workflow.
| | 00:25 | So maybe as, like, they're going
in their program, they insert this
| | 00:29 | motion graphic shot or what have you.
| | 00:31 | You probably want to, for that reason,
give them maybe a second or two on each
| | 00:36 | side, at the beginning and the end, so that
they can use that for transitions if they
| | 00:40 | want to or they can chop it and
have it just start hard or whatever.
| | 00:44 | But you want to give them
that flexibility down the road.
| | 00:47 | And if the first second of your
composition or the first second that you render
| | 00:52 | out is like right here when the
subject's head just initially pops up, they really
| | 00:57 | don't have too much extra stuff to work with.
| | 01:00 | So giving them a little bit of a bumper
on beginning and the end is a good thing.
| | 01:03 | Now how do we accomplish that?
| | 01:05 | You might initially say, "Well we just
can fade it in with Opacity and fade it
| | 01:09 | out with Opacity," and
that is absolutely correct.
| | 01:12 | But there are a few issues.
| | 01:13 | Number one, if you accidentally render
this out as an alpha channel, then it
| | 01:18 | will actually be transparent and whatever is
composite underneath this will show through.
| | 01:24 | And in an NLE, a video editing system,
that might be bad because it might show
| | 01:29 | the video layers underneath
that that shouldn't show through.
| | 01:33 | So one workaround for
that just to make sure that you don't mess
| | 01:36 | that up on accident and send out some
transparency that you don't want to send out.
| | 01:40 | So what I usually do to work around
that is to create a New > Black Solid, and
| | 01:45 | put that underneath the
layer that I'm fading in and out.
| | 01:49 | And that way I make sure that
there is no transparency anywhere.
| | 01:53 | When I fade-out my comp I am really
fading to black and I'm not fading to
| | 01:57 | transparency, which sometimes we
forget are two different things.
| | 02:01 | Now if we had multiple layers in this
comp then it would be more of a challenge
| | 02:05 | fading in and out the Opacity at
the same time of all those objects.
| | 02:08 | So sometimes what I'll do, in that
case, is make yet another Black Solid
| | 02:13 | which is super helpful.
| | 02:14 | You can use your Black Solids all the time.
| | 02:16 | And what I will do is actually fade
out the Opacity of the Black Solid.
| | 02:23 | So really what I've done here is we
have a Black Solid and so it looks like we
| | 02:27 | are fading in from black, but we
actually have black on top of everything and as
| | 02:32 | we fade that out it appears
to actually fade in the video.
| | 02:35 | So just a couple issues to be aware
of when fading in and out a video.
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| Making colors broadcast-safe| 00:00 | Just a quick tip here folks,
we're not exporting this to broadcast.
| | 00:04 | But if you were, it would be important
that all of these colors were broadcast safe.
| | 00:08 | So I just want to share with
you a little tip about that.
| | 00:11 | Usually what I do is I take my final
composition before I output it, and I
| | 00:14 | create a New > Adjustment layer, put
that on top, and then I apply the Broadcast
| | 00:22 | Colors effect to this Adjustment layer.
| | 00:25 | And that ensures that all of the
colors are safe for broadcast and won't look
| | 00:30 | really awful when they are
broadcast to your television screen.
| | 00:33 | Assuming, of course, that whatever
dude is watching your show on their TV
| | 00:38 | doesn't have insane settings on their TV.
| | 00:40 | But in most cases it looks halfway
decent We can also choose How to Make the
| | 00:44 | Colors Safe either by reducing the
brightness or by Reducing the Saturation.
| | 00:49 | And if you want to just look very
quickly and see which colors in your project
| | 00:53 | are illegal by the broadcast standards,
then you could go to Key Out Unsafe.
| | 00:59 | And I'm not really seeing too
much of a difference either way.
| | 01:02 | So I think we're good, but sometimes it
is just safe to apply this effect just
| | 01:06 | to make sure that all is good with your project.
| | 01:09 | By the way, for more information on
this effect you can check out my After
| | 01:11 | Effects Effects series on lynda.com where
I go into detail about this effect.
