1. IntroductionWelcome| 00:04 | Hey folks! My name is Chad Perkins.
On behalf of lynda.com,
| | 00:07 | welcome to this training series.
| | 00:09 | We're going to take an in-depth look
at Element 3D from the ground up.
| | 00:14 | First of all, what is Element 3D?
| | 00:17 | Element 3D is a plug-in for Adobe After
Effects created by the hero of the After
| | 00:22 | Effects community, Andrew
Kramer from videocopilot.net.
| | 00:26 | After a simple starter project, and
some explanation of basic features, we'll
| | 00:30 | look at how Element allows you to
create simple 3D objects from scratch, such as
| | 00:35 | text, and extruded masks.
| | 00:37 | We'll even look at how you can use shapes
from Photoshop and Illustrator to create
| | 00:41 | 3D objects in Element.
| | 00:43 | But you could also import 3D objects.
| | 00:46 | Yes, you heard that correctly;
| | 00:48 | you can now, with Element, import 3D objects into
After Effects, and we'll look at how to do that.
| | 00:55 | Element also allows you to create
and apply materials to 3D objects.
| | 00:59 | We'll look at how to do that from
scratch to really improve the quality of our
| | 01:04 | renders in After Effects.
| | 01:05 | We'll also look at some tricks
to fake more complex materials.
| | 01:09 | But Element is even more than this;
| | 01:11 | Element is also a 3D particle
generator, allowing you to quickly create an
| | 01:15 | array of 3D objects.
| | 01:17 | We'll see tons of examples of this in
action, and really get a firm hold on how
| | 01:21 | to use this replication
system in practical ways.
| | 01:24 | We'll also look at evil,
stampeding, tiny cows.
| | 01:28 | We'll also be learning a bit about
cinematography, so that you can use After
| | 01:31 | Effects' lights and cameras to get the
best possible renders out of Element,
| | 01:36 | including how to get the ever
popular shallow depth of field look.
| | 01:40 | On top of all of this, Element also has
a powerful animation engine, which allows
| | 01:45 | you to animate between 3D objects.
| | 01:47 | This can create some amazing
results that we'll look at, like this.
| | 01:51 | (music playing)
| | 01:54 | Also, really cool text animations, like this.
(music playing)
| | 02:00 | Throughout this training series,
we'll also be looking at how easy it is to
| | 02:03 | integrate 3D footage into
live action shots using Element.
| | 02:09 | Finally, we'll wrap everything up by
looking at a little project I made
| | 02:12 | entirely in After Effects using Element 3D.
| | 02:15 | (video playing)
| | 02:41 | We're going to start from scratch,
and learn a ton in this training,
| | 02:44 | so let's get to it.
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| Using the exercise files| 00:00 | If you're a premium member of the
lynda.com Online Training Library, or you've
| | 00:04 | purchased this training on a disk, then
you'll have access to the exercise files
| | 00:07 | to accompany in this training.
| | 00:09 | Here's how these are organized.
| | 00:11 | In each Chapter, you'll find the
corresponding projects that go with that chapter.
| | 00:16 | So, if you're watching Chapter 06, you'll
find the projects that go along with Chapter 06.
| | 00:21 | Now, only the projects are in these
chapter files. All of the media is located
| | 00:26 | in these separate folders
inside of the Media folder.
| | 00:29 | Now, if you are a monthly or annual
subscriber to the lynda.com Online Training
| | 00:33 | Library, then you won't have access to
these files, which is a kind of a bummer
| | 00:38 | actually, because if you go into the
3D Files in the Media folder, there's a
| | 00:42 | bunch of really cool 3D models, such
as the spaceships and things like that,
| | 00:46 | that are in the public domain, and are
free to use for commercial projects, or
| | 00:49 | personal projects, or whatever you want.
| | 00:51 | So, there's that, and let's go
ahead and jump into the training.
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|
|
2. Creating Your First ProjectCreating 3D lightbulbs| 00:00 | In this chapter, we're just going to
get comfortable with Element as we work
| | 00:04 | through a little project.
| | 00:06 | I am going to right-click in this composition;
that's the Intro Project Step 1 composition.
| | 00:11 | I'm going to create a new Solid layer.
| | 00:14 | Now, it doesn't matter what color it
is, but go ahead and make sure that you
| | 00:18 | click the Make Comp Size button,
and we will rename this Element.
| | 00:23 | Go ahead and apply the Element effect
in the Video Copilot category to this
| | 00:28 | layer, and here we have what seems to be the
very simple controls in the Element effect.
| | 00:36 | But we really get to the heart of the
effect by clicking this Scene Setup button.
