IntroductionOverview| 00:03 | Hi! I am Chris Meyer of Crish Design and
in this set of tutorials, I want to go
| | 00:07 | over the core concepts of how to
integrate a 3D world from Maxon Cinema 4D into
| | 00:13 | Adobe After Effects.
| | 00:15 | Now regardless of what 3D program you
are using, there are a few things you
| | 00:18 | need to get across.
| | 00:19 | You need to know your camera movement
in your 3D program, so you can match it
| | 00:23 | with an identical camera in After Effects.
| | 00:25 | If you can also bring
across lights, that's a bonus.
| | 00:28 | You need to know the position of any
object in your 3D world that you intend
| | 00:33 | to add a layer in After Effects right on
top of, for example, the face of a video wall.
| | 00:37 | And if anything every moves in front
of that object, or otherwise, it has an
| | 00:41 | irregular shape, or it has cropped off
edges, you need to create a matte in your
| | 00:46 | 3D program that will then matte that
added layer in After Effects, to best
| | 00:51 | integrate it into the world.
| | 00:53 | Cinema 4D makes all of those easy and
builds an After Effects project for you to boot.
| | 00:58 | It really helps push the process along.
| | 01:00 | Now beyond those core ideas, we are going
to move into a few other advanced concepts.
| | 01:05 | One is Multi-Pass Rendering, the
ability to breakout individual properties like
| | 01:09 | shadows, specular highlights,
reflections and blend them in post in After
| | 01:15 | Effects, rather than having to tweak
your 3D render over and over again.
| | 01:19 | Maxon Cinema 4D goes one step further
and actually allows you to break out the
| | 01:23 | contribution of each individual light in
the 3D world and change their colors, or
| | 01:29 | each individual shadow, individually.
| | 01:31 | It's really powerful.
| | 01:32 | Now speaking of shadows, the hardest
thing in this integration is getting
| | 01:36 | shadows from your new objects in After
Effects to fall on objects already you
| | 01:41 | rendered in your 3D world.
| | 01:43 | I will show you the trick to that as well.
| | 01:45 | Let's go ahead and take a quick look
at the world you'll be going around in.
| | 01:47 | and we'll move on from there.
| | 01:49 | Here I am inside Cinema 4D and this is the
scene you are going to be using most of the time.
| | 01:54 | This is a very simple video wall scene
where we have a set of boxes, intending
| | 01:59 | to match the idea of nine
TV screens tied together.
| | 02:02 | We have some text floating in front of
it, indicating the night of the show.
| | 02:06 | And you'll notice that it is indeed in
front of the video, so we need to cut
| | 02:10 | out any video applied to this wall to make
it look like it was actually behind this word.
| | 02:17 | Additionally, we have the
camera movements in the scene.
| | 02:21 | Additionally, we have three lights in the scene:
| | 02:23 | a top light, a key shadow light, and a
side fill that's also going through a
| | 02:27 | go-go sort of screen, another texture
from iStock that's giving us this interesting
| | 02:32 | pattern on the back wall.
| | 02:34 | And we are going to be able to bring those
lights from Cinema into After Effects as well.
| | 02:39 | So any new layers we add in After
Effects get the same lighting effect as we set
| | 02:44 | up inside Cinema 4D.
| | 02:46 | Now for these particular lessons, I am
going to be using Cinema 4D version 11.5
| | 02:52 | and Adobe After Effects version CS4.
| | 02:55 | That's the file format I use when I
save the project files that come along
| | 02:59 | with this training.
| | 03:00 | However, these core concepts have been
valid for the last several versions of
| | 03:04 | Cinema 4D and for After Effects.
| | 03:06 | So, even if you can't open the files,
you'll be able to apply these concepts to
| | 03:10 | older versions and future
versions of the software.
| | 03:13 | So with that, let's dive in,
let's get set up, let's have some fun.
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| Installing the CINEMA 4D plug-in into After Effects| 00:04 | Cinema 4D can export a special format
After Effects project, which you can then
| | 00:09 | import into After Effects. For that to
happen, you need to install a plug-in.
| | 00:13 | To find that plug-in, when you
installed in Cinema 4D, you'll find a folder
| | 00:17 | called Exchange Plugins.
| | 00:19 | Go underneath the aftereffects folder,
choose the one appropriate for your
| | 00:24 | operating system, for example, I am on
OS X. CS3-CS4 is the version of After
| | 00:29 | Effects I am using, and then I have a zip
archive that I can double-click and decompress.
| | 00:36 | Next, I need to install that
plug-in into After Effects.
| | 00:40 | So I go to my After Effects folder,
open up Plug-ins, go to Format and drag the
| | 00:46 | C4D.plugin into my After
Effects Plug-ins Format folder.
| | 00:52 | Next time I start After Effects, I can
now import those special projects that
| | 00:56 | Cinema 4D can export.
| | 00:58 | Now if you have an older version of
Cinema 4D or After Effects, or you just want
| | 01:02 | to make sure you have the
latest version of the plug-in,
| | 01:05 | you can also download it online.
| | 01:08 | Go to the maxon.net website, click on
Downloads, go to Updates, click on Plugins
| | 01:20 | and inside that, you'll
find Adobe After Effects.
| | 01:23 | Click on that and then you'll see
version of these plug-ins, which you can
| | 01:26 | download for different versions of
Cinema and different versions of After
| | 01:30 | Effects, in case you are still using an older
version of After Effects, such as 6, 5, or 7.
| | 01:34 | Download that and then install it
in the same folder I just showed you.
| | 01:38 | Okay, now that you've done
that, we can get started.
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1. Exporting from CINEMA 4DLocating objects| 00:03 | We are going to start in Cinema 4D.
| | 00:05 | If you have downloaded the files that
came with this project, Open, inside the
| | 00:11 | Chapter 1 folder, Cinema 4D folder,
the file, videowall_1_starter.
| | 00:18 | This is the same scene as
you saw in the introduction.
| | 00:21 | I will go ahead and render this scene.
| | 00:23 | You'll notice first that this wall's face is
about 50% gray and that was done on purpose.
| | 00:29 | When we go composite video on to the
face of this wall inside After Effects,
| | 00:34 | it's actually very useful if this wall
is roughly 50% gray, as opposed to white,
| | 00:39 | black, or any other color.
| | 00:41 | By doing that, we'll be able to use
Blending Modes to factor in how light
| | 00:45 | changes across the face of this wall,
from a little bit brighter here, to a little
| | 00:49 | bit darker here, some shadow here.
| | 00:52 | So, before we even got to this point, I
spent some time with the texture on this
| | 00:57 | wall's face, so that it
would render at about 50% gray.
| | 01:00 | Okay, we need to know where the face
of this wall is and I have actually
| | 01:05 | created a null object called 'box
group' that holds all of these different
| | 01:10 | components of the box.
| | 01:12 | Now I have put the null for this box
group down at the base of this wall.
| | 01:18 | I did that to make it easier to position
this box group to sit right on my floor.
| | 01:23 | In reality, when it comes time to
export the position of an object into After
| | 01:27 | Effects, it's far better if that
group's null is the one in the corners or
| | 01:32 | dead-center in the face.
| | 01:35 | Note, however, that these axis arrows
are flush with the face of this box.
| | 01:40 | It's crucial that these axis arrows
for this layer are flushed with exactly
| | 01:47 | where we want to our video
to be added in After Effects.
| | 01:50 | If you want to move it, you select the
appropriate Axis tool and you can go ahead
| | 01:55 | and move your axis arrows
to where they need to be.
| | 01:58 | But I am actually going to leave them
here at the bottom just to show you how to
| | 02:01 | correct for issues like
this later on in After Effects.
| | 02:04 | With box group selected, I
can do one of two things.
| | 02:08 | The old fashioned manual way is to go
down to position coordinates and look at
| | 02:12 | the X, Y, and Z position and transcribe
them, and also transcribe any rotational
| | 02:18 | offset for this box group.
| | 02:20 | However, since we are using Cinema 4D and
After Effects, we don't need to do this manually.
| | 02:25 | We can have Cinema 4D save a solid or a null
object for us that remembers these coordinates.
| | 02:32 | To do that, I select the box
group and go underneath Tags>Cinema 4D
| | 02:38 | Tags>External Compositing.
| | 02:41 | That's the tag you add to say "In another
program, I need to know where this object is."
| | 02:47 | Select External Compositing and down
here, underneath Attributes>Tag>Tag
| | 02:53 | Properties, I have got a few options.
| | 02:55 | Now by default, this will create a
null object inside After Effects.
| | 03:01 | A new little wrinkle they've added in
recent versions of Cinema is that you can save it
| | 03:04 | as a Solid instead and you can even set
with the X and Y size of that Solid is.
| | 03:10 | Now I am going to be replacing this
solid with a video layer from After Effects,
| | 03:14 | so the size does not matter so much.
| | 03:16 | But I know when I built this wall face
that I made it roughly the size of a square
| | 03:21 | pixel and to see video.
| | 03:23 | So, I am just going to enter those numbers here.
| | 03:25 | Color doesn't matter unless you
want to color code your objects.
| | 03:27 | I am going to go ahead and make it 50%
gray just to remind myself that that is
| | 03:32 | the color of the wall face itself.
| | 03:33 | Now notice too that you
have Anchor Point choices here.
| | 03:37 | This allows you to choose whether to
place the anchor point of your null
| | 03:41 | object, or your solid, in the center of that new
layer or in one of the corners as I mentioned.
| | 03:46 | I am going to leave it in the center
for now, and fix my little offset later
| | 03:49 | on in After Effects.
| | 03:50 | Now these two other properties,
Children and Cache, really have to do with
| | 03:55 | whether or not you have created a
grouped object, and whether or not you are
| | 03:58 | using something like particle systems
or a Cloner or some other system that
| | 04:04 | makes multiple objects or
merges objects together.
| | 04:07 | If I wanted to create a solid of null
object for every item inside my box
| | 04:12 | group, I would check the Children option.
| | 04:15 | But I only want it for the face, so
I am going to leave that unchecked.
| | 04:19 | Cache comes into whether or not to
calculate all the particles that might have
| | 04:22 | been created, the cloned
objects that might have been created.
| | 04:25 | Again, I don't have that situation, so
I am going to leave that off for now.
| | 04:29 | By the way, if there is ever a
property in Cinema you are unsure off,
| | 04:32 | right-click on it, select Show Help and
it will open the online help for Cinema
| | 04:38 | to the page that
describes what that parameter is.
| | 04:41 | It's one of my favorite parts of Cinema 4D.
| | 04:44 | Okay, we have added a tag that's going
to remember where this box group face
| | 04:50 | is and next thing I need to do is
include that in the After Effects project
| | 04:54 | Cinema is going to create.
| | 04:55 | I am going to discuss this in more
detail later, but let's quickly go
| | 04:58 | through the motions.
| | 05:00 | I am going to go open my Render Settings,
choose the Save panel and twirl down the
| | 05:06 | Compositing Project File option.
| | 05:09 | Inside there, I am going to make sure I
have enabled Save the compositing file
| | 05:14 | and most importantly, include the 3D Data.
| | 05:18 | The 3D Data is going to include things
such as my camera movement, my lights and
| | 05:23 | these additional nulls or solids I have
been creating with tags inside Cinema.
| | 05:27 | You also pick your target application.
In addition to After Effects, other programs
| | 05:31 | are supported as well.
| | 05:32 | Obviously, we are using After Effects here.
| | 05:35 | You can manually save a project file,
which comes in handy if you change
| | 05:39 | something after the fact.
| | 05:41 | But whenever you do a render, this project
file will also get saved for you automatically.
| | 05:45 | So you don't need to remember how to do
this, and that's the position of the wall face.
| | 05:51 | Now let's move on to how do you
create a matte that indicates just where
| | 05:55 | that face is?