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| Adding audio and exporting| 00:00 | Now of course our project would not
be complete if we didn't export it.
| | 00:04 | So what we are going to do is add our audio
clip to our composition and then we can render it.
| | 00:11 | I can hit Command+Shift+Question Mark
,or Ctrl+Shift+Question Mark on the PC, to
| | 00:16 | add that to the Render Queue.
| | 00:18 | And I just hate this minimize
render queue. It drives me nuts.
| | 00:20 | So I hit the Tilde key to maximize it,
because once you start putting stuff in
| | 00:24 | the Render Queue usually, I
want to focus on these settings.
| | 00:27 | I don't need to look at stuff anymore.
| | 00:29 | So what I want to do is open up Render
Settings, click on Best Settings to open
| | 00:33 | them up, make sure these settings are
all cool so what I want to use here.
| | 00:38 | I use the change Time Span to Length of
Comp other than Work Area Only, unless
| | 00:42 | I'm specifically going for the Work Area
Only, just be aware that it defaults to that.
| | 00:47 | So if you want to render the entire composition
just to be safe I put it on Length of Comp.
| | 00:52 | Click on Lossless to open up the Output Module.
| | 00:54 | This determines the compression method
the type of file format will be outputting.
| | 00:58 | What's really important too is that,
two things about audio. Number one:
| | 01:04 | Audio Output is checked.
| | 01:05 | By default this is unchecked, so if
you want to output this with audio again,
| | 01:09 | make sure to check it. Number two:
| | 01:11 | you'll want to make sure that the sample rate
here matches the sample rate in your project.
| | 01:19 | So right now my Audio
Sample Rate is actually 44.1.
| | 01:23 | That's the standard for CD audio, and
Video Sample Rate is usually 48 kilohertz.
| | 01:29 | And if you sync up your audio to your
video, so if you have something like a
| | 01:34 | music video and the cuts or pastes with
the music, then a lot of times the audio
| | 01:39 | and the video will go out of sync, and
a lot of times, there's just a lot of
| | 01:43 | random problems with that.
| | 01:44 | So you typically want to make sure
that Audio Output matches what the audio
| | 01:50 | track is, especially, again
if sync is important to you.
| | 01:54 | Now right now if I click on Format Options,
the method of Compression is animation.
| | 01:57 | This is a really high-quality codec, and so
taking the quality up to Best is fantastic.
| | 02:03 | This will give us pretty much
broadcast quality output and that's great for
| | 02:07 | file delivery format.
| | 02:08 | But what I actually want to do as well
is to export a low-res version, maybe an
| | 02:15 | H264 version, something really light-
weight quality doesn't have to be super
| | 02:18 | great, maybe even take this down to
medium, so that way I can bring this into
| | 02:23 | GarageBand to make our
soundtrack in the next chapter.
| | 02:26 | For now, I'll just go ahead and
take it up to Animation, just for means
| | 02:31 | of demonstration here.
| | 02:32 | I want this set to millions of colors.
| | 02:34 | I don't need the extra weight that comes
from an alpha channel, so I am going to
| | 02:38 | leave this at Millions of
Colors, not Millions of Colors+.
| | 02:40 | I'll click OK here, double-check the
Audio Settings, click OK, and then I can
| | 02:44 | click Output To choose where to save this.
| | 02:47 | And once I am done, click
Render and our project is complete.