| | 00:43 | That launches the big interface of
Element 3D, and this is really where you do a
| | 00:48 | lot of work with Element.
| | 00:50 | Now, throughout this project, you'll notice
that I don't explain what I'm doing too much.
| | 00:54 | I kind of want to just get you familiar
with the feel of Element, and we'll
| | 00:59 | explain all this stuff in detail
as we go throughout the course.
| | 01:03 | But again, this project is just to
get started with this little project.
| | 01:07 | You'll also notice that I have additional
models here in the Model Browser that
| | 01:11 | you will not have, and I have additional
materials and presets here that you
| | 01:17 | will not have as well.
| | 01:18 | These are additional packs that I've
purchased from Video Copilot, which I highly
| | 01:21 | recommend, and we'll talk about later.
| | 01:24 | Now, back up to my Model Browser here,
I'm going to click on the Starter_Pack,
| | 01:28 | which you will have. This
ships with Element as well.
| | 01:31 | And what I want to do is I go
over here to the bulb model.
| | 01:36 | Not to bulb_white, and not to
bulb_on; there are three bulbs here.
| | 01:39 | I just want to click on bulb 1;
click once.
| | 01:43 | This adds this model to my scene,
and I can click and move this around.
| | 01:48 | You can see that it's a three-dimensional
light bulb. It has a little bit of
| | 01:52 | a reflection going around the top of the
light bulb here, which we can totally change.
| | 01:57 | And as I move around, again, you can
see little filaments inside moving around,
| | 02:00 | because this is a
three-dimensional light bulb.
| | 02:03 | I'm going to go ahead and click
OK in the upper right-hand corner here.
| | 02:07 | This will accept that, and apply
this light bulb into my scene.
| | 02:12 | And if I zoom out in my project,
so we can see everything here,
| | 02:15 | you could see that it's in my scene.
| | 02:16 | But the real magic is if I go up to
the Layer menu, create a new Camera, and
| | 02:22 | I'll just go ahead and accept whatever
default settings are here, and click OK,
| | 02:27 | and then I'm going to click
on the Unified Camera Tool.
| | 02:30 | And if I go now, and click and drag
around, you can see there I have an actual
| | 02:36 | three-dimensional object in my scene.
| | 02:39 | You can see that the reflections are alive,
and you can see how fast this renders.
| | 02:44 | It's absolutely incredible.
| | 02:46 | And that's all it takes to
add 3D objects to your scene.
| | 02:50 | Now, what I'm going to do is select
that Camera again, hit the Delete key to
| | 02:54 | delete it, then go to File > Increment
and Save, and this creates the next step,
| | 03:00 | which will be the starting point of
the next movie, when we add the turned
| | 03:05 | on light bulb.
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| Turning on the light| 00:00 | So, continuing on where we left off our little
project with our 3D turned off light bulb here,
| | 00:05 | I'm going to go back to Element, click
the Scene Setup button to again open the
| | 00:10 | Scene interface, where we have our
scene here, which basically consists of
| | 00:15 | this one bulb. I am going to go
back over to my Model Browser, click on
| | 00:19 | the Starter_Pack, and there's also this
bulb_on model, so I'm going to click this;
| | 00:24 | that adds the bulb_on to our scene.
| | 00:26 | Now, that did not replace our bulb.
If we click on the bulb here, we can see
| | 00:30 | it, and then bulb_on,
we can see that there.
| | 00:33 | So there's two different objects in our scene,
| | 00:36 | and we want to be able to control them
independently, and actually we want to
| | 00:40 | animate between these two objects.
| | 00:42 | So in order to do that, we need to put
these objects on different groups. I want
| | 00:47 | my regular bulb to be on Group 1, and
that's active here; we can see that. But
| | 00:52 | right now, bulb_on is also on
Group 1, and we don't want that.
| | 00:56 | So I'm going to click on that to disable
it from Group 1, I'm going to click on
| | 01:01 | Group 2 to enable the bulb_on onto
Group 2, and now we'll be able to adjust
| | 01:07 | them and animate them separately, and
I'll show you what that looks like. We'll
| | 01:11 | go ahead and click OK here.
| | 01:13 | Now, when we click OK, and we come back to
our scene, we're only seeing the lit up
| | 01:17 | light bulb, because that is the one on
top of the other light bulb, but if we
| | 01:23 | want to adjust these, we come
over here to Group 1, and Group 2.
| | 01:27 | Now, remember that the turned off
light bulb was in Group 1, so all these
| | 01:32 | controls are going to
adjust the turned off light bulb.