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| Object mattes| 00:03 | Next, we want to create a matte that
shows us just where this video wall
| | 00:08 | face is, just where our video in After
Effects is supposed to appear and exclude
| | 00:13 | everything else, including any objects
that pass in front of this video wall's face.
| | 00:20 | To do that, I did a
little bit of work on my model.
| | 00:23 | I went ahead and selected all of the
pieces that are part of the video wall face
| | 00:28 | and grouped it underneath a
null object called box faces.
| | 00:33 | This is very important because any
piece of geometry that I have attached to
| | 00:37 | this null is going to be factored into
the track matte I am about to create.
| | 00:42 | So, make sure you set this
up properly and think about every element that
| | 00:46 | should be part of that wall face and exclude any
part that should not be part of that wall face.
| | 00:52 | With that done, I'll select my box
faces, not the entire group, but just the
| | 00:56 | faces and I will add a new tag.
| | 00:59 | Tags>Cinema 4D and this time,
Compositing tag, not External Compositing, that was
| | 01:07 | for location, but Compositing.
That's what creates the matte.
| | 01:12 | Once that's been added, I go look at
the Attributes and what I am interested in
| | 01:16 | is the Object Buffer.
| | 01:18 | What Cinema calls an Object Buffer
is a hold out matte or a track matte,
| | 01:23 | whatever you want to call it,
| | 01:24 | that represents just where this object is
visible in the scene from frame to frame.
| | 01:31 | I am going to enable one of these
buffers and select a buffer number.
| | 01:36 | The number doesn't really matter, but
you do want to keep track of what buffer
| | 01:40 | you've assigned to what object, particularly
when you have multiple buffers in one project.
| | 01:44 | I only have one buffer in this project,
| | 01:47 | so Buffer #1 is fine.
| | 01:49 | Okay, that's half of the task.
| | 01:50 | The other half of the
task is actually saving it.
| | 01:53 | So, I am going to back up to my Render
Settings, click on this icon and switch
| | 01:58 | to the Multi-Pass pane.
| | 01:59 | I am going to enable Multi-Pass,
| | 02:02 | currently, there is nothing underneath
here, and add a new multi-pass layer to be
| | 02:07 | rendered and saved out as a file.
| | 02:09 | Underneath Multi-Pass,
I'll select Object Buffer.
| | 02:13 | This is the matte we've just been talking about.
| | 02:15 | Object Buffer, the default is Group ID
#1, perfect in this case, because that
| | 02:20 | matches the buffer number.
| | 02:22 | Again, make sure that the buffer
number you chose down here matches what you
| | 02:26 | actually render, and that's
pretty much all there is to it.
| | 02:29 | Now underneath Save, you want to make
sure that you are indeed saving your
| | 02:33 | regular image, but that you are
also saving your multi-pass images.
| | 02:38 | Both of these will need to get saved
when you render and we'll discuss rendering
| | 02:41 | here in just a few moments.
| | 02:42 | Now there's lots of properties you
can add to a multi-pass render and all
| | 02:47 | these different things like the
Ambient, the Diffuse, the Specular, we will
| | 02:50 | discuss all of those in a separate movie.
| | 02:52 | The important thing is is to get that
matte, we needed at this Object Buffer.
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| Save and render| 00:03 | Okay, we've setup where the
location of this video wall face is.
| | 00:07 | We've created a matte that matches
just where the video wall is present or
| | 00:11 | visible in the scene.
| | 00:13 | Now we need to make sure we save the rest
of our data and actually render the project.
| | 00:17 | One thing that's absolutely crucial is
you want to remember the camera move.
| | 00:21 | This way, whenever you add a layer in
After Effects, you'll have a matching
| | 00:26 | camera that has the exact same angle of
view, the exact same movement, the exact
| | 00:30 | same perspective distortion, so any
layers you add in After Effects will act
| | 00:35 | just as if they were in this
exact same scene in Cinema 4D.
| | 00:38 | Another nice thing to have is the location
and any animation of any of the lights
| | 00:44 | you have in the scene.
| | 00:45 | That way, the lights that you have used
to illuminate your Cinema scene can also
| | 00:49 | be duplicated and used to light any
new objects you add in After Effects.
| | 00:54 | Again, this means the perspective
looks the same, the lighting looks the same
| | 00:57 | and the shadows are cast in the same direction.
| | 01:00 | To make sure this data, the lights and
the camera is saved, we need to go back
| | 01:04 | into our Render Settings again.
| | 01:06 | As we discussed, underneath the
Save tab, is a section called
| | 01:10 | Compositing Project File.
| | 01:12 | You need to make sure that Save is
enable, that you've selected After Effects
| | 01:17 | and that you've selected Include 3D Data.
| | 01:20 | Otherwise, it will remember just to
render and your Multi-Pass layers, but it
| | 01:24 | will not include any of this
important information like cameras, lights and
| | 01:28 | those additional null objects that we set
up to tell us where our various objects were.
| | 01:32 | Now there is one additional
parameter in here, called Relative.
| | 01:36 | This is basically a numbering thing.
| | 01:37 | If you are rendering just a portion of
your Cinema timeline, Relative says "Well,
| | 01:42 | "just start the numbering fresh, just
for the segment that I am rendering."
| | 01:46 | In my case, I am rendering my entire
Cinema timeline, that's not so important.
| | 01:50 | If you ever forget what this is,
again, right-click and select Show Help.
| | 01:54 | Now before we render, we need to make sure
everything else has been set up correctly.
| | 01:58 | For one thing, Cinema is
very picky about the file path.
| | 02:03 | You need to make sure that you
are saving this to the correct file path.
| | 02:06 | In this case, I'll go ahead and make a
new folder called 'videowall renders',
| | 02:12 | I'll call my file videowall.mov
and save it inside that folder.
| | 02:17 | You need to do this for your normal
render file and also for your multi-pass
| | 02:22 | renders, in this case, our object
buffers, those holdout mattes or track mattes
| | 02:26 | we were wanting to create.
| | 02:28 | So I'll click on that path as well,
give it a name such as 'videowall' again.
| | 02:33 | Make sure it's in that folder I
just created, and rather than give it a
| | 02:36 | special name here, I am going
to enable Layer Name as Suffix.
| | 02:42 | That means the name of this
particular layer, such as object buffer, will be
| | 02:45 | appended on to videowall and it will
be automatically in the movie's name.
| | 02:50 | Multi-layer File only applies on
rendering something like a Photoshop
| | 02:54 | multi-layered file, not important.
| | 02:56 | Format depends on how you
like to render your files.
| | 02:58 | Some people prefer something like a
JPEG sequence, or say TIFF sequence.
| | 03:05 | I personally prefer QuickTime Movies.
| | 03:07 | Just for the sake of this project to
save space on your download, I happen to be
| | 03:12 | using Photo JPEG at a quality around 85.
| | 03:15 | Photo - JPEG in 95 and 99 is
of very, very high quality.
| | 03:18 | If I want to make sure it was
lossless, I would something like the
| | 03:22 | Animation codec and increase the
quality all the way up to best, which is
| | 03:26 | 100%, no compression.
| | 03:28 | But I am happy to JPEG just
for the sake of this tutorial.
| | 03:31 | I want to point out a couple of
more things up here underneath Output.
| | 03:35 | Whenever I render a project from any 3D
program, Cinema or otherwise, I like to
| | 03:40 | keep the Pixel Aspect ratio
at 1, no non-square pixels.
| | 03:44 | Programs like Maya and Cinema do
have ways of trying to compensate for
| | 03:48 | non-square pixels when it comes to these
more involved After Effects projects. I
| | 03:53 | have had troubles with them in the past.
| | 03:54 | It's safest to stay at 1.
| | 03:56 | So I am using After Effects CS4's
official square-pixel size for D1 720, 534 and
| | 04:04 | to whatever size your project is going to be.
| | 04:06 | I will show you later in After
Effects, how to scrunch this down to fit a
| | 04:11 | non-square pixel render.
| | 04:13 | Another thing I do out of
superstition is I like to keep my Frame Rate at a
| | 04:17 | whole integer number, like 30.
| | 04:19 | Those working in PAL with 25,
you never have to worry about this.
| | 04:24 | In countries like the US with NTSC,
our Frame Rate is actually 29.97.
| | 04:29 | I will keep at an integer number like
30 and again, I'll show you in After
| | 04:33 | Effects how to correct for that and
bring it back down to the correct NTSC
| | 04:36 | rate. Otherwise, I want to go
ahead and render all of my frames.
| | 04:40 | If I was doing just a custom frame
range, I might want to use that relative
| | 04:44 | numbering checkbox I showed you back
underneath the Save dialog, but since I am
| | 04:48 | rendering all frames, I will have no issues.
| | 04:50 | The rest of the settings like General,
Anti-Aliasing, Options set up as you
| | 04:54 | choose for your render. I tend to
really like to anti-alias things very
| | 04:58 | smoothly, I'll put up with
the extra rendering time.
| | 05:02 | Now that I have my Render Settings
all set up, it's time to go ahead and
| | 05:05 | render this project out.
| | 05:06 | I will go ahead and click in my render
to Picture Viewer icon and you'll see
| | 05:11 | my render has begun.
| | 05:12 | Now a really handy thing to check
out in this picture viewer is to click
| | 05:15 | underneath the layer
button and look at Single-Pass.
| | 05:19 | This would show you each
pass in a multi-pass render.
| | 05:22 | Here is my so called Background, my
primary render of the scene and here
| | 05:27 | is my Object Buffer.
| | 05:28 | This is that special matte that I created.
| | 05:31 | It's showing just where the video wall
is visible and it's black anywhere the
| | 05:35 | video wall should not be rendered,
| | 05:37 | for example, these cracks in between the
individual video wall screens and where
| | 05:42 | the word, Thursday, is
obscuring a portion of the video wall.
| | 05:47 | So, this a good way to check to
make sure your object buffer is
| | 05:50 | rendering correctly.
| | 05:51 | So let's go ahead and let this render
finish and we'll go ahead and show how to
| | 05:56 | import it into After Effects and
take advantage of these multiple passes.
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2. Importing into After EffectsPreparing the project| 00:03 | Okay, now that we have rendered our
project from Cinema, including all that
| | 00:06 | extra data such as the cameras, the
lights and on solids showing where the
| | 00:11 | face video wall is,
| | 00:13 | let's go ahead and work on
those layers inside After Effects.
| | 00:15 | First off, make sure you install the Cinema 4D
plug-in, like we discussed back in introduction.
| | 00:21 | If you've downloaded the files that
along with this training, go ahead and open
| | 00:26 | Chapter 2 > After Effects > videowall composite_starter.
| | 00:31 | The reason to start with that is we
already have a couple pieces of video for
| | 00:35 | you, courtesy of iStock, which we
will be including on our video wall.
| | 00:39 | Next, to add your Cinema 4D project,
you don't use Open, you use Import.
| | 00:44 | You need to import the special
.aec file that Cinema 4D creates.
| | 00:50 | So I will do Command+I in Mac, Ctrl+I
in Windows, select the videowall renders
| | 00:55 | folder that we created and inside you'll
see created a videowall.aec project for
| | 01:01 | us, along with these
different layers that it rendered.
| | 01:03 | So, I will select that project and click Open.
| | 01:07 | Inside a folder named after the
project videowall_1_starter, you will find an
| | 01:12 | After Effects composition and that
composition will include several objects.
| | 01:16 | It will include the video wall
background render, the final render of our scene.
| | 01:21 | It will include a solid layer that
represents where we want to add additional
| | 01:26 | layers in After Effects along
the face of that video wall.
| | 01:29 | Note that we had centered the anchor
point for that layer, but it's initially
| | 01:33 | been set up at the bottom of this wall.
| | 01:35 | We will fix that there in a minute and
we also have camera data and light data.
| | 01:39 | If I go ahead and select any of these
and press U, you will see that it
| | 01:44 | also has keyframes for any animation in this scene.