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|
|
11. Creating the Soundtrack in GarageBandImporting the video| 00:00 | And now we are going to go down
to somewhat unconventional avenue.
| | 00:03 | We are going to take a look into
GarageBand to create the soundtrack.
| | 00:07 | I figured, hey, if we are going to
create a full-on After Effects project from
| | 00:11 | scratch might as well show you the
whole kit and caboodle, GarageBand included.
| | 00:16 | Now I realized that while every
single Mac user out there will have this
| | 00:19 | application, not one single PC user will.
| | 00:23 | So I apologize this is just the
software that I use to make this.
| | 00:27 | I'll also use Logic Pro,
which is also Apple only.
| | 00:30 | So I figured this would be the lesser
of two evils doing it in GarageBand.
| | 00:33 | But for those of you that are on PC,
there are a couple great packages you
| | 00:36 | could use and use the same concepts
here to follow along with whatever audio
| | 00:40 | program you'd like to use.
| | 00:41 | For example, FL Studio.
| | 00:43 | If you do a Google search on that,
that's a great application, they have a
| | 00:46 | demo that's fully functional, so you can
play around and add tracks as we are doing here.
| | 00:51 | Also Reason by Propellerhead Software.
| | 00:54 | Reason is phenomenal and there is
great training on that on lynda.com.
| | 00:57 | So you could use another application
and just use the same concepts that we're
| | 01:01 | covering in this chapter.
| | 01:03 | And it's kind of like what we've
done with this entire training series.
| | 01:06 | I am not going to show you exactly note
for note, every single thing that I did,
| | 01:09 | but I want to get you started with
the basic instruments that I added and my
| | 01:13 | thought process and all that kind of stuff.
| | 01:14 | So what I am going to do is go to the
Track controls because our first step is
| | 01:18 | to import a movie, so we're going to
go to Track > Show Movie Track, then we
| | 01:21 | just have to drag the movie
that we want to use to this track.
| | 01:25 | So I am going to go over to my Finder
and in the Video folder, in the Media
| | 01:29 | folder of the Exercise Files you'll
find the sample vid for GB.mp4 file.
| | 01:33 | It's a low-quality version of our
project and actually this video doesn't have
| | 01:37 | any kind of intro fade in or whatever.
| | 01:39 | So it's a little bit
shorter than we are going to use.
| | 01:41 | So I am just going to drag that in and
it says that there is not going to be any
| | 01:44 | audio that GarageBand could do anything with.
| | 01:46 | That's good, we don't want any audio, and just
give that a couple of seconds to come in here.
| | 01:52 | And it's giving us about
four-and-a-half seconds.
| | 01:54 | But this is all based on our beats
per minute, and right now our beats per
| | 01:59 | minute is set to about 120 which is really slow.
| | 02:03 | Now eventually what we are going to do
is we are going to take this project up
| | 02:06 | to about 200 beats per minute.
| | 02:08 | Now after increasing the tempo to 200
beats per minute, which makes it, way
| | 02:12 | faster, then our video spreads out to
about seven seconds, which is where we want it.
| | 02:17 | However, while we're going through this
training series, I am going to keep it
| | 02:20 | back at a default 120 because we are
going to be using MIDI instruments.
| | 02:24 | If you are not familiar with that,
basically what that means is you just record
| | 02:27 | the notes and then later on
you can change the instruments.
| | 02:30 | So I might create a piano track right
now and then later on decide to have that
| | 02:34 | be a harp or a guitar or
drums or whatever I want it to be.
| | 02:39 | So if I had a microphone, for example
and was actually recording audio, then that
| | 02:43 | would be a big problem changing
the tempos, because then it would be off.
| | 02:46 | But with MIDI instruments,
that's not really a big deal.
| | 02:49 | So now that we've imported the video,
we are ready to lay down some drums.
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| Laying down the drums| 00:00 | First of all we are going to
lay down a simple beat here.
| | 00:03 | I'm going to double-click this Green Piano icon.
| | 00:06 | The Grand Piano is the
default instrument in GarageBand.
| | 00:09 | And if you double-click the piano,
this will open up the Software
| | 00:12 | Instrument Browser.
| | 00:13 | So we can go over to let's see, Drum Kits.
| | 00:17 | And what I am looking for is
something called RnB Remix.
| | 00:21 | So click on that, and right now you
might be saying, "Well, how am I going to
| | 00:25 | get instruments or music into this?"