| | 01:36 | Group 2 controls the turned on light
bulb, and all these settings control that
| | 01:41 | light bulb. And we'll talk about
groups later on in detail, but what I want I
| | 01:46 | take a brief look at
is this Animation Engine.
| | 01:49 | If I open this up, this Animation
Engine basically allows us to animate
| | 01:54 | from one group to the next. So to see
this, I'm going to enable this, and now
| | 01:59 | we're only seeing Group 1, but we're having
our start group, by default, be Group 1;
| | 02:04 | that's the turned off light bulb.
| | 02:06 | The finish group is Group 2, which is
the turned on light bulb, so it's going to
| | 02:12 | animate between these two groups from
the turned off light bulb to the turned on
| | 02:16 | light bulb, and then we can go to the
animation slider, and we can click and drag
| | 02:20 | on this percentage, and
this turns on the light bulb.
| | 02:25 | Now, it doesn't really turn it on; it's
really just animating between these two
| | 02:28 | groups, which is a turned off to a
turned on light bulb. So then let's actually
| | 02:33 | see what this looks like. I'm going to
go out to about a second in time, click the
| | 02:36 | stopwatch for animation at 0%, I'll go
out to about a second, and I'll turn that
| | 02:43 | up to 100%. Now if we go back
to the beginning of our animation, we have
| | 02:49 | nothing for a second, and
that turns on over a second.
| | 02:51 | Of course, we could select our layer,
and press the letter U to see all of its
| | 02:56 | keyframes, and we could drag those
together if we want this to be an instant
| | 03:00 | turn on here, like that.
| | 03:03 | Either way, though, we now created
two 3D light bulbs that animate
| | 03:08 | between themselves.
| | 03:09 | It's an absolutely incredible thing.
Usually, when I have to turn something on, I
| | 03:14 | need some very light music, and
candlelight dinner, but with Element, it's
| | 03:17 | really, really easy.
| | 03:18 | In the next movie, we'll look at a few
finishing touches that we can add to
| | 03:22 | this project.
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| Adding the final touches| 00:00 | As we've gone throughout this chapter,
we have seen the power, at least, the
| | 00:04 | potential power of using this
Element effect. It's incredible.
| | 00:07 | We have actual live 3D objects that
render fast, and animate between each
| | 00:13 | other in our scene.
| | 00:14 | There is a tendency, because Element
is so cool, to just leave it as is; to
| | 00:19 | just let Element do all the
work, but we can't do that.
| | 00:22 | As artists, we need to contribute something to
this, and not let Element get all of the credit.
| | 00:28 | So let's add a little bit of polish here.
| | 00:30 | What I'm going to do is I'm going to
go the Layer menu at the top, and choose
| | 00:35 | New > Adjustment Layer.
| | 00:36 | And what I'm going to do now is apply
the Glow effect, because I think we could
| | 00:41 | actually create a better looking glow
than what's there. I'll take up the
| | 00:45 | threshold maybe a little bit, maybe
increase the radius, actually maybe
| | 00:51 | I'll take down a little threshold,
and make this a little bit brighter, as if
| | 00:55 | it's really lit up, kind of like that.
| | 01:02 | It really does look lit up.
That's good.
| | 01:05 | And what's really cool is that Glow
uses the luminance of the object based on
| | 01:12 | our threshold value to determine when
it's lit up. So when this light bulb is
| | 01:16 | turned off, there will be no glow,
and all of a sudden, blink; glow.
| | 01:20 | Now, another thing that I want
to do is add a background here.
| | 01:23 | So I'm going to go to the Layer menu
again, and choose Layer > New > Solid.
| | 01:27 | Let's actually go ahead and click on
the color swatch here. I'm going to make
| | 01:32 | this kind of a bluish color to
complement with those yellow tones in light
| | 01:39 | bulb, and I'll drag this below the
Element layer, so we have a nice little
| | 01:44 | background there. Just a single
tone is not that attractive here, so what
| | 01:49 | I'm going to do is go up
to the masks at the top.
| | 01:52 | I am going to choose the Ellipse Tool,
and I'm going to double-click the Ellipse
| | 01:56 | Tool, and I'm going to select the
solid here, open up the Masks settings, and
| | 02:04 | for Mask Feather, I'm going to increase the
feather a lot. There you have our final project.
| | 02:12 | Now we have this cool light, it turns
on, it glows really cool, and actually I
| | 02:18 | might just drag these together, so that
kind of pops on a little bit more. There
| | 02:22 | we go. And we have this cool
background. The colors look good together.
| | 02:27 | This is something we could really be
proud of, and again, not let Element get all
| | 02:31 | the credit for our work.
| | 02:34 | So as you can see, Element has some
phenomenal tools for creating and animating
| | 02:39 | 3D objects, and this is just a warm-up.
| | 02:41 | We have so much other
great stuff to look at.