| | 01:47 | In this case, the camera was indeed animating.
| | 01:49 | So there is a keyframe for every
single frame of the camera move.
| | 01:54 | It may be a little excessive, but this
is the way 3D programs tend to export
| | 01:57 | their keyframe data.
| | 01:59 | They bake it on every frame rather than
trying to give you ease in and ease out
| | 02:03 | that might go wrong.
| | 02:05 | Now in the case of our lights, they
were not actually animating, but something
| | 02:09 | Cinema does is it goes ahead and
creates keyframes for these parameters anyway.
| | 02:13 | If you plan on moving these lights
yourself later, you might want to turn off
| | 02:18 | these old keyframes just to make sure
that you don't get some erratic motion as
| | 02:22 | it starts at the original position
and returns to the original position.
| | 02:25 | Twirl these up for now and
go back to our Project panel.
| | 02:31 | There is another folder in
here called Special Passes.
| | 02:35 | This includes any addition
renders that Cinema created beyond its
| | 02:39 | normal background render.
| | 02:41 | One is a copy of the full
video wall render, videowall_rgb.
| | 02:46 | It kind of anomaly of cinema that it
renders its separate RGB movie, but does
| | 02:51 | not actually use it in the project file.
| | 02:53 | I guess you can kind of have around for
reference, but it's somewhat redundant.
| | 02:57 | Of more interest is this
videowall _object_1 movie.
| | 03:02 | This is that special hold out matte that
shows only where a video wall face is
| | 03:07 | visible in the scene from frame to frame
and this going to come in very handy later on.
| | 03:13 | First, let's prepare our video footage
that we going to using in this scene.
| | 03:16 | Let's start with the parasailor.
| | 03:19 | I'll double-click it to open
it in its QuickTime viewer.
| | 03:22 | This shows me what the footage looks
before the After Effects Interpret Footage
| | 03:27 | dialog, which is very important, and I
notice some interlacing along the parasail
| | 03:31 | here and down in the leaves over in this corner.
| | 03:35 | As I step through the frames,
using the left and right cursor keys,
| | 03:38 | I'll notice that some that some of
the frames do not have interlacing,
| | 03:41 | there is no comb teeth
effect here, while other frames do.
| | 03:46 | This indicates this
movie has 3:2 pulldown in it.
| | 03:50 | It's a special way of taking 24 frames
per second material and spreading those
| | 03:54 | frames across normal NTSC video
rate of 29.97 frames per second.
| | 03:59 | We have created extensive training
elsewhere on both the subjects of fields and
| | 04:02 | on pulldown, but I'll show quickly how
get rid of this here in After Effects.
| | 04:06 | I will go ahead and select my footage
and then open its Interpret Footage dialog.
| | 04:12 | This is a very important dialog that
determines how any Alpha channel is
| | 04:17 | interpreted, Frame Rate, how you deal
with Fields and Pulldown, even how do you
| | 04:21 | deal with Color Management.
| | 04:22 | Very important. Many people overlook this.
| | 04:24 | There are a couple of
areas, which are important.
| | 04:27 | One, After Effects has already detected
that this is normal NTSC D1 footage
| | 04:32 | and has separated the field,
Lower Field First. That's great.
| | 04:36 | If there is no pulldown in this
footage, I will make sure that I checked
| | 04:40 | Preserve Edges as that improves
the quality of deinterlacing footage.
| | 04:45 | It will look better if you are going out to
the web or other progressive scan destinations.
| | 04:49 | It will also look better when you're
scaling and moving things around on objects.
| | 04:52 | But in this case, I am going to
get rid of those fields altogether.
| | 04:55 | I want to guess 3:2 pulldown. As long as
the footage is not fading up from black
| | 05:01 | or it doesn't have an edit in it
or something strange is going on,
| | 05:04 | After Effects will determine the phase
of split, the interlaced, and the whole
| | 05:08 | frames, the ones that look progressive and
remove them, getting them back to my source
| | 05:13 | footage, which is very cool.
| | 05:14 | Now there is another thing I need to
take care of in this particular project.
| | 05:18 | You may remember that I told Cinema 4D to
render at 30 frames a second, not 29.97.
| | 05:27 | Therefore, my composition
is at 30 frames a second.
| | 05:31 | If we are going to add a video to this
composition, it needs to have the same
| | 05:37 | frame rate as the Comp.
| | 05:38 | There are two ways of doing that.
| | 05:40 | One is go back into the Interpret Footage
dialog and conform the frame rate to 30.
| | 05:47 | This works fine. If you have a
Video Only layer, you're done.
| | 05:52 | If however, there was audio associated
with this layer, what you would want to do
| | 05:56 | is change the Stretch Speed of that
video to 99.9%, which will, in essence, speed
| | 06:05 | it up from 29.97 frames a
second to 30 frames a second.
| | 06:10 | I'll cancel that because I don't
want to do that to my 3D render.
| | 06:13 | That's only what I might do to my video.
| | 06:15 | I'll close the Stretch dialog for now.
| | 06:17 | As long as I am here, I'll take care of
my windsurf footage. Command+Option+G on
| | 06:22 | Mac, Ctrl+Alt+G on Windows is the
shortcut to open Interpret Footage.
| | 06:27 | I'll bump it up to 30 frames a second.
| | 06:29 | I see it's already separated Lower
Field First and I'll Preserve Edges.
| | 06:34 | Back to the parasail.
| | 06:35 | Hold on the Option key on
Mac, or the Alt on Windows.
| | 06:39 | Double-click and open it in its special
footage panel and now as I use the Page
| | 06:44 | Down and Page Up keys to step
through the footage, you'll see that no
| | 06:48 | interlacing comb teeth at present.
| | 06:50 | I just get nice, clean, whole frames
and that's what I want to do for any
| | 06:55 | footage that I composite.
| | 06:56 | I would like get back as close to
that source footage as I possibly can.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding layers| 00:03 | Okay. Here is the solid that was created
for the box group and notice that Cinema
| | 00:08 | even gave the solid the same name as that group
that I applied the Compositing tag too, very handy.
| | 00:15 | Now to place this footage exactly
where this solid is, I will select both my
| | 00:21 | target and the footage I want to swap in.
| | 00:24 | I can do one of two things.
| | 00:25 | I can hold down Option on Mac, or Alt
on Windows, drag down in my timeline
| | 00:30 | panel and it will automatically swap
in for me, or the other shortcut is to
| | 00:36 | have these two footage item selected,
hold down Command+Option on Mac,
| | 00:40 | Ctrl+Alt on Windows and hit the
Forward Slash and that will also do the
| | 00:45 | replacement for me, very cool.
| | 00:47 | There is something else
very important to note here.
| | 00:49 | Note that this layer that I have added
in After Effects needs to have its 3D
| | 00:54 | layer switch enabled.
| | 00:57 | That way, it will capture any effects of
the cameras and lights, which have been
| | 01:01 | brought into this new project.
| | 01:03 | However, notice that any renders that
came out of Cinema 4D do not have the
| | 01:10 | 3D layer switch set.
| | 01:12 | This is because they already have been
calculated with the camera move and the lights.
| | 01:16 | They don't need get the
camera and lights a second time.
| | 01:20 | It has already been baked
in so it remains a 2D layer.
| | 01:23 | That becomes quite an issue later on
when we talk about issues like shadows, but
| | 01:27 | we will cover that considerably later.
| | 01:29 | Let's get back to this scene.
| | 01:32 | Now that we have our video added to
this scene at the position and at the
| | 01:37 | rotation that matches where the video
wall face is, as I drag my current time
| | 01:42 | indicator through this project, as the
camera moves in After Effects, it matches
| | 01:47 | any perspective distortion that was
happening in the Cinema 4D render.
| | 01:50 | I will go ahead and view this at
100% just so you see without aliasing.
| | 01:59 | Drag through and you see it stays
stuck to the front of that wall.
| | 02:03 | However, it is in the wrong position.
| | 02:06 | Now, remember, I noted earlier this
Cinema has this habit of adding keyframes to
| | 02:10 | things. I am going to turn those
keyframes off for now so I don't accidentally
| | 02:15 | induce some wandering or motion into my project.
| | 02:18 | I want to first move this video to
be centered up on that video wall.
| | 02:23 | To do that, first I am going to knock
down the transparency a little bit.
| | 02:26 | I press T to reveal transparency and I
scrub it so I can see the video wall
| | 02:31 | through my video layer and now I will
press A for anchor point and I will scoot
| | 02:36 | this anchor point down to
the bottom of this video layer.
| | 02:39 | By doing that, the video will
appear to rise in the scene.
| | 02:43 | So I will scrub the Y value and I will
move my video up until I kind of like how
| | 02:49 | it's centered or framed on that screen.
| | 02:51 | I notice that Cinema also had keyframes
and anchor points, I am going to disable
| | 02:55 | that so again, I don't accidentally
animate the position of my footage, unless I
| | 03:00 | intend to indeed move it
across that video wall's face.
| | 03:03 | Now my video is a little bit bigger
than my video wall face, which is actually
| | 03:07 | a good thing because I get to crop off,
if anything is off here, an action, say, for any other gunk.
| | 03:12 | I could go ahead and type Shift+S
to reveal scale and scale it down to
| | 03:17 | more closely fit, or scale it up to go ahead
and frame my footage a little bit differently.
| | 03:22 | I will go back to 100% and again, I can
go ahead and slide my anchor point if I
| | 03:27 | wanted to, just to frame the
resulting composite a little bit different.
| | 03:30 | I will look at it later here in the
scene and that's kind of a nice ending.
| | 03:34 | So, I will go ahead and
frame it off to the side here.
| | 03:35 | Now if I wanted to, I can even try to
reduce the scale and even do masking to try
| | 03:40 | to make that video be exactly the
same size as that video wall, but I have got
| | 03:44 | something far better for
that task, my object buffer.
| | 03:46 | Now I will select my video, press T to
reveal it's opacity, crank it back up to
| | 03:51 | 100% so I can see it fully opaque.
| | 03:54 | Then I want to grab my video wall render.
| | 03:58 | This was created by applying the
external compositing tag to my video wall
| | 04:02 | face inside Cinema and then doing a
multi-pass render of the object buffer.
| | 04:07 | Drag it down to be exactly on top of my video.
| | 04:11 | It's white where we want to see the video wall.
| | 04:14 | It's black where we
should not see the video face.
| | 04:18 | Outside the video wall, the cracks
between the screens where it's obscured by the
| | 04:22 | type, we should not be seeing any video
in these parts and you will see that it
| | 04:26 | has the camera move already in it.
| | 04:29 | Because of this, it needs to remain a 2D
layer. It already has 3Dness baked into it.
| | 04:36 | We don't want to do that again.
| | 04:38 | Now to use that as a matte for the
video layer underneath, we select the video
| | 04:42 | layer, not the matte, but the video layer.
| | 04:45 | Then Toggle Switches/modes.
| | 04:46 | The shortcut is F4.
| | 04:49 | Then we set the Track Matte popup for
the video to be Luma Matte, using the video
| | 04:55 | wall above, and you will see the video is
now perfectly cropped, even down in the
| | 05:00 | cracks between the screens, to
fit on that video wall's face.
| | 05:04 | As I drag through it, you will see that
my cameras indeed match between my Render
| | 05:09 | in Cinema 4D and the imported camera
in After Effects, which is affecting the
| | 05:13 | video. The video stays stuck onto that face.
| | 05:16 | It's perfectly cropped out and the text
does indeed appear in front of the video
| | 05:20 | as if it has been rendered that way.
| | 05:22 | So, that's our basic composite.
| | 05:24 | We have got the video on the face
of that wall and it has been cropped.
| | 05:29 | But, as you can see, this image
could use a lot of improvement.