| | 00:28 | Well, usually what I do is I have this
keyboard plugged into my computer and
| | 00:32 | then I use that as a controller.
| | 00:34 | But if you are on a laptop, or if
you are in a pinch what you could do is
| | 00:36 | hit Command+Shift+K and that will pop-up
this little keyboard that you could use instead.
| | 00:42 | And so if you hit this,
| | 00:43 | [Drumset sounds]
| | 00:46 | we are actually playing those
notes, which is kind of cool.
| | 00:49 | And so what I want to do is play A --
| | 00:51 | [Bass drum]
| | 00:53 | -- which is the bass drum --
| | 00:54 | [Bass drum]
| | 00:54 | -- and D, which the snare drum.
| | 00:56 | [Snare drum and bass drum]
| | 00:58 | You could also use your mouse, but good luck
rocking out with your mouse on this keyboard.
| | 01:03 | It's kind of a challenge.
| | 01:04 | So if you just hit the A key and the D
key then we could plat a beat, and the
| | 01:07 | beat that I am looking to
play is something like --
| | 01:09 | [Pop beat]
| | 01:12 | Now my timing, especially
when I type, is not very great.
| | 01:16 | So it's going to be pathetic and awful,
but I know that going into it, which is
| | 01:20 | okay, so I can fix this later.
| | 01:22 | Now you want to make sure that this
little red icon is lit up on a track that
| | 01:25 | you want to record on because if you
click it like this and it's not lit up,
| | 01:29 | that means that you won't record on
that track and even like your little
| | 01:32 | keyboard here will be grayed out.
| | 01:34 | So make sure that that's red, and then
come down here at the Record button and
| | 01:38 | we'll start recording our song.
| | 01:40 | [Recording Pop beat]
| | 01:47 | Okay, once you're done you
could just hit the Spacebar.
| | 01:49 | We could drag this little region that
we've created here over to the beginning.
| | 01:54 | And I'll double-click it to open
up these notes here in the editor.
| | 01:58 | And I can click-and-drag these notes
and then when we say Align To, let's try
| | 02:04 | aligning to an eighth note and
see if that sounds a little better.
| | 02:08 | [A more even pop beat]
| | 02:12 | Very nice. Very nice.
| | 02:14 | And then what we could do is come over here
to the upper right-hand corner of this
| | 02:18 | and make a loop out of it, so we can drag this
over and make another instance of this region.
| | 02:23 | So that way when we hit the Return key to
jump to the beginning and hit the Spacebar
| | 02:26 | to play, then it just keeps repeating.
| | 02:28 | [Looped pop beat]
| | 02:36 | And so forth.
| | 02:37 | Now if we wanted to, we could select
this layer and we could hit Command+D,
| | 02:42 | which will duplicate that track,
just like in After Effects.
| | 02:45 | And we can go back and
make a little hi-hat track.
| | 02:48 | So I might hit Enter to get to
the beginning and then I could hit
| | 02:51 | Command+Shift+K again to
pop-up this little dialog box.
| | 02:55 | I could look for a cool hi-hat sound.
| | 02:57 | [Varying hi-hat sounds]
| | 03:00 | So it looks Y and T are my hi-hat sounds.
| | 03:03 | [Faster hi-hat sounds]
| | 03:06 | So what I could do is hit the closed hi-hat on
beats 1 and 3 and the open hi-hat on beat 2.
| | 03:11 | If I want to, I could also change it
up, so I am hitting different notes.
| | 03:17 | But for now, I'll stick to T and Y so
I am going to go ahead and hit Record
| | 03:20 | and try this again.
| | 03:21 | [Pop beat with hi-hat included]
| | 03:29 | Now I kind of messed up on that one.
| | 03:31 | So what I can do is just double-click it.
| | 03:33 | Oops, the piano roll is already here.
| | 03:35 | And what I want to do is align this.
| | 03:38 | I realized I messed up, but I
could fix it. I could fix it.
| | 03:41 | All is not lost.