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|
3. Overview of Element 3DOverview of the Element 3D workflow| 00:00 | Now that we've had a chance to play
around with a project in Element,
| | 00:03 | in this chapter, we are going to
look at a big picture overview of the
| | 00:08 | workflow in Element.
| | 00:10 | It is, after all,
a little unconventional.
| | 00:12 | So in this movie, we'll just look at a
big picture overview, and then we'll get a
| | 00:16 | little bit more specific in the
next few movies in this chapter.
| | 00:19 | Let's go ahead and come down to the
create new composition button here at the
| | 00:23 | bottom of the Project panel.
| | 00:24 | Create a new composition using the
HDV/HDTV 720 29.97 preset. I'll go ahead and
| | 00:30 | click OK. I'll right-click, and I'm going
to choose New > Solid. I'm going to make
| | 00:36 | this the size of the comp, and click OK.
It doesn't matter what color it is, and
| | 00:41 | we'll go ahead
and apply Element to this solid.
| | 00:45 | Now, in most cases, you're going to want
to go straight for the Scene Setup button.
| | 00:50 | However, if you are using custom materials,
which we'll talk about later, or if
| | 00:54 | you're creating your own 3D object
from a custom text layer, or from a mask,
| | 01:00 | which again, we'll talk about later also,
| | 01:02 | then you start here.
| | 01:05 | But other than that, you'll want to
come straight to the Scene Setup button to
| | 01:08 | open the scene interface, and this is
where we will do a lot of the, at least, the
| | 01:14 | initial setup in Element.
| | 01:16 | And so then we come over here to the
Model Browser, and we can go and click
| | 01:20 | on one of these folders, if we have them,
and click to add a 3D element into our scene.
| | 01:27 | So I have clicked on Alarm Clock, and
now the alarm clock is in our scene.
| | 01:31 | Here in the Scene area, in the Element
interface, we have the model -- that's the
| | 01:38 | alarm clock -- and we assign it a group.
| | 01:41 | We could really have as many 3D
objects as we want in a scene, but to have
| | 01:46 | individual control over each element,
we'll need to assign them a group, and
| | 01:51 | there's only five groups.
| | 01:53 | So essentially, for every instance of
the Element effect, you could have five
| | 01:58 | independent groups of 3D objects, and once
they're on a group you don't have too much control,
| | 02:04 | so probably best to constrain
yourself to use one 3D object for each group;
| | 02:09 | that's five groups total.
| | 02:11 | Now, here below the 3D object, we have the
different textures applied to the object.
| | 02:17 | So, when we apply a 3D object, it's
essentially just a naked model, and it
| | 02:23 | looks shiny, or like it has clock hands, or
whatever, because of the different textures applied.
| | 02:31 | We can, of course, let's say, for example,
I will click on Main here, come down to
| | 02:35 | the Presets area, and maybe I'll change
this to a flat color. Just drag and drop
| | 02:41 | that on top of the main texture, and
that changes it. Or I could click on Black
| | 02:46 | Hole, and drag and drop,
and that changes that.
| | 02:49 | We'll, of course, talk much more about
each of these steps later, but this is just
| | 02:53 | the general workflow.
| | 02:54 | We open this up, this interface, we
apply the 3D objects, we clothe it in the
| | 02:59 | material that we want,
| | 03:00 | we could adjust things like the
environment, and lights, which we'll talk about
| | 03:03 | later, and once we get
that set up, then we click OK.
| | 03:07 | Now we could come back here, and we
open up the corresponding group to adjust
| | 03:12 | the 3D model. So our 3D model here is on
Group 1, so I'd open up Group 1, and
| | 03:17 | here we actually have a Particle Replicator
which creates multiple instances of our object.
| | 03:22 | So if I wanted to create multiple
clocks, I could increase the number of
| | 03:26 | particles. I could change the array.
| | 03:30 | So, for example, the current Replicator
Shape is Point. I could change this to
| | 03:34 | Sphere, making a sphere of seven clocks.
| | 03:39 | And of course I could play around with
this. I could scale the shape up and down,
| | 03:44 | and I could rotate these, and do any
one of a number of cool changes. We could
| | 03:48 | pilot a camera around this
scene; whatever we want to do.
| | 03:51 | And then we could animate these;
adjust all the different groups. We could
| | 03:55 | also animate between different groups, and
that's a pretty cool trick we'll talk about later.
| | 04:01 | And then we come down to the Render
Settings, and the Output, and we add some
| | 04:05 | finishing touches to make
everything look beautiful.
| | 04:08 | So that is the overall workflow of Element
3D, in a nutshell. And again, as we go
| | 04:15 | throughout this course, we're
going to be getting much more specific in
| | 04:18 | detail about each little step.
| | 04:21 | We can perfect every little
piece of the puzzle.