| | 05:33 | That's what we are going to do next.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Refining the composite| 00:03 | The first thing I notice is that
this video is looking a bit underlit.
| | 00:07 | It could be brighter.
| | 00:09 | Well, there's a few
different ways of improving this.
| | 00:11 | First off, I could go to my main key
light, press T reveal its intensity and
| | 00:17 | crank it up until it illuminates the
video more to my liking, because after all,
| | 00:22 | this video is now a 3D layer in After Effects.
| | 00:24 | It's affected by these 3D lights and
these lights are a copy of the lights that
| | 00:29 | existed inside Cinema.
| | 00:30 | So, that's one way.
| | 00:32 | Another approach is to select the video
itself and change how it reacts to lights.
| | 00:37 | I will press AA to reveal its 3D specific
parameters, namely it's Material Options.
| | 00:43 | I will scroll down so I get to see them all.
| | 00:45 | The default settings for Diffuse and
Specular are 50%, which is frankly a bit underlit.
| | 00:51 | So, they're doing this so you don't over-
light a scene, but it's underlit in most cases.
| | 00:55 | So, if you like, you can increase the
Diffuse reaction and Specular reaction
| | 01:01 | to get the brightness back up to where
you want it to be so the video looks
| | 01:04 | nicely illuminated.
| | 01:06 | And you can balance these off against
each other to decide whether you want even
| | 01:09 | overall illumination or if you want
something that has more of a hot spot up in
| | 01:13 | this corner and moves in as the light moves.
| | 01:17 | Another approach, if you are unhappy
with this lighting, is just to turn off this
| | 01:21 | layer's reaction lights altogether.
| | 01:23 | You see this line that says Accepts Lights.
| | 01:26 | If turn it to Off and now it doesn't
matter what that light is doing, how
| | 01:32 | intense it is, what my Material Options are.
| | 01:35 | This video will look exactly like it
does if it was only a 2D layer
| | 01:40 | instead of a 3D layer.
| | 01:41 | But why are we in 3D if we didn't
want some of the imperfections of the way
| | 01:45 | lights fall off things like that.
| | 01:46 | So I am going to turn it back on, I am
going to go ahead and put this back a mix
| | 01:50 | I prefer, which is more like 50% and 100%
and then I am going to go play with the
| | 01:55 | intensity of the light to get
the amount of lighting that I like.
| | 01:58 | Again, if I want to see what the
video looked like unmolested I could turn
| | 02:02 | Accepts Lights off and go,
"Well, that was the original."
| | 02:05 | Here I have got about the same average
illuminance to the video, but now I have
| | 02:08 | got a nice natural fall off,
based on the lights in the 3D scenes.
| | 02:11 | I prefer this look.
| | 02:12 | Twirl these up to clean things up.
| | 02:16 | The next thing we are going to do is better
blend this video onto the surface of that wall.
| | 02:22 | We have already played some fun games
with the lights themselves, but you notice
| | 02:25 | my shadow here is missing.
| | 02:27 | This is because my video is completely
obscuring the video wall face that had the shadow.
| | 02:33 | Well, the way we can get that shadow
back is to use Blending modes and this is
| | 02:39 | why we made that video wall face 50% gray.
| | 02:42 | There is a set of modes: Overlay, Soft
Light, and Hard Light, which react very
| | 02:48 | strongly to the grayscale
levels of the underlying layer.
| | 02:52 | 50% gray is kind of a pivot point.
| | 02:55 | Anything above that gets brighter,
anything darker ends up in shadows.
| | 03:00 | I am going to start with something
like Overlay mode and now you will see
| | 03:03 | my shadows come back and I have
picked up more of light fall off across the
| | 03:07 | face of this video.
| | 03:08 | Overlay is usually good starting point,
but I find I often end up using Hard
| | 03:12 | Light for these because it just
gives me a more intense effect.
| | 03:15 | You see I have got blacker blacks,
a little bit richer colors here, compared to
| | 03:19 | using Overlay mode, which is getting a little
washed out by the light hitting the gray surface.
| | 03:24 | So I am going to go back to Hard
Light and if I want to, I can further play
| | 03:29 | around with my light intensity to
get this illuminated the way I want to,
| | 03:32 | even blowing it out.
| | 03:33 | I will put it somewhere around there and
go later in my project and see what I like.
| | 03:38 | Yeah, I have got a
little bit of a hotspot there.
| | 03:40 | I've got my shadows, so I like this looks.
| | 03:43 | Now this is just a piece of video.
| | 03:46 | I can swap that video out.
| | 03:47 | I will select a new piece of video I
might want to use, such as the windsurfer,
| | 03:52 | hold down Command+Option on Mac, Ctrl+
Alt on Windows, press the forward slash
| | 03:57 | and now I have replaced it
with a new piece of video.
| | 04:01 | This video does have cuts in it.
| | 04:03 | Since the video is just basically
sitting there on the wall, I have all the
| | 04:07 | flexibility to just go ahead and trim
this by sliding my edits and coming up
| | 04:13 | with a different piece of exposure
for how this video plays back on that wall.
| | 04:17 | And if I don't like the framing, I
will go ahead and type A for anchor point
| | 04:22 | and I will slide it to frame a
shot more to my liking. There we go.
| | 04:28 | If I like I can even apply
effects, I might apply Effect>Color
| | 04:32 | Correction>Levels, look at the histogram
and say, well, you know the black point
| | 04:37 | is lacking a bit here.
| | 04:39 | White point is lacking a bit here, play
with the contrast like a good 50% gray
| | 04:44 | mix, just right around there, check it later
in the shot, see how that works out as well.
| | 04:51 | And I can even apply other effects,
such as say, Color Correction, Hue
| | 04:55 | Saturation, and if I like, bump up the
saturation a little bit or even Hue shift
| | 05:00 | to get a little more of a
indigo sky. There we go.
| | 05:03 | That's the really cool thing.
| | 05:05 | This is just a piece of video
in After Effects at this point.
| | 05:09 | You can swap it out very quickly.
| | 05:11 | You can apply effects very
quickly and render very quickly.
| | 05:15 | If you were doing this all in 3D, you
would have to take your video, trim it,
| | 05:20 | color correct it, render it out as a
movie, reapply it as a texture map in 3D,
| | 05:25 | re-render the 3D result,
then bring it back in.
| | 05:28 | That's a lot more steps.
| | 05:30 | Applying videos directly inside After
Effects allows you to accommodate things
| | 05:35 | a client changes much faster and that's
the reason we went through all this trouble.
| | 05:39 | Now that said, to be honest, it is not perfect.
| | 05:43 | One shortcoming we have, even
though the logo is reflecting off the
| | 05:47 | floor as part of that 3D scene, this
video, which I added after that fact, is
| | 05:52 | not reflecting off the floor.
| | 05:54 | After Effects itself does not
natively support 3D reflections.
| | 05:59 | However, there is a number of different
ways of faking reflections in After Effects.
| | 06:03 | There is even a great plug-in, Zaxwerks
Reflector, which can be used to go ahead
| | 06:08 | and render reflections of
3D geometry in After Effects.
| | 06:12 | So there are further ways you can
perfect the scene to make up for the
| | 06:14 | shortcomings of doing part of it
in After Effects and part of it in a
| | 06:17 | 3D program.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Rendering for video| 00:03 | Now you might remember from earlier
that one of the things we did in the 3D
| | 00:07 | program is we did render this as Square
Pixels and added an integer Frame Rate of 30.
| | 00:12 | And I'll go ahead and open Composition>
Composition Settings and see that Cinema
| | 00:16 | did indeed create a comp at 720, 534,
Square Pixels, which is indeed the Square
| | 00:23 | Pixel size After Effects
recommends in CS4, for D1/NTSC video.
| | 00:28 | And it does indeed have a
Frame Rate of 30 frames per second.
| | 00:32 | I need to convert these in the non-
square pixels for my final render and I need
| | 00:36 | to convert this Frame Rate down to 29.97.
| | 00:39 | I don't want to do that work in this
composition, because I have all sorts of
| | 00:43 | problems with lots of keyframes on my
camera and other things have might have
| | 00:47 | problems with the distortion.
| | 00:48 | So, to prepare this for final output,
I am going to go ahead and select my comp,
| | 00:54 | with my composite, and
rename it something useful.
| | 00:56 | So, just videowall_composite and I'm
going to drag it into a second comp.
| | 01:01 | I'll drag it down into the New
Composition icon, type Command+K on Mac, Ctrl+K
| | 01:06 | on Windows to open up the Composition
Settings, rename it something like final
| | 01:11 | render, select an appropriate preset,
such as NTSC D1, 720, 486 non-square
| | 01:19 | pixels now and a correct frame rate at 29.97.
| | 01:23 | Click OK and you'll see that my comp
is little bit larger now than my Output
| | 01:27 | Comp and I have a frame rate
issue, so let's fix those one at a time.
| | 01:31 | First off, I need to scale down my nested
composite to fit inside this New Output comp.
| | 01:39 | I can either do this manually, or
what's far better is to right-click on the
| | 01:44 | layer, Select Transform and Fit to Comp Height.
| | 01:50 | That will conform it to the right
Height, scale the Width by the same amount,
| | 01:55 | and now I've got a perfectly
fit video inside my output comp.
| | 01:59 | Now a warning, if you have read the
After Effects manual, I know a few of you
| | 02:03 | have, you might be tempted
to collapse transformations.
| | 02:07 | Press F4 and here this
Collapse Transformation switch.
| | 02:11 | And what you are told in the
documentation is this improves your quality.
| | 02:15 | Well, it has some unintended consequences.
| | 02:18 | If you turn it on, in this case, that 3D
layer, back on the precomp, is expecting
| | 02:23 | to find a camera, in this comp, to render it.
| | 02:27 | That's part of collapsing.
| | 02:28 | You bring things in pre-comps
forward to the current comp.
| | 02:32 | Well there is no 3D camera in this comp, so it
doesn't know what to do with that video layer.
| | 02:36 | So definitely do not collapse
transformations when doing this sort of composite.
| | 02:41 | Okay, the second thing we need to fix is
that Frame Rate issue of 30 verses 29.97.
| | 02:47 | To do that, we need to open up the Speed column.
| | 02:50 | So, I'm going to go ahead and right-
click on this Column Header, select
| | 02:53 | Columns>Stretch and I'm going
to stretch this comp by 100.1%.
| | 03:01 | 1001, over 1000 is exactly the ratio of 30
over so called 29.97 frames per second video.
| | 03:12 | So, this would give us exactly the slow
down we need to bring our Frame Rates in line.
| | 03:17 | I will click OK.
| | 03:20 | You might have noticed that this end
moved out just a touch, since the video is
| | 03:23 | now playing slower and filled out my
entire composition and now I've got a lovely
| | 03:28 | composite, which is ready to be
rendered straight to my D1 output.
| | 03:32 | And of course, you can modify
these instructions, depending on what
| | 03:35 | formats you're working in such as
PAL, maybe HTV, which has its own
| | 03:38 | anamorphic considerations.
| | 03:40 | Regardless, render Square Pixels, and
enter your Frame Rate in your 3D program,
| | 03:45 | Cinema or anyone, then fix it in the second
comp inside After Effects. And there you go!
| | 03:51 | You got your basic videowall_composite.
| | 03:53 | That's the core steps you're going to
need to know and repeat in virtually any
| | 03:58 | project that combines these two programs.
| | 04:01 | But you can go much further than that.
| | 04:03 | That's what we're going to play with next.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
3. Multi-Pass RendersMulti-pass renders in CINEMA 4D| 00:03 | Next, I want to show how to take
advantage of some of the those options we saw
| | 00:06 | in the multi-pass dialog,
inside Cinema's Render Settings.
| | 00:09 | If you've downloaded the files that
came with this training, go ahead and
| | 00:13 | Open/Chapter 3/CINEMA 4D/videowall_3_starter.