| | 03:42 | So I have aligned it and let's go
ahead and drag this over and then actually
| | 03:48 | not loop it just yet.
| | 03:49 | Hit Return and play this back.
| | 03:50 | [Pop beat with hi-hat]
| | 03:54 | So what I did is I forgot to do
some of these little hi-hats early on.
| | 03:59 | So what I am going to do is delete this
first one, select these three, and then
| | 04:06 | I can just hold Option while I drag
and then, voila, I've fixed the problem.
| | 04:12 | [Pop beat with hi-hat]
| | 04:16 | Here we go, and if I loop this, we will
now have a complete drum loop and we are
| | 04:22 | ready to add some bass.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding the bass line| 00:00 | Now we are going to add some bass.
| | 00:02 | To add a new track, come down here
in the bottom left-hand corner of the
| | 00:05 | interface, click this little plus
button, and we are going to choose a
| | 00:08 | software instrument.
| | 00:09 | These other two options over here are good if
you are going to actually record live audio.
| | 00:13 | We actually want a software instrument,
in other words something made with MIDI.
| | 00:16 | So I am going to go ahead,
select that, and click Create.
| | 00:19 | Next I need to change my instrument.
| | 00:21 | With this track selected,
I am going to go to Bass.
| | 00:24 | Then I am going to choose Eye Liner.
| | 00:26 | This is a cool synthesizer. If I hit
Command+Shift+K, we can hear that.
| | 00:30 | [Synthesizer notes]
| | 00:33 | Now I actually need to cheat on this one.
| | 00:35 | I feel horrible about this.
| | 00:36 | I tried practicing a lot before I
recorded this movie for a way where I could
| | 00:40 | just be honest with this and do this
with the keyboard, and I just can't.
| | 00:43 | Because what happens is is this track goes:
| | 00:46 | [Synthesizer playing C and B-flat]
| | 00:47 | And then an octave higher it goes:
| | 00:50 | [Synthesizer goes from E to F to G]
| | 00:52 | But you can't really do that with a
keyboard or a mouse because it changes octaves.
| | 00:57 | So what I am going to do is I am going
to record this with my keyboard, but you
| | 01:00 | will see these notes as I play them.
| | 01:03 | So it starts on C to B flat.
| | 01:06 | And then it goes to E to F, and then F
to G. And if you hold down those notes,
| | 01:14 | so if like while I'm going from E to F,
I hold down E, when I go to F, it kind
| | 01:19 | of slurs it, and then F to G. So if I
don't hold them down, it sounds like:
| | 01:24 | [Slurred synthesizer]
| | 01:29 | Kind of fun.
| | 01:30 | So here we go.
| | 01:30 | I am going to go ahead and with my
left hand, it is kind of tricky, my right
| | 01:34 | hand is on the keyboard, my left hand is going
to click this with the mouse, and rock and roll.
| | 01:38 | [Pop-beat with synthesizer]
| | 01:47 | Okay. So it wasn't that best performance of my
lifetime, but what you are going to do?
| | 01:52 | I am just going to manually
click these and put them into place.
| | 01:54 | [Adjusting synthesizer notes]
| | 01:59 | There we go.
| | 02:00 | I want to quantize the whole track
because then what's going to happen is going
| | 02:02 | to quantize my little wham whim.
| | 02:05 | Kind of like those where they are.
| | 02:07 | So I am going to drag this to
the left and use this loop icon.
| | 02:10 | Drag this over to the right.
| | 02:11 | If I hit Enter and then hit the Spacebar:
| | 02:13 | [Looped pop beat with synthesizer and slur]
| | 02:21 | Okay. It sounds good.
| | 02:23 | And right now, I'm using my fingers
in quotation marks when I say good,
| | 02:27 | because it will sound good once we
take the tempo up to its proper speed of
| | 02:32 | 200 beats per minute.
| | 02:34 | [Looped pop beat with synthesizer and slur, faster]
| | 02:39 | But there definitely is some fine-tuning
that we can do on this track.