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| Previewing 3D objects| 00:00 | In this movie, we're going to look at
how to preview 3D objects in the Element
| | 00:04 | 3D scene interface.
| | 00:06 | And we're going to start from scratch
again, so go ahead and create a new comp
| | 00:10 | using the HD same preset, 720 29.97;
click OK. right-click, create a New > Solid,
| | 00:17 | click OK, apply the Element effect,
click Scene Setup, and here we are again.
| | 00:24 | And again, as you can see here, I have a
couple extra model packs. I have Projectile
| | 00:29 | Weapons and Motion Design that you
won't have unless you purchase them from
| | 00:33 | videocopilot.net. But I could go
through here, and I am going to click on Icons
| | 00:38 | here, and we have 30 icons that ship with
videocopilot, which is pretty cool. I'm
| | 00:42 | going to click once to
get the Atom model in here.
| | 00:45 | Now, this is a great way to preview
materials and 3D objects, to kind of get of
| | 00:52 | look around them. So what we could do
is click and drag with our left mouse
| | 00:56 | button to rotate around this 3D object,
which is pretty cool, and we can kind
| | 01:01 | of see a little bit of the reflection of
the environment, which we'll talk about
| | 01:04 | later in this chapter.
| | 01:05 | We can see that in there, so as we
move that around, you can see that we're
| | 01:09 | reacting with the
environment, which is pretty cool.
| | 01:12 | If you click and drag our right
mouse button, we could actually move the
| | 01:16 | environment around. That will make more
sense when we actually talk about the
| | 01:20 | environment later on,
but just be aware of that.
| | 01:23 | If we zoom with our scroll wheel, if
we have wheel on our mouse, we could
| | 01:27 | actually zoom in and zoom out of this,
and so if we want to zoom in, and get close,
| | 01:34 | and see the details, which you'll find
with these models that ship with Element
| | 01:38 | are actually really good, so we
can get a close-up look there.
| | 01:42 | I'm actually going to zoom out little
bit. We could also hold the middle mouse
| | 01:45 | button down to pan up, down, left,
right, if we want to move the whole scene
| | 01:51 | over without rotating.
| | 01:53 | So again, rotating around, moving up
and down, left and right, with the middle
| | 01:57 | mouse button, move the environment with
the right mouse button, and we can zoom in
| | 02:02 | and out with that mouse wheel.
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| Applying materials| 00:00 | In this tour, we're going to look at
how to clothe our 3D objects in different
| | 00:05 | materials. Let's go ahead and go and
create a new comp with this HDV/HDTV
| | 00:11 | 720 29.97 preset. Click OK, right-click,
make a New > Solid comp size, click OK,
| | 00:18 | and add Element to that.
| | 00:19 | We can go ahead and click on Scene Setup
button, and we want to go over here to
| | 00:24 | the Model Browser, and we
actually want to click on Primitives.
| | 00:26 | There's 54 basic shapes that come with
Element, and these are extremely helpful;
| | 00:33 | everything from basic shapes, like
spheres, and boxes, and blobs, to stuff like an
| | 00:39 | empty room, which you can clothe with
your own textures, and make really cool.
| | 00:43 | So a lot of really
great stuff here; water drops.
| | 00:47 | And what I want to do is actually click
on this blob object; click on blob, and
| | 00:52 | now we have this blob in our scene.
| | 00:54 | None of these Primitives here, or the
Icons for that matter, have any textures
| | 00:57 | applied to them, so they're almost just
like naked 3D objects, and again, we need
| | 01:02 | to clothe them with materials. You could
see over here in our scene, we have our
| | 01:06 | blob, and we have a
material with zero textures on it.
| | 01:10 | Now, we could click on this material,
and now we could actually use our own
| | 01:16 | textures for these materials. We could
also just click, and let's say Diffuse
| | 01:20 | Color, if we want to make this red, or
if you want to do something like that, and
| | 01:25 | we'll have a whole chapter on materials
later on, but that's just kind of like
| | 01:29 | how to get started there.
| | 01:30 | If we go over here to Presets, Element
comes with a big load of really cool
| | 01:35 | presets, so we can, say, drag and drop
black hole, for example, onto our object.