| | 00:22 | And this is very similar to the scene you've
already seen, with our camera move, etcetera.
| | 00:29 | I've already added the external
Compositing Tag for the box group, the
| | 00:33 | Compositing Tag with object Buffer 1 for
the box faces, and all my other setups.
| | 00:38 | To get more properties out of this
render, let's go to Render Settings and go
| | 00:43 | back underneath Multi-Pass.
| | 00:44 | We're going to deal with the idea of
separating Lights later and we
| | 00:49 | currently have our one Object Buffer that
we set up to matte out the videowall face.
| | 00:53 | So, underneath Multi-Pass, let's go
ahead and click on the Multi-Pass button and
| | 00:58 | add some more properties.
| | 00:59 | I'm going to add Ambient, because I do have
self-illuminance happening with the text layer.
| | 01:05 | I'm going to go ahead and add Diffuse,
which is the flat overall coloring or
| | 01:11 | shading of my objects.
| | 01:12 | I'm going to add Specular, which are
those little specular highlights, hot
| | 01:17 | spots, special areas and
lighting that really pop out in a seen.
| | 01:21 | And we are going to add Multi-Pass>
Reflections, so we are going to separate out
| | 01:25 | those reflections over in the scene.
| | 01:27 | And finally, we're going to add Multi-
Pass>Shadows, so we can go ahead and treat
| | 01:32 | the Shadow Density separately in the scenes.
| | 01:34 | So, these are all of the individual
special passes I'm asking Cinema to render
| | 01:39 | for me with this project.
| | 01:41 | I have to remember, in the Save dialog,
to indeed set my paths for my renders.
| | 01:47 | This is particularly important if
you've moved a project between computers.
| | 01:50 | My paths on my computer are going to be
different than your paths on your computer.
| | 01:53 | I'm going to type in 'multipass
renders' and save to that box.
| | 02:01 | Do it for the normal regular image
and do it for the multipass images.
| | 02:05 | You can save them in a
separate folder if you want to.
| | 02:08 | I'm going to throw everything
into my Multi-Pass Renders folder.
| | 02:10 | Click Save. I have enabled use the
Layer Name, the type of pass, Ambient,
| | 02:15 | Diffuse, Specular, et cetera as the
Suffix to my Multi-Pass render name.
| | 02:20 | As before, I need my Compositing
Project. I want to save it in After Effects
| | 02:24 | and Include my 3D Data, so I do get across
my null objects, my camera moves, my lights, et cetera.
| | 02:31 | And once we've got that, I'll click on
Render to Viewer and see what's going on.
| | 02:35 | I'm going to open this up a little bit,
so you can see things with better fidelity.
| | 02:39 | There is 100%.
| | 02:41 | Currently, I'm looking at Layer>Image,
so I can see how my Render is
| | 02:45 | developing. I'm going to go into
Single-Pass mode, so that I can start to
| | 02:49 | isolate the individual elements in
my Render and see what special passes
| | 02:54 | are being rendered.
| | 02:55 | And this is the Background, which is
the overall render, but I've got my
| | 02:58 | flat, Diffuse lighting, my Specular highlight,
just the hot spotting lights on the wall,
| | 03:05 | my Shadows, which show just the dark areas
of the shadows, otherwise the scene is white.
| | 03:10 | You'll see the gray there for backing shadow.
| | 03:13 | The Ambient light, I have some very,
slight self-illumination on the videowall
| | 03:18 | face, to get it more even in its
lighting, and a little bit around the edge of this
| | 03:22 | type, you can see the edges there.
| | 03:24 | And finally, reflections.
| | 03:26 | These are the reflections of the wall and
the type for Tuesday off the floor of my room.
| | 03:32 | That's what's all being rendered
at the same time for me in Cinema.
| | 03:36 | In addition to all of these layers, it
has also saved for me a .ace After Effects
| | 03:42 | project file that will reassemble
all of these layers into a composite.
| | 03:46 | And I'll show you that, as
soon as this render is finished.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Blending the passes in After Effects| 00:03 | I'm back here in After Effects.
| | 00:05 | If you've downloaded the project files
that came with this training, go ahead
| | 00:08 | and do Command+O or Ctrl+O to open.
| | 00:11 | Go up to Chapter 3 folder/After
Effects/videowall composite3_starter.
| | 00:18 | Open up and that brings in the same two
video sources we had earlier to play with.
| | 00:22 | Now, I want to import my multi-
pass render and again, it's important.
| | 00:26 | You don't do O to Open, but you do
Command+I or Ctrl+I to Import a Cinema .aec file.
| | 00:33 | Command+I, I'm going to go to my
multipass renders folder. There is my .aec file.
| | 00:41 | You see all of these other layers.
| | 00:42 | Videowall.mov is my normal render
but there is the ambient, diffuse,
| | 00:46 | object buffer, reflection, rgb,
which is redundant to the whole render,
| | 00:50 | shadow and specular.
| | 00:51 | So, I'm going to go ahead and import
just the aec and it will bring in all of
| | 00:56 | those other special passes for me.
| | 00:58 | Here is my videowall object.
| | 01:01 | There is my normal render.
| | 01:02 | Here is the RGB render, but also inside
the videowall folder, I have my ambient,
| | 01:08 | diffuse, reflection,
shadow and specular properties.
| | 01:12 | Let's open up this comp
and see what's all in here.
| | 01:14 | Here is my Camera and lights, as I expected.
| | 01:18 | This particular project in Cinema, I
used a null object instead of a solid to
| | 01:23 | note where the videowall's face is.
| | 01:25 | That's why that looks a little bit different.
| | 01:27 | Here's these individual
properties. Let's solo them.
| | 01:29 | Reflections, you see a little
bit down here in the bottom.
| | 01:34 | Ambient, just that self-illumination
on the wall or around the text edges.
| | 01:39 | Shadow, normally a white render, the black
with the shadows are supposed to be factored in.
| | 01:45 | Specular, that hot spot, and all these
are factored on top of Diffuse, the flat,
| | 01:50 | overall lighting of the scene.
| | 01:51 | What's really instructive is to click on
Toggle Switches / modes, again, F4 is a
| | 01:56 | shortcut and see the Blending modes
used to create this composite.
| | 02:01 | Reflections are typically done in Add mode.
| | 02:03 | If you find the reflections are too
strong, you can try something weaker like
| | 02:06 | Screen but Add tends to work
better for things like this.
| | 02:11 | Ambient is also added.
| | 02:13 | It's another form of illumination,
which is added into the scene.
| | 02:17 | Shadow is Multiplied.
| | 02:19 | It actually darkens the scene.
| | 02:21 | That's why it was mostly white.
| | 02:23 | When you multiply white, you have no
change, but when you multiply black, it
| | 02:27 | darkens the underlying composite.
| | 02:29 | Specular highlights are also added onto
the underlying footage and there is our
| | 02:34 | Diffuse down at the bottom.
| | 02:35 | Now the really cool thing about this is
not only can I change the modes, I can
| | 02:41 | change the transparency of these
layers to change how they're blended.
| | 02:45 | I'll Type T for Opacity.
| | 02:47 | Let's say that I want less Reflection.
| | 02:49 | That's too much reflection.
| | 02:50 | Let's go ahead and reduce its Opacity to
reduce the amount of reflection in the scene.
| | 02:56 | No reflection, just to hint,
full strength reflection.
| | 03:01 | Ambient light, where I got some self-
illumination on that wall, if I find the
| | 03:04 | wall a bit too flat, I want something
more dramatic on in or if I want to use my
| | 03:08 | lighting inside this scene to help
boost it, I can pull out the Ambient
| | 03:13 | lighting, or just factor it back in
as much as I like, maybe around there.
| | 03:17 | Shadows, same thing.
| | 03:19 | Here are my Shadows.
| | 03:21 | If that's too strong, I can go ahead
and pull them back out of the scene.
| | 03:25 | There is no Shadows present
or just a hint of a shadow.
| | 03:30 | And same thing with the Specular
highlight, a little hot spot on the wall
| | 03:33 | I can reduce, or put back in.
| | 03:36 | Now the problem with Opacity, and with
this approach in general, is that they
| | 03:40 | all come at 100% and you
can't go greater than 100.
| | 03:44 | However, there are things you
can do to heighten these effects.
| | 03:49 | If you're already inside After Effects,
you can pick something like the Specular
| | 03:52 | highlight, duplicate the layer and now
you've got double the Specular effect.
| | 03:57 | Type T for your duplicate and decide just how
much extra specular do you want to match in.
| | 04:02 | So, there I have gone basically to
100 plus 16 or 116% Specular, versus what
| | 04:07 | came out of Cinema.
| | 04:08 | So, I can do that to over-amp the Specular.
| | 04:11 | Let's say in the case of the Shadow.
| | 04:13 | The shadow wasn't dark enough.
| | 04:14 | I can do the same thing.
| | 04:15 | I can duplicate it to darken my
shadows or keep the one original layer.
| | 04:20 | Let's say that I don't like black as
my shadow. Well if I wanted to, I could
| | 04:24 | even colorize my shadow, just to add
more of a surreal look to the scene.
| | 04:29 | In that case, I would use
something like Effect>Color Correct>Tint.
| | 04:36 | Leave White at White, but Map Black To a
different color, so just say something in a
| | 04:42 | more of an Amber sort of look here.
| | 04:44 | Let's go ahead and go a little darker,
pull it back down on that sort of look.
| | 04:49 | Now I've got a tinted shadow in the scene
rather than my normal straight black shadow.
| | 04:56 | In the case of reflections, they
default to being perfectly sharp.
| | 04:59 | Let's say I want a blurry reflection.
| | 05:02 | I will go ahead and pick my
Reflection Pass and go Effect>Blur & Sharpen.
| | 05:08 | Pick something like Box
Blur, which is very flexible.
| | 05:11 | I can either increase that go get a
boxy sort of blur on my reflection or maybe
| | 05:16 | increase the Iterations a little bit to
get a smoother blur to the reflection.
| | 05:19 | But now I've got that classic blurred
reflection look, rather than a perfectly
| | 05:24 | clear sharp reflection.
| | 05:25 | Now, this is very cool because I'm
doing all this mixing and matching after the
| | 05:30 | fact, inside After Effects.
| | 05:33 | I'm not having to go back into
the 3D program and re-render.
| | 05:37 | Again, this is a fantastic way
to accommodate client changes.
| | 05:42 | Indeed, if I know I'm going to be
working this way in the future, what I
| | 05:47 | might do is go back to my Cinema project, in
CINEMA 4D and over-amp some of these properties.
| | 05:54 | For example, let's go ahead and go to my
key light, open up its properties, look
| | 05:58 | at Shadow and I might even make the
Shadow Density say more than 100% inside
| | 06:03 | Cinema because I can always cut the
Opacity back inside After Effects.
| | 06:09 | Same thing for Reflections, I've
got my Texture on my white flooring.
| | 06:14 | Open up the Texture Settings, go to
Reflection and increase the Mix Strength
| | 06:21 | for my floor or do other things to go ahead
and really amp up the look of this project.
| | 06:26 | I can always back it down in After
Effects far easier than I can duplicate and
| | 06:30 | mix in more of an effect in After Effects.
| | 06:32 | So, I might purposely overplay things
in 3D, just so I can pull them back later
| | 06:37 | or keep them hot, if
that's what the client wants.
| | 06:39 | Now, this approach, of just doing a
Multi-Pass on Ambient, Diffuse, Specular,
| | 06:45 | Reflection, Shadow alone gives you a
lot more flexibility, whether you're doing
| | 06:49 | motion graphics or visual effects, but
you can take this to the next level and
| | 06:53 | even control the individual intensity of
each light and the color of each light.
| | 06:58 | I will show that one next.