| | 02:42 | But, hey, again this is a - let me move
this one into place here, this one
| | 02:46 | is kinda bothering me.
| | 02:48 | So it's not perfect again, there is a
lot of changes that we could make to
| | 02:51 | fine-tune and tweak this.
| | 02:52 | It's going beyond the scope of this
tutorial, but you're getting the idea that we are
| | 02:55 | starting to make a complete song
here and now it's our task to add the
| | 03:00 | lead synthesizer.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding the lead synth| 00:00 | So now that we've laid down our rhythm
foundation it's time to add our lead synthesizer.
| | 00:04 | So I am going to go click this plus
button on the bottom left-hand corner of the
| | 00:07 | screen to create a new software
instrument track and click Create.
| | 00:11 | If you are not seeing your Instrument
Browser on the right-hand side, just
| | 00:15 | double-click the piano.
| | 00:16 | And I'm going to go to Synth Leads>Arena Run.
| | 00:20 | And I am going to hit Shift+Command+K
to make the onboard keyboard pop-up here.
| | 00:25 | [Lead synth demo]
| | 00:28 | This instrument is nothing but a good time,
but I am going to take it an octave higher, actually.
| | 00:32 | I don't want these frequencies
overlapping with my bass frequencies.
| | 00:36 | I want to just kind of have a
bigger distinction between them.
| | 00:39 | Now as before, I am going to be using
my MIDI controller keyboard that you are
| | 00:42 | not currently seeing on screen here,
because I'm not the best keyboard player.
| | 00:46 | I have also slowed down the
tempo a little bit to that end.
| | 00:49 | And now I'm going to go ahead and
record this keyboard melody and it's going to
| | 00:53 | go a little bit beyond the duration of
what we've created so far. That's okay.
| | 00:57 | And then once I am done recording it, I
am going to show you a few extra tricks
| | 01:00 | that we haven't covered yet so far.
| | 01:02 | So with that I am going to go
ahead and click the Record button.
| | 01:05 | [Pop beat with synthesizer]
| | 01:07 | Oops! I am just going to go ahead and
hit the Spacebar to stop that.
| | 01:10 | One of the things I want to do is have
this melody instrument start on beat 1,
| | 01:14 | so I can't wait for it to go for a bar
or whatever before I start playing, I
| | 01:19 | need it to start playing right away.
| | 01:21 | So what we'll do is go to the
Control menu up here and turn on Count In,
| | 01:25 | and that way it gives me a four-count before I
start recording, which I so desperately need.
| | 01:30 | So I am going to go ahead and click the
Recording button and give this another shot.
| | 01:33 | [Pop beat with lead synth]
| | 01:49 | Nice! Okay, so there were some problems.
| | 01:52 | I am going to go ahead and close the
keyboard, and I am going to go down to the
| | 01:56 | area here, the Piano Roll.
| | 01:58 | Double-click this to get these notes to show up.
| | 02:00 | And let's see what we have here.
| | 02:01 | I am going to hit the Enter key and
I'll solo this by clicking the headphones icon.
| | 02:06 | [Lead synth only]
| | 02:14 | Yes, see there is where we had a problem here.
| | 02:15 | Yeah, so need this G right here to come
before the F. That should fix our problems.
| | 02:20 | [Lead synth]
| | 02:24 | Actually what I am going to do
is get rid of this F right here.
| | 02:28 | Delete that one. That one
was extra, and drag this over.
| | 02:32 | Now let's try that.
| | 02:33 | [Lead synth]
| | 02:39 | Okay, I am in another little glitch
right here, full of mistakes today.
| | 02:43 | Accidentally played this A note right here.
| | 02:45 | Didn't mean to do that, so I am
going to click that to select it and hit
| | 02:48 | Delete to get rid of that.
| | 02:49 | Next I am going to click one of these
notes and select it, hit Command+A to
| | 02:53 | select all of them, and I'm
going to change Align To eighth note.