| | 01:40 | Just click and drag and drop that onto
the object. Or alternatively, you can
| | 01:44 | drag and drop it over to the materials
area in the scene, but make sure that
| | 01:50 | you drag it on exactly the texture
that you want to replace, because some of
| | 01:53 | these objects get quite complex, and
have a lot of different textures here, and
| | 01:58 | so you want to make sure that you're
dragging and dropping it on to the right one,
| | 02:02 | so you don't want to replace the wrong
texture here. But if I click and drag
| | 02:06 | around, as you can see, we have some
interesting Fresnel action going on around
| | 02:09 | the edges. It basically means that we
could have a different texture in the
| | 02:13 | middle, and a different texture on the
edges, which creates a very cool effect like
| | 02:18 | that. Ah, I love that.
| | 02:20 | Another one of those Fresnel textures;
the Glow Glass also looks really cool, or
| | 02:25 | the Outside Glow, kind of like the
opposite, where we have a glow on the outside.
| | 02:30 | Personally, I like the look of these
materials so much, I often start with one
| | 02:34 | of these as a jumping off point. So, if I
want something shiny, for example, click
| | 02:38 | and drag Shiny, and then I can adjust
this to my liking, but again, I use these
| | 02:44 | kind of like a jumping off point.
| | 02:46 | And again, as we'll talk about later,
there's also custom shaders, they call it Pro
| | 02:50 | Shaders, that you can also buy additionally
from Video Copilot, but I think the
| | 02:54 | 21 materials that it ships with for
free are actually very awesome as well.
| | 02:59 | That's how you apply a preset
material to a 3D object in Element.
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| Using lighting presets| 00:00 | As After Effects users, we know full
well the power of light, and when it comes
| | 00:06 | to 3D objects, the difference that
light makes becomes even more significant.
| | 00:11 | This chess set looks pretty cool here.
| | 00:13 | This is made with Element 3D.
| | 00:15 | It's one of the preset models
that it comes with it, actually.
| | 00:18 | And as we turn on this light,
give that a little bit of direction,
| | 00:21 | you can see that it makes a significant
difference in at least the mood of the
| | 00:25 | scene, if not the realism as well.
| | 00:27 | And so Element 3D has a series of
Lighting Presets that it ships with,
| | 00:33 | that'll kind of get you
started with lighting,
| | 00:34 | so let's take a look at those.
| | 00:35 | I'm going to select
the Element layer here.
| | 00:37 | I'm going to go into Scene Setup, and if
we're looking -- I'll go ahead and click
| | 00:42 | my chess_board here,
| | 00:43 | wait for that to load;
click that around.
| | 00:46 | I'm going to actually zoom in to that
just a little bit if we want to there.
| | 00:50 | And what we could do here is, in this
dropdown, this Default Lights dropdown here,
| | 00:54 | we have a series of
lighting presets that we can use.
| | 00:58 | So, we could click on Dramatic, or Cinema,
or even something crazy, like Underwater.
| | 01:04 | Now I will go ahead
and click OK here,
| | 01:06 | and when I do, and I come back to my scene,
you'll notice that the lights have gone away.
| | 01:11 | Well, we can adjust the default lights
there, or the lighting presents there;
| | 01:15 | it's kind of just a temporary
way to look at our own model.
| | 01:18 | We could also come in here to Render
Settings, inside the Element effect,
| | 01:22 | and we could open up Lighting, and then
we find those same Lighting Presets here
| | 01:28 | in the Add Lighting dropdown.
| | 01:29 | So, if we want to choose Dramatic, for
example, we can choose that here, and now
| | 01:34 | it stays in our scene.
| | 01:35 | Look how beautiful that looks.
| | 01:37 | That's just incredible.
| | 01:38 | And then if we want to, we could actually,
make sure that Use Comp Lights is selected;
| | 01:43 | that's actually the default,
| | 01:44 | and we could supplement the
lighting here with a comp light.
| | 01:50 | So again, we could add more to
our scene using the comp lights, and
| | 01:55 | these lighting presets.
| | 01:57 | A lot of times, I will use these lighting
presets, honestly, if I am just kind of --
| | 02:01 | I want to get a feel for what I could
do with these 3D models; of how I want
| | 02:06 | to light these things.
| | 02:07 | After Effects is not really
designed to be a 3D program,
| | 02:10 | so these models don't really react
to After Effects lights the way regular
| | 02:14 | objects would.
It's kind of wonky sometimes,
| | 02:16 | and so sometimes I will just go
through here, and look at these different
| | 02:20 | lighting setups to see, you know, what
do I want to do with this 3D model?
| | 02:24 | What kind of lighting
setup do I want to what I have?
| | 02:27 | And I will just be inspired by
that, and I will add comp lights to
| | 02:31 | supplement that as I see fit.
| | 02:32 | So, you don't have to
use these lighting presets.
| | 02:35 | By default, this is set to None,
| | 02:36 | but you can add these additional
lighting presets if you'd like to.