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|
|
4. Remixing LightsSeparating lights in CINEMA 4D| 00:03 | If you have downloaded the project
files that accompany this training, go ahead
| | 00:06 | and go into Cinema and do File>Open.
| | 00:10 | Move up a couple of levels to
chapter 4, open the Cinema folder, and pick
| | 00:16 | Videowall_4_starter.
| | 00:18 | This is similar to the wall you've
seen, but I've just gone ahead and done
| | 00:21 | something a little more interesting with it,
in terms of giving it some colored lights.
| | 00:24 | I am going to render it quickly,
so you can see what it looks like.
| | 00:27 | Since I know I am going to be doing a
multi-pass render, I've gone ahead and
| | 00:30 | darkened my shadows more than I normally would.
| | 00:33 | I've gone ahead and increased my
reflections more than I normally would.
| | 00:37 | I'll go up to my Render settings and
you'll see I've already added Diffuse,
| | 00:42 | Specular, Shadow, Reflection, Object
Buffer, and Ambient, just like we have for
| | 00:46 | the previous passes.
| | 00:48 | Now the next level of multi-pass
rendering is playing around with the lights as
| | 00:53 | individual objects, as individual
layers and components inside After Effects.
| | 00:58 | So, click on the Multi-pass header and
set Separate Lights to one of these choices.
| | 01:04 | I'll pick All of the lights to
go ahead and separate them out.
| | 01:07 | As you can see, you can also
target lights if you'd like to.
| | 01:09 | Let's do all three lights in the scene.
| | 01:12 | Underneath Mode, you have
a few different choices.
| | 01:14 | The first one, 1 Channel will
give you one movie for each light.
| | 01:21 | And that movie will contain the
Diffuse and the Specular and the Shadow
| | 01:25 | contributions of that light.
| | 01:28 | Going a bit further, two channels,
you'll get two movies per light.
| | 01:33 | One that's Diffuse and Specular, one that's
just a Shadow contribution to that light.
| | 01:40 | And then there is Three channels,
three movies per light, where you break out
| | 01:45 | Diffuse, Specular, and Shadow individually.
| | 01:48 | Let's go ahead and take advantage of that.
| | 01:50 | By the way, I tend to enable shadow
correction since I have situations where
| | 01:54 | like the video wall touches the
floor, the Shadow correction helps to fill
| | 01:57 | in things like that.
| | 01:59 | Now since I am already rendering
Diffuse, Specular and Shadow per light, I no
| | 02:05 | longer need to render
those in my multi-pass render.
| | 02:08 | They'll just be black because I already
have those qualities rendered per light.
| | 02:13 | I don't need it for the overall scene.
| | 02:16 | So, I am going to go ahead and select
Diffuse, delete it, Specular, delete it,
| | 02:20 | and Shadow and delete that as well.
| | 02:22 | I don't need those extra passes
because I am getting them per light.
| | 02:25 | The last thing, as always, is go to the Save
dialog, make sure your paths are correct.
| | 02:30 | I want to go ahead and go to my
folder here, Cinema4D/Chapter 4, good.
| | 02:37 | Make a new folder called something like
Separate Light Renders, Create, and save
| | 02:44 | my regular render, as well as my
multi-pass render into that folder.
| | 02:48 | Make sure you Compositing file is indeed checked on,
After Effects, Include 3D data. Life is good!
| | 02:55 | Let's go ahead and render this to see
what it looks like inside the render viewer.
| | 02:59 | As we're going here, you'll see we
have our Reflections as before, Ambient as
| | 03:05 | before, the Overall Background Buffer,
and the Object Buffer, but now I've
| | 03:11 | got separated lights.
| | 03:13 | There is a Top light, the Key light,
which is mainly hitting the Face, and then the
| | 03:17 | side fill, which is a different color light.
| | 03:20 | And inside those lights, I do have
Shadow, Top light Specular, you don't really
| | 03:26 | see it, since it is on top of the
wall, and Diffuse for that light.
| | 03:30 | These are all of the independent
movies that Cinema is rendering for me.
| | 03:35 | Now this is going to take a little
while, I won't make you sit through it.
| | 03:38 | Let's jump ahead and now see how
all this comes into After Effects.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Remixing lights in After Effects| 00:04 | Once the render is done in Cinema 4D,
you can to return to After
| | 00:07 | Effects and in this case, we're not
going to bother with the video, so just
| | 00:10 | start with the blank project.
| | 00:12 | Again, do Command+I on Mac or Ctrl+I on
Windows to Import your Cinema render.
| | 00:16 | Let's go to the Project we just created.
| | 00:18 | It's in Chapter 4/Cinema/separate
light renders and there is our .aec, which
| | 00:25 | Cinema created for us.
| | 00:26 | So I'll select that and do Open.
| | 00:30 | Take a second to think about it, because
it's a more complex project. Twirl it down.
| | 00:34 | Now we see not only do we have our
Ambient and Reflection passes, and Special
| | 00:40 | Passes of our normal
background and our object buffer,
| | 00:43 | we now have folders for each of our
lights that were rendered in Cinema, and
| | 00:48 | inside each of those folders is a pre-
composition for that light, I'll open this
| | 00:53 | up a little bit more.
| | 00:55 | And then the separate Diffuse, Shadow
and the Specular highlights, which you can't
| | 01:04 | see in this render, for each of the lights.
| | 01:07 | Let's go ahead and open up our big composite.
| | 01:11 | Again, on this project, I just use a
null object instead of the solid for where
| | 01:15 | the video wall goes.
| | 01:16 | This contains that important information
of Position and Rotation, which you can
| | 01:21 | copy and paste to your video later on.
| | 01:23 | It has our Reflection pass. There's
the Tuesday reflecting off the floor, our
| | 01:30 | Ambient pass, a little bit of extra
ambient effect around the edges of the text,
| | 01:33 | but now we have precomps for each of our lights.
| | 01:39 | There's the top light, there's the key +
shadow light and there is the side fill
| | 01:45 | light. Notice that they're
each different colors.
| | 01:48 | This gives us a lot of flexibility.
| | 01:50 | I'm going to lock this window down.
| | 01:53 | I'm going to create a View>New Viewer
and drag it off to the side here, so I've
| | 01:59 | got two comps side-by-side and we'll
just go ahead and scale as necessary, so we
| | 02:04 | can see them both at the same time.
| | 02:08 | There. And now we'll start looking at
our individual lights, double-click.
| | 02:13 | This is the composition for our top light.
| | 02:19 | There's the Shadow's contribution.
| | 02:22 | There's the Specular, which you don't
really get to see since it's off at the top
| | 02:24 | of the wall, and there's the lights contribution.
| | 02:27 | As you see, as I turn off the Diffuse
in that lights precomp, that yellow light
| | 02:32 | disappears from our final comp on the left.
| | 02:34 | There it is with just the key light and
the fill light and there's with it on.
| | 02:40 | The really cool thing about this is
I can really start playing around the
| | 02:44 | individual parameters.
| | 02:45 | Let's say I don't like that color of yellow.
| | 02:48 | Since that light is isolated in this
precomp, I can go ahead and apply an effect
| | 02:54 | to the colorization of the
Diffuse Channel of just this light.
| | 02:58 | I will go to Color Correction.
| | 03:00 | I will go ahead and pick something
very simple like Hue/Saturation and as I
| | 03:04 | play around with the Master Hue, maybe you get
something into a little cooler of a blue
| | 03:09 | look, you'll see how the Master Render
changes, just that lights contribution has changed.
| | 03:15 | It's very important and
it's very cool, by the way.
| | 03:18 | I didn't have to re-render anything in 3D.
| | 03:20 | I'll go back up and double-click my
key+shadow. I might think my shadow density
| | 03:26 | is a bit too much there, so I can type
T for Transparency, back it off to be a
| | 03:31 | less intense shadow, maybe around there,
and you'll see the shadow is reduced
| | 03:36 | in my final composite.
| | 03:38 | And like we did earlier, if I wanted to,
I could even colorize that shadow by
| | 03:41 | applying tint and changing
the black part of that shadow.
| | 03:43 | I'll go back and open up my side fill.
| | 03:47 | This has yet a different color.
| | 03:48 | I basically like it, but maybe I want
to kick it up a little bit, make it a
| | 03:50 | little bit more saturated.
| | 03:51 | So I'm going to go ahead and pick that
Diffuse Channel again, go underneath Effect,
| | 03:56 | get Hue/Saturation, maybe increase the
Saturation a little bit and now I've got
| | 04:01 | a little more contribution in the final.
| | 04:03 | And if I don't like how the light fall
off work or how the middle grays work, I
| | 04:07 | can even go apply an Effect like
Color Correction>Levels and play with the
| | 04:11 | Histogram to maybe boost up the middle
grays for that light, and there's its
| | 04:16 | contribution in the final.
| | 04:18 | Very cool. I can re-blend my lights
and the characteristics of each light
| | 04:23 | separately without going back into 3D.
| | 04:25 | This will save you so much time and
frustration, when you're trying to get that
| | 04:30 | final 10% or even 1% out of a
render to make it look good.
| | 04:34 | I'll go ahead and go back to my main
comp here and I can still play around with
| | 04:38 | things like how much reflection that I
have, pull it out, put it back in, even
| | 04:44 | apply an Effect like Blur and Sharpen> Fast Blur
and give me soft, just a little
| | 04:49 | bit of a soft reflection.
| | 04:52 | I'll close this comp for now, and
I'll get back to my full view.
| | 04:55 | And that's how you can change the final
composite of your render without having
| | 04:59 | to go back into a 3D program.
| | 05:01 | Again, very powerful.
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|
|
5. Shadow CatchersThe problem with shadows| 00:03 | So after you've learned all of these
techniques, the day will come when you are
| | 00:06 | going to create a nice room in Cinema,
you are going to export everything
| | 00:10 | correctly into After Effects,
| | 00:11 | you are going to add a 3D layer in
After Effects and you are going to go,
| | 00:14 | "Something is wrong, something is missing."
| | 00:17 | Well namely, there's no shadows in this scene.
| | 00:21 | This text is not casting any
shadows on this floor or back wall.
| | 00:25 | Before you panic, there are a few
things you should check out first in After
| | 00:29 | Effects, because shadows
are a little bit tricky.
| | 00:31 | First off, you need to make sure that
your lights have been set to Casts Shadows,
| | 00:34 | that this little check mark is on, but
as I go through my lights, I am finding
| | 00:38 | that Cast Shadows is turned
on for all my lights. Okay.
| | 00:43 | Ah! Well the second problem is is that layers
themselves default to not casting shadows.
| | 00:49 | So I will select my 3D layer, type AA
and look at Casts Shadows, oh, I have set
| | 00:55 | that On and I am still not getting shadows.
| | 00:59 | Hm. Let's twirl that up.
| | 01:02 | Okay, well the third possible problem,
it's rare but it can happen, is that the
| | 01:06 | layers receiving shadows
are not set to receive shadows.
| | 01:09 | So I will select my 3D Render, type AA,
and I am not getting 3D Parameters. Oh!
| | 01:17 | You know why?
| | 01:18 | Let's Toggle Switches/Modes.
| | 01:20 | My 3D Render is not a 3D layer, and
if I was to turn on the 3D layer switch, it
| | 01:27 | would just go off into
space. What's happening?
| | 01:31 | Well, 3D Renders already have
Camera movement and any perspective
| | 01:37 | distortion built into them.
| | 01:39 | You don't need that camera move
affecting them again in After Effects.
| | 01:44 | So the 3D layer switch
must stay off for 3D renders.
| | 01:48 | And the catch 22 is is that 3D layers in
After Effects cannot cast shadows onto
| | 01:55 | 2D layers, they can only
cast shadows on the 3D layers.
| | 01:59 | Well, you might say "Oh I can fake
this, I am going to go ahead and go
| | 02:02 | "underneath Effect and Perspective,
and use one of these shadows like Drop
| | 02:06 | "Shadow or Radial Shadow."