| | 02:57 | Let's go ahead and
preview that and hear how it sounds.
| | 02:59 | [Lead synth]
| | 03:13 | Nice! Okay, a couple of things.
| | 03:15 | First of all, this is really cool and
it's going to sound a lot cooler once we
| | 03:18 | speed up the tempo to what it actually
is, which actually we can do now because
| | 03:22 | we are not going to do any more recordings.
| | 03:23 | We'll take that up to 200.
| | 03:25 | And also I want to add some
modulation to this last note.
| | 03:29 | It hangs on it for a long time.
| | 03:31 | It's not super-interesting.
| | 03:32 | So what we are going to do to add some
modulation is to take this to View from
| | 03:36 | Notes, which is these little
things right here to Modulation.
| | 03:40 | Now what I am going to do to change
the modulation is to Command+Click, so I
| | 03:46 | don't want any modulation in
the beginning of the song here.
| | 03:48 | I want it to start modulating at about 6.6 here.
| | 03:53 | So if this is like 0.5 and about right here,
so I am going to hold the Command key
| | 03:59 | so I get pencil, and then I am
going to click one more point here.
| | 04:03 | Actually we could drag that down to 0.
| | 04:06 | And then I'm going to Command+Click
somewhere about over here at the 120 point
| | 04:11 | to make a diagonal line here,
and then we can just sustain that.
| | 04:15 | So basically what I am doing is I am
increasing the amount of modulation, or
| | 04:20 | basically vibrato in this case, so
that the note kind of does this cool
| | 04:24 | little thing at the end.
| | 04:25 | So let me just go ahead and back this
up a little bit, just by clicking the
| | 04:27 | playhead and hit the Spacebar.
| | 04:29 | Let's back up a little bit more. There we go.
| | 04:31 | [Lead synth with vibrato]
| | 04:34 | Hear that little bwowwww? It was a horrible impression
of it, but you get the idea.
| | 04:38 | One more time, just to be sure we heard it.
| | 04:40 | [Lead synth with vibrato]
| | 04:43 | That is fun. Okay, so now what I am going to do is
I'm going to unsolo this, then I'm going
| | 04:49 | to select the track, hit
Command+D to duplicate it.
| | 04:53 | And then I'm going to hold the Option
key and drag it downwards to copy it.
| | 04:58 | The reason why I am doing this is because
the instrument isn't really strong enough.
| | 05:02 | I am not actually sure I like the tone enough.
| | 05:04 | It's not complex enough.
| | 05:06 | If we hear that, it sounds cool.
| | 05:07 | I'll hit the Enter key to return to the
first frame and we'll hit Spacebar to preview it.
| | 05:11 | [Pop beat with synthesizer]
| | 05:16 | Just needs a little something extra.
| | 05:18 | So what I am going to do is while this
Arena Run track is selected, we're just
| | 05:22 | going to go to Synth
Leads and select Riffy Fifths.
| | 05:25 | And that will give us a little bit more bite
and texture, Riffy Fifths sounds like this.
| | 05:30 | [Riffy Fifths sample]
| | 05:31 | Kind of a cool little thing, and
so when we play those both together:
| | 05:34 | [Music Playing]
| | 05:40 | Now we could balance them
together with these volume sliders here.
| | 05:43 | We might want to take
these down just a little bit.
| | 05:45 | We also might want to take up,
let's say, Arena Run, for example.
| | 05:49 | We want to take these up an octave, so
you could take View back to Notes, and
| | 05:54 | maybe you click on one of them.
| | 05:56 | Hit Command+A to select all of them, and
then we'll drag this note up from C4 to C5.
| | 06:04 | Now when we play it, we have an
octave separation between the duplicates.
| | 06:08 | [Music Playing]
| | 06:16 | And they both have that cool modulation,
the vibrato at the end, I dig that.
| | 06:20 | So now if we want to, we can go over to the
Edit tab and we could add effects to these.
| | 06:26 | We could add reverb and compression, EQ,
and balance these a little bit better.
| | 06:31 | We could also add some drums and bass to
go along with these last couple of bars
| | 06:36 | of our Synth melodies.
| | 06:37 | We are not going to take time to do
that, but I think we've covered enough
| | 06:39 | concepts that you know what to do
and you could fill in those blanks.
| | 06:43 | Next we need to export
this back to After Effects.