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| Using the environment| 00:00 | The last important component of Element
that we're going to look at in this
| | 00:05 | chapter is the environment.
| | 00:07 | So, let's go ahead and click the Scene
Setup button here in Element to open
| | 00:10 | the scene setup;
the scene interface here.
| | 00:13 | And we'll go to Primitives, and I'd
like you to scroll down here, and we want to
| | 00:18 | click on the round_box.
| | 00:21 | And again, when you bring in these
icons, or primitives, they don't have any
| | 00:25 | textures applied to them; we can see a
faint reflection, but let's go ahead and
| | 00:29 | apply a reflective material here.
| | 00:30 | Let's go to the Presets, and then
grab this Chrome, which is one the most
| | 00:34 | reflective presets out there.
| | 00:36 | Drag and drop this onto our
round_box to apply that material.
| | 00:41 | And as we click and drag around here, we
can see this cool reflective texture.
| | 00:46 | What it is actually doing is
reflecting the environment.
| | 00:50 | So, that's how we
create reflections in Element.
| | 00:53 | Now, if we click the Environment button,
we actually see the environment in the
| | 00:57 | back, and basically it's a map.
| | 00:59 | It's a big image that's being
projected onto this cube; our object here.
| | 01:04 | And again, if we right-click,
we can move that around.
| | 01:07 | You could see it's moving
in the background.
| | 01:09 | So, it's changing how this image
falls on the reflection of our cube.
| | 01:15 | Now, we could actually change the
environment, which is pretty cool.
| | 01:18 | I'll click the Environment button,
so that you could see we have a huge
| | 01:21 | collection of images that we can use in
environment maps that ship with Element.
| | 01:26 | And then, we also have a bunch of controls
over here, if we want to tweak it further.
| | 01:30 | We could also use custom layers as
environment maps, and we've looked that before;
| | 01:35 | we set that up in the plug-in back
in the regular After Effects interface.
| | 01:39 | But let's say, for example,
I'll use Garage,
| | 01:41 | and now our reflections look completely
different, and because this object, or
| | 01:47 | this material is so reflective, this
different material, or different environment
| | 01:51 | has completely changed
the look of our object.
| | 01:54 | And we have this Garage here, and I
could change this to Garage Blurred. Oops!
| | 01:59 | There we go, Garage Blurred,
| | 02:00 | and now it's a much softer. If we
click OK, much softer reflection, much less
| | 02:05 | distinct, which can be a good thing.
| | 02:09 | And I'll go ahead and
turn back off the Environment,
| | 02:11 | so we can focus just
on this texture here.
| | 02:13 | Go ahead and click Environment again.
| | 02:15 | I'll click this dropdown.
| | 02:16 | We could also Load from
file, so keep that in mind.
| | 02:19 | There are some cool
textures here. There is a Garden.
| | 02:23 | So, pretty much anything you want to
reflect, any type of environment, or color
| | 02:26 | scheme you want to reflect,
you would find here.
| | 02:28 | I really like the Studio here,
| | 02:30 | like this Studio_Warm_Blurred is
probably one of my favorites.
| | 02:33 | Maybe I'll just go to regular Studio_Warm,
click OK, and you just see it
| | 02:38 | looks so incredible.
| | 02:40 | So, go and click OK here,
| | 02:43 | and just know that if you'd like to
adjust this even further, you can do that
| | 02:47 | here in the Element plug-in, in the
Effect controls panel. I could open up
| | 02:52 | Render Settings, then Environment, and I
could show it in background here with this
| | 02:57 | checkbox if I want to do that,
| | 02:59 | or I could rotate the environment, and
that again gives us a different look.
| | 03:03 | So, if I want to position this, so maybe
like the cool ceiling lights are right there,
| | 03:08 | I can do that; rotate it as desired.
| | 03:12 | So, it's pretty cool.
| | 03:15 | So, the environment does play a big
role in our reflections, and because of
| | 03:20 | the limitations of the system that Element
was built on, there aren't any real reflections.
| | 03:25 | So, if we have two, three objects here in
Element, there is no way, as the time of this
| | 03:30 | recording, to be able to reflect
those objects onto each other.
| | 03:33 | So, you kind of have to fake it using
this environment, and that's okay, because
| | 03:37 | human eyes are really not very good
at distinguishing between reflections.
| | 03:43 | They get soft, and blurry, and it kind
of doesn't matter what the reflections
| | 03:47 | look like that much.
| | 03:48 | So, as long as they're kind of in
the ballpark, which you can do by using
| | 03:52 | different environment maps, then
it is close, and it seems like a
| | 03:55 | believable reflection to us.
| | 03:56 | So, it's not that big of a limitation,
| | 03:58 | but again, this whole environment
thing does play a big role in our work
| | 04:01 | in Element 3D.