| | 02:08 | But frankly those aren't going to
work because you want shadows on the
| | 02:10 | back wall, and on the floor and
on the window and they are all in
| | 02:13 | different positions.
| | 02:14 | So to make this work you need
to learn one more technique.
| | 02:18 | The technique of shadow catching, and
that's what we are going to cover next.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Catcher locations in CINEMA 4D| 00:03 | We are back in Cinema 4D and if you've
downloaded the project files and sources
| | 00:07 | that came with this training, go Open,
make sure you are in the Chapter 5
| | 00:11 | folder/Cinema 4D/room_5_starter and Open.
| | 00:17 | Here I have created a different room
just to keep things a bit more interesting.
| | 00:20 | I have got a floor, a wall, a window
that's juts out slightly from that wall,
| | 00:26 | I'll give a quick render here.
| | 00:28 | Why that's important is that if
shadow was being cast against this wall,
| | 00:32 | it would appear a little bit differently on
this window than it would on the back wall,
| | 00:36 | so a little bit more of an advanced case.
| | 00:39 | In our previous examples, we
have been mapping video onto walls.
| | 00:43 | Well in this case, we need to map our
shadow catcher layers onto these walls.
| | 00:48 | So just like the video wall case, we
need to setup External Composting tags for
| | 00:54 | these three surfaces.
| | 00:56 | One thing we need to know is how big they are.
| | 00:59 | So let's start with the
floor. Here is my floor object.
| | 01:03 | I need to figure out how big it is so I need
how big of a layer to put on it in After Effects.
| | 01:07 | So I am going to select my top of floor
layer and note there's 3096 wall units by
| | 01:14 | 2048, so that gives me its size.
| | 01:17 | I select my floor, apply a Tag>Cinema
4D>External Compositing. This gives me
| | 01:26 | either a null object, or in newer versions
of Cinema, a Solid that's placed right in
| | 01:32 | the middle of that floor and
fortunately, I already have my axis arrows placed
| | 01:35 | square in the middle of the floor,
right on the top of the floor.
| | 01:39 | I need my shadow catchers to be white.
| | 01:42 | So I am going to change these solids
to be white in color, or you can replace
| | 01:46 | them with a white solid in After
Effects and what I'd love to do is type in the
| | 01:51 | size of my floor straight here in Cinema.
| | 01:54 | The problem with that is Cinema
currently restricts these solids to be no larger
| | 01:59 | than 1000 pixels on a side.
| | 02:01 | So unfortunately, I just need to make
them 1000 x 1000 here in Cinema, then what
| | 02:06 | I get into After Effects, I will go ahead
and expand them out to the right size.
| | 02:10 | But I've already written down somewhere
what size this needs to be, 3096 x 2048.
| | 02:16 | Let's pick my next object, the back wall.
| | 02:19 | Again, I need my axis arrows to be
flushed with the face of that wall because we
| | 02:25 | want the shadows cast flush onto that wall.
| | 02:28 | I want to figure out how big that back wall is.
| | 02:30 | I am going to click on back wall, note
that it's 3096 wide by 1024 tall, good.
| | 02:38 | I will select my back wall
again and apply Tags>Cinema
| | 02:42 | Tags>External Compositing.
| | 02:44 | I will make it a Solid again. I will
make it white since shadow catchers need to
| | 02:49 | be white, and again, I'd love to make
it the size of that wall, but I have to
| | 02:53 | settle for just 1000x1000, as of Cinema
in version 11.5. Finally, I want to create
| | 02:59 | a separate little shadow
catcher just for where that window is.
| | 03:02 | So to do that, I select my window boolean.
| | 03:05 | That's how I created this
window in the first place.
| | 03:07 | I want to check its size,
| | 03:10 | so I see the window main
was 448 x 384, good to know.
| | 03:16 | Select that window, make sure my axis
arrows are flush with the face of that window.
| | 03:22 | It looks like it is except for taking
that bevel into account, so I will make
| | 03:27 | sure I've got my Axis Move tool here
and I will move it until it's just flush
| | 03:33 | with the face of that window. That's good.
| | 03:35 | Select it. Tags>Cinema Tags>External
Compositing, make it a Solid, make it white in color.
| | 03:43 | This time, I can actually type in
the numbers, and rather than typing in
| | 03:47 | exactly the size of the window, it's
good to have a couple of extra pixels
| | 03:51 | left over because I am going to trim them with
object buffers. We will get to that in a second.
| | 03:55 | I am going to type in something like, say,
452 wide, just to give myself a little
| | 03:59 | extra and 390 tall, so my solids a
little bit bigger than this window.
| | 04:05 | For this window, I really need
to think about my Tag Properties.
| | 04:09 | For one thing, it was created as a
boolean, one cube was cut out of another cube.
| | 04:16 | I don't want the cache calculated in
that point because otherwise, I am going
| | 04:21 | to get solids for all these components
that made up that boolean and I don't
| | 04:25 | want that in this case.
| | 04:27 | I am going to settle, in this case,
making a solid just for the face of this
| | 04:31 | window and use that as a Shadow Catcher,
but if I was really trying to get the
| | 04:36 | last little bit out of my composite, I
would want a solid for every facet of
| | 04:41 | that window, so I can catch
shadows in all those different dimensions.
| | 04:46 | If you are working on a critical project,
that's what you would want to do. Okay.
| | 04:51 | You could just have these white solids for
the back wall, for the floor and for the window.
| | 04:56 | But the problem is is we do have some cut outs,
some holes where shadows should not appear.
| | 05:02 | Whenever we have cut-outs or we need
to worry about trimming a layer, that's
| | 05:05 | when we want to use object buffers.
| | 05:07 | So let's go back to these guys again.
| | 05:09 | I'll select my floor, and this time I
will add a Tag>CinemaTag>Compositing,
| | 05:14 | not External Compositing.
| | 05:15 | I will go to my Object Buffer and make
sure that I have assigned one Buffer, a
| | 05:21 | unique buffer, to mask out just where
that floor is visible in the final render.
| | 05:26 | I will go to my back wall, apply
a Tag>Cinema Tag>Compositing.
| | 05:32 | Underneath Attributes>Object
Buffer, I am going to turn on another Buffer
| | 05:37 | with a different number to create a
unique matte pass just for that back wall.
| | 05:44 | And finally, I am going to go to my
window boolean just this window object here in
| | 05:48 | the middle, and again apply Tag>
Cinema Tag>Compositing, Attributes>Object
| | 05:55 | Buffer. This time, Enable Buffer 3.
| | 05:58 | So I have a third unique matte pass
that shows me just where this window is
| | 06:04 | visible in the final composite.
| | 06:06 | Now that I have got those, I need
to go to my Render Settings, enable
| | 06:11 | Multi-Pass, add some Object Buffers,
Buffer 1, Buffer 2, make sure I increment
| | 06:19 | the number to number 2, and Buffer
3 and increment, finally, to Buffer 3.
| | 06:25 | I will go back to my Save, make sure I save
these to a path that is actually on this computer.
| | 06:31 | I see that I am in my Chapter 5 folder,
so I am going to create a New Folder
| | 06:35 | inside for my renders called shadow
catcher renders, Create, Save and do the
| | 06:43 | same for my Multi-Pass.
| | 06:45 | Make sure it goes in that same folder.
| | 06:47 | I've got my Compositing Project
File turned on to Save, After Effects
| | 06:51 | and Include 3D Data.
| | 06:53 | And now that I have got all that
set up, let's go ahead and render it.
| | 06:57 | Now you see that I am getting not only
my Background render for the entire wall,
| | 07:02 | but individual Object Buffers, a floor,
for the back wall, without the window,
| | 07:08 | and for the window itself. Pretty good.
| | 07:10 | Well this is going to take a while to
render, so I am not going to make you sit
| | 07:14 | here and wait. When this is done, we
will jump into After Effects and see how we
| | 07:17 | need to build our Shadow
Catchers as part of that scene.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Catching shadows in After Effects| 00:03 | My render in Cinema 4D is done.
| | 00:05 | I am back in After Effects with a new project.
| | 00:08 | I am going to do Command+I on
Mac, Ctrl+I on Windows to import.
| | 00:12 | I'm going to select the folder for
my shadow catcher renders.
| | 00:15 | You'll see, again, Cinema has created a
.aec file for me, my backgrounds and my
| | 00:22 | three object buffers for my shadow catchers.
| | 00:24 | So I will go ahead and select aec and Open.
| | 00:28 | Once I bring this into After Effects,
we'll look at our composition, I'll
| | 00:32 | deselect and you'll see, in addition to my
3D render, I have solids for my floor, my
| | 00:38 | back wall and for my window cutout.
| | 00:42 | Here is the render just as seen unmolested.
| | 00:45 | The lights are animating a little bit
in the scene, in addition to the camera
| | 00:48 | moving, and we'll verify that by
selecting the camera, these different lights,
| | 00:53 | pressing U to reveal their keyframes
and you can see the motion going on, the
| | 00:57 | camera eases to hold at five
seconds, while the lights keep drifting.
| | 01:01 | And finally, our Special Pass renders,
our three object buffers, the floor, the
| | 01:07 | back wall, minus the window,
and finally, the window by itself.
| | 01:12 | Let's go to the scene and start setting
it up and this is going to take a little
| | 01:17 | work, but we're going to do everything
three times for our three surfaces.
| | 01:21 | First, let's make those three solids the
correct orientation and the correct size.
| | 01:25 | Now, for some reason, Cinema brings
in that solid facing straight forward.
| | 01:29 | It doesn't realize it's supposed to be
laying flat on the floor, but that's okay.
| | 01:32 | I see it's my red or my X arrow
that I need to rotate it along.
| | 01:36 | That's the axis I want to flip it on.
| | 01:38 | So, I'll type R for rotation and orient it 90
degrees so that it lays flat along the floor.
| | 01:48 | Next, I need to change its size,
underneath Layer>Solid Settings.
| | 01:53 | I know that this floor is 3096 pixels wide.
| | 01:57 | I like to have a few extra pixels on
the edges to trim off, just to keep
| | 02:00 | things nice and clean.
| | 02:01 | I'm going to make it 3100 wide.
| | 02:04 | For the Height, I know it's 2048 in Cinema.
| | 02:07 | Again, I'll just round it up to 2050, click OK.
| | 02:10 | Now I have a surface that
covers the entire floor.
| | 02:13 | Next is the back wall.
| | 02:14 | Twirl up the floor, select the back
wall, again, choose Layer>Solid Settings,
| | 02:20 | the shortcut is Command+Shift+Y on Mac,
Ctrl+Shift+Y on Windows, and change its size.
| | 02:26 | Again, its 3096 wide, I'll round that up.
| | 02:29 | It's 1024 tall and I'll
round that up to, say, 1028.
| | 02:33 | Now, I have something
covering the entire back wall.
| | 02:36 | And the Window Boolean was already the
correct size, so there is no need for me
| | 02:40 | to do anything further with that.
| | 02:42 | The next thing I want to do is trim
those shadow catchers, so that they exactly
| | 02:46 | confirm to the surfaces they are sitting in for.
| | 02:49 | So in the case of the floor, I'll
pick my shadow catcher 1, this render that
| | 02:54 | matches the floor, drag it just above
the floor, hit F4 to open up the modes
| | 03:01 | panel and say use that as a luma
matte and there is the floor trimmed.
| | 03:06 | I'll pick up my shadow buffer number 2,
drop in front of the back wall, set the
| | 03:11 | back wall to luma matte
and it will matte that out.
| | 03:15 | And finally, I am going to grab my third
buffer, drag it above my window, set it
| | 03:20 | to luma matte as well, and now
I've got that cut out as well.
| | 03:25 | Okay, so I have these three solids,
each sitting in for my surfaces in a
| | 03:30 | very rough fashion.