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| Exporting for After Effects| 00:00 |
So here is the final song project.
| | 00:02 |
This is the actual project that I
created when I was creating this project.
| | 00:06 |
So it has all the mixes and reverb.
| | 00:09 |
There was even a track that I decided
not to use, and so you can kind of open up
| | 00:12 |
this project and see what I did with it.
Let's listen to it.
| | 00:15 |
[Music Playing]
| | 00:26 |
All right. Good times!
| | 00:27 |
So I also have this Analog Swell that
we didn't talk about how to make but this
| | 00:31 |
is simple enough, just use
the Analog Swell instrument.
| | 00:34 |
So pretty simple stuff but
also at the same time quite fun.
| | 00:38 |
And now it's time to
export this to After Effects.
| | 00:40 |
So I am just going to go to the Share menu,
I am going to select Export Song to Disk.
| | 00:44 |
Now if you don't want to compress this
in new CD quality audio, you could not
| | 00:48 |
compress it and then export this.
| | 00:50 |
I chose to compress it.
| | 00:52 |
I use the AAC Encoder, which is
better than the MP3 Encoder, and also After
| | 00:56 |
Effects will understand that
file, so it's all safe and good.
| | 00:59 |
And then Audio Settings, I chose Higher Quality.
| | 01:02 |
It still only makes a file that's
two-tenths of a megabyte, so not really that
| | 01:06 |
much we have to worry
about in terms of file storage.
| | 01:09 |
It's a really small file.
| | 01:10 |
So at this point, all I have to do is
click Export to make this song for After
| | 01:14 |
Effects and our work creating
this song in GarageBand is done.
| | 01:18 |
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|
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ConclusionAssignment: Completing the second side| 00:00 | So now we are all done with our After
Effects project or at least we are halfway done.
| | 00:06 | Now you remember from an actual video
here that we start on the left side of
| | 00:10 | the screen was Stay Tuned and then it goes
to the other half that says For More Show.
| | 00:15 | Now obviously I used the same elements, the
same principles and everything on the right half.
| | 00:20 | But all we've covered in this
training series is how to do the left half.
| | 00:24 | Now that was completely intentional.
| | 00:25 | So the challenge now to you is can
you make the other half on your own?
| | 00:31 | So if we to select the Working Comp,
move this over, create the For More Show
| | 00:37 | stuff, going on the right-hand
side of the Composition.
| | 00:40 | So I present you that challenge, give it
a shot and see what you can come up with.
| | 00:44 | Now for those of you that are interested
in doing this, what you can do is go to
| | 00:49 | YouTube, I've posted this movie. It's
called ChatShowBumper with audio or w audio
| | 00:53 | here, and what you can do is post a
video response and show me the second half.
| | 00:59 | You could post it and maybe you
could improve on it, and change some
| | 01:02 | things, make it your own.
| | 01:03 | It also might be a way for you to
allow others in the community to comment
| | 01:07 | and critique your work.
| | 01:08 | So that option is there if you want it.
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| Goodbye| 00:00 | Well folks, that's the
end of this training series.
| | 00:02 | Again, thank you so much for watching.
| | 00:04 | I've had a total blast making this
project and this training series for you.
| | 00:07 | I hope you've learned something from it.
| | 00:09 | I tell what. One more time for the road,
well just watch our final project with the
| | 00:12 | audio and everything to see
what we've learned how to do.
| | 00:15 | [Music Playing] Love it!
| | 00:23 | Love it!
| | 00:24 | Again, I am Chad Perkins. On behalf
of lynda.com, thanks for watching!
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