| | 03:31 | Before we really see how to make
these shadows work, I need to create
| | 03:34 | something that casts the shadow.
| | 03:35 | So I am going to select my Text tool,
have a nice bold font, such as Arial
| | 03:40 | Black, I'll pick a color such as some sort of
medium gray so you can see what it looks like.
| | 03:45 | I have a nice big font size picked already.
| | 03:47 | Let's just start typing,
such as shadows: catch me.
| | 03:56 | Press Enter, then press V to
return to the Selection tool.
| | 03:59 | I need to go back to Switches down
here in the timeline, so I'll press F4, but I
| | 04:04 | need to enable the 3D layer switch for my text.
| | 04:08 | I do so and it kind of
defaults down in the floor.
| | 04:11 | Let's go ahead and pull it up out of
the floor, push it back a little bit, pull
| | 04:17 | it over a little bit and
pull it up a little bit.
| | 04:20 | Again, layers in After Effects do not
cast shadows by default, so I need to
| | 04:25 | select it, type aa to reveal its
Material Options and turn on Casts Shadows.
| | 04:31 | The shortcut is Option+Shift+C
on Mac, Alt+Shift+C on Windows.
| | 04:35 | So now, my text is casting shadows.
| | 04:38 | I see a bit of this shadow down here
on the floor, but the wall has this very
| | 04:41 | strange look about it.
| | 04:43 | Well, this is because these solids are
catching lights and catching shadows.
| | 04:49 | We want our shadow catchers to
only capture shadows, not light.
| | 04:57 | The light's already been
factored into the 3D render.
| | 04:59 | It's only the shadows we want to add.
| | 05:02 | So to do that, I am going to start
with my floor, select it, type aa to
| | 05:07 | reveal its options.
| | 05:10 | Keep on Accepts Shadows,
but turn off Accepts Lights.
| | 05:16 | That way, it is just a 100% white solid
and if you forgot to make your solids
| | 05:21 | white, just go ahead and change your
color in Solid Settings, and that has
| | 05:24 | captured my nice black shadow.
| | 05:26 | We'll do the same to the back
wall, aa, Accepts Lights off.
| | 05:33 | Now I see black shadows.
| | 05:35 | And for the window, aa, Accepts Lights off.
| | 05:40 | So again, this is very important,
Accepts Shadows on, Accepts Lights off.
| | 05:45 | That's one of the main secrets to this trick.
| | 05:48 | Okay, I now have black shadows on white
walls, but what I really want to see are
| | 05:52 | my original walls underneath.
| | 05:53 | Well, this is where blending
modes come back to rescue again.
| | 05:57 | Remember when we did multi-pass
renders that Cinema put the Shadow layer in
| | 06:01 | Multiply mode so the white was
unaffected, and only the dark areas were
| | 06:06 | darkened on the render?
| | 06:07 | Well, we want to do the same thing here.
| | 06:09 | Once again, press F4 to return to our
modes and now for the Window Boolean, I
| | 06:16 | will set its mode to Multiply.
| | 06:20 | Now, the window comes through as just the shadow.
| | 06:23 | Go to the back wall, same thing, Multiply mode.
| | 06:28 | There is the back wall with its original
rendered color but with my shadows added in.
| | 06:34 | Finally, floor, set it to Multiply mode
as well, and there is the floor with just
| | 06:40 | the shadow from the text.
| | 06:42 | And to show you that this is interactive,
I am going to pull the text around and
| | 06:46 | you'll see how as I pull it closer to
the lights, the shadows grow in size and
| | 06:51 | also travel across the floor.
| | 06:52 | As I drag it up over this window,
| | 06:56 | you'll notice how the shadows
do, indeed, break up across this window.
| | 07:01 | They are falling on the front surface
of that window separately than they are
| | 07:05 | falling on the back wall.
| | 07:07 | So, that's another important trick.
| | 07:09 | We have a little bit of artifacting
here on the edge, but frankly, that's a lot
| | 07:13 | better than no shadows at all.
| | 07:15 | Well, by the way, speaking of artifacts,
sometimes when you do this sort of
| | 07:19 | trick with object buffers, if you
render this with an Alpha Channel, you
| | 07:23 | might see a white fringe in here, in
an interface between the Alpha Channel
| | 07:28 | and the object buffer.
| | 07:29 | If you ever see that white fringe,
select the object buffer layer, not the shadow
| | 07:35 | catch layer, but the object buffer,
that's causing you some grief and giving a
| | 07:39 | white fringe, and apply the
Minimax effect to it, Minimax.
| | 07:47 | Apply it to your object buffer, set
it to Minimum rather than Maximum, set it
| | 07:51 | to a small Radius of 1 and that will clean
up any white fringes you see on the inside.
| | 07:57 | It does have the cost though of
shrinking your shadow catcher and also creating
| | 08:02 | a bit of an edge here right around this fall off.
| | 08:04 | So only use it if you see an artifact.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Refining the shadows| 00:03 | So, I now have objects added in After Effects
casting shadows, apparently on my 3D scene.
| | 00:11 | But what they're really being cast on
are just those shadow catcher layers that
| | 00:16 | I've created with a combination of
the 3D program and solids in After Effects.
| | 00:21 | Let's tweak this out a little a bit.
| | 00:22 | Okay, the shadows are quite dark.
| | 00:26 | There's a few ways of fixing that.
| | 00:29 | One, each light, I'll double click one,
has a Shadow Darkness parameter.
| | 00:36 | So if you had a particular light that
you thought was casting a particularly
| | 00:40 | dark shadow, first I'd isolate which
light is causing me the grief, like that one
| | 00:45 | right in the middle I don't like so much.
| | 00:48 | Double click it, decrease its Shadow
Darkness to, say, 50 and now its shadow
| | 00:53 | has much less effect.
| | 00:54 | You can also type AA, reveal it in
the timeline and interactively scrub it.
| | 01:00 | That - or like that.
| | 01:05 | And by the way, the Shadow Diffusion
parameter for each light affects how
| | 01:09 | soft the shadow is.
| | 01:11 | So, I can soften up those shadows to create
something blurry, or go down to 0 and keep them sharp.
| | 01:17 | By the way, Shadow Diffusion
does really add to your render time,
| | 01:20 | so use it judiciously.
| | 01:23 | Another approach is to take the layer
receiving the shadow, the shadow catcher
| | 01:29 | and reduce its opacity, so
there's less shadow to add in.
| | 01:33 | In this case, the back wall's at issue.
| | 01:36 | I'll press T to reveal its opacity and
scrub it down, basically fading out the
| | 01:42 | shadows on the back wall.
| | 01:44 | You see, I haven't touched
the window yet, so it's 100%.
| | 01:47 | There's the back wall.
| | 01:49 | Okay, somewhere in there, maybe I'll
leave it a little bit different just so I
| | 01:53 | accentuate this difference between falling
on the window and falling on the back wall.
| | 01:57 | The third way to affect this and
it's not really the right way, but it is
| | 02:01 | another approach, is to select
your layer casting the shadows.
| | 02:05 | Again, type AA to reveal its
parameters and play around this Light
| | 02:09 | Transmission parameter.
| | 02:11 | What Light Transmission says is, "Is it 0?"
| | 02:13 | The shadow is black.
| | 02:16 | At 100, the shadow is the color
of the layer casting the shadow.
| | 02:21 | So, you can modify, or colorize, or
alter your shadows by playing with
| | 02:25 | this parameter as well,
| | 02:27 | but normally you will leave
that at 0 to get dark shadows.
| | 02:29 | Now, I want to emphasize that
this is completely interactive.
| | 02:33 | This is a 3D layer in After Effects.
| | 02:37 | It reacts to the camera move and the
shadows move as the rest of the scene changes.
| | 02:42 | I could even add animation to that text
and it would be reflected in these shadows.
| | 02:48 | For example, if I were to open up my Animation
Presets, go down to Text and go down to 3D Text,
| | 02:56 | I can have a lot of fun applying
one of these different effects.
| | 02:59 | For example, I know that Flutter is
a particularly fun animation, so I'm
| | 03:03 | going to double click it.
| | 03:04 | It's applied to the Text layer.
| | 03:05 | I'm going to go ahead and hit 0 on
the numeric keypad to RAM preview.
| | 03:14 | As it starts to render, we'll see
this big shadows as the text flies or
| | 03:19 | flutters down into position.
| | 03:20 | Isn't that cool how it's going on these
different surfaces including the floor
| | 03:24 | in addition to the back wall and then
as the text settles into position, the
| | 03:35 | shadows create the normal pattern
that we had when the text is at rest.
| | 03:41 | Last character falls into place there.
| | 03:43 | I press the Spacebar and let's
see that in real time. Kind of fun!
| | 03:49 | I'm going to press Command+Z or Control+Z
on Windows to undo and try a different one.
| | 03:54 | For example, I know this one on Path down
here that we can also have a lot of fun with.
| | 03:58 | Press 0 to RAM Preview and as the text
starts to flutter in, you'll see it casted
| | 04:04 | shadows on the back wall and floor,
while it also forms a line along this path
| | 04:13 | in my window, and it's almost done forming here.
| | 04:19 | And that's a lot of fun as it
moves across the window here.
| | 04:25 | And you see how, particularly this A
breaks up depending on when it hits the window,
| | 04:28 | which is further forward, or the back wall.
| | 04:30 | And again, I want to emphasize
these are fully interactive layers,
| | 04:34 | that's the reason you're breaking up
your workload this way, Text>Path options
| | 04:39 | and I can go ahead and scoot along the
First Margin, so it goes further along the
| | 04:44 | line, or just go ahead and pick up the
whole layer and scrub its position over an
| | 04:50 | X to more artfully
position it against the wall.
| | 04:54 | Press End and the animation will end up here.
| | 04:56 | So, that's pretty cool!
| | 04:58 | Now I have gone ahead and done a
couple of modifications to this project.
| | 05:01 | I've gone ahead and move the last
keyframe from moving along the path down to 5
| | 05:05 | seconds and eased into it, couple of
other tweaks, and here's a RAM Preview of
| | 05:09 | the final animation, a lot of fun!
| | 05:14 | And during the RAM preview, I'm
noticing little things like the text could be a
| | 05:18 | little smoother here in the shadows.
| | 05:20 | There's ways of fixing that.
| | 05:21 | For example, if you open the Composition
Settings, go to the Advanced Tab, look
| | 05:26 | underneath the Advanced 3D,
Rendering Plug-in, click on Options.
| | 05:29 | If you make the Shadow buffer larger,
such as maybe 1500, it will slow down your
| | 05:34 | render, but it will sharpen up your shadows.
| | 05:38 | You see how much cleaner they are and
you get less shattering and there you go.
| | 05:42 | That's the last piece of the puzzle
to get really good Integration between
| | 05:45 | CINEMA 4D and After Effects.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
ConclusionWrap-up| 00:03 | And now you should have a good grasp of
the core concepts you need to master to
| | 00:07 | integrate a 3D world from Cinema
4D into the world of After Effects.
| | 00:12 | Not only does it make it easy for you
to set up things like Camera data, null
| | 00:16 | objects or solids for where you want
to place new objects in After Effects,
| | 00:20 | create mattes to mask out those objects,
do multi-pass renders and a few other
| | 00:25 | tricks like setting up the
shadow catchers I just showed you.
| | 00:28 | It makes really easy in that it puts it all
into an After Effects project for you
| | 00:32 | with the layers already in place.
| | 00:34 | It makes it much faster to get going and
start adding any elements that you need.
| | 00:38 | As part of this, I do want to thank
Adobe for After Effects, Maxon for lending
| | 00:42 | Cinema 4D and also for iStockphoto who
also gave us the textures and videos that
| | 00:47 | you are using in this tutorial.
| | 00:48 | Hope you find it useful.
| | 00:50 | Look forward to creating some
more tutorials for you in the future.
| | 00:53 | Have fun!
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