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|
|
4. Working with 3D ObjectsAssigning groups| 00:00 | In this chapter, we're really going
to dig in deep, and look at using 3D
| | 00:04 | objects in Element.
| | 00:06 | First step, we're going to be
looking at groups, and using groups.
| | 00:10 | So, you can see here in the Element
plug-in, we have group controls for
| | 00:15 | five different groups.
| | 00:16 | And groups really are the fundamental, or
one of the most fundamental concepts in
| | 00:21 | working with Element, but
they're also one of the most confusing.
| | 00:24 | Let's go ahead and click the Scene
Setup button, and get into this here.
| | 00:27 | Let's go ahead and go to the Starter_Pack
in the Model Browser, and scroll all
| | 00:31 | the way down, and go ahead
and click on the paint_can,
| | 00:34 | click on the soda_can, and
then click on the telephone_pole.
| | 00:38 | So now we have these 3D models in our
scene, and you can see here that these
| | 00:43 | are where we assign
different groups for each 3D object.
| | 00:48 | As you can see, the Group number 1 is
illuminated for all 3D objects as they
| | 00:53 | are brought in, by default,
| | 00:54 | so they're all put on Group 1.
| | 00:56 | Now, I like to think of these
groups as buckets that hold 3D objects.
| | 01:01 | There are five different groups.
| | 01:03 | You could put as many 3D
models into one group as you want,
| | 01:06 | but if you want to move, scale,
rotate, or otherwise transform pretty objects
| | 01:11 | independently, you'll want to make sure
that each 3D object is on its own group.
| | 01:17 | If I keep all these three objects on
Group 1, and I click OK, and I go back to
| | 01:23 | the main part of the interface, you
could see, we only see one object at a time.
| | 01:27 | They're all on Group 1, and so all
of Group 1 controls of three models.
| | 01:32 | So we really have to go in here and
play around to even see those 3D objects, and
| | 01:36 | again, we cannot adjust them independently
if they're all on the same group.
| | 01:40 | So what we'd want to do is go back to
the Scene Setup here, and what we need to
| | 01:46 | do is, let's say, for example,
telephone_pole we want to keep on Group 1.
| | 01:49 | What we have to do for soda_can is
disable it from Group 1, and enable it for
| | 01:54 | another Group; let's say, Group 2.
| | 01:55 | Same thing with paint_can. We want to
disable it for Group 1, and enable it
| | 02:00 | for, let's say, Group 3.
| | 02:02 | Then if we click OK, we can adjust -- well,
let's see; we have Group 1 here, and I'll go
| | 02:08 | to the Particle Replicator, and
we can move the position here,
| | 02:11 | so that we move the telephone_pole
in Group 1, in Group 2, we adjust the
| | 02:17 | position of the soda_can,
| | 02:20 | and then Group 3, open up the Particle
Replicator, and adjust position of the paint_can.
| | 02:26 | So now all three of these objects
still exist in the same world, but we have
| | 02:30 | absolute independent control over each
one, and that is the purpose of groups.
| | 02:36 | A little bit of later, we'll also
talk about how we can animate between
| | 02:39 | different groups, and that gets
really cool, and kind of complex as well.
| | 02:43 | But just remember, if you want
autonomous 3D objects that we can adjust
| | 02:48 | independently, they need to
be assigned to their own group.
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| Adjusting basic transforms| 00:00 | In this movie, we're going to
look at adjusting basic transform.
| | 00:03 | We have scale, rotation, position, and
all that kind of stuff, and on the surface,
| | 00:07 | that sounds really simple, but
in Element, it's kind of not.
| | 00:10 | So, let's go ahead, and we'll
apply Element to this Element layer,
| | 00:15 | and you can see that I've applied a
background here that's currently hidden.
| | 00:19 | Go ahead and click Scene Setup, and go
to the Starter_Pack in the Model Browser
| | 00:24 | area, and scroll down a little bit, and
add each of these rocks: rock_01, click on
| | 00:30 | rock_02, and click on rock_03.
| | 00:34 | Now, we want to make sure that these
rocks are not on the same group, because we
| | 00:40 | want to adjust them independently.
| | 00:42 | So, I want rock_01 on Group 1,
and that's great.
| | 00:45 | I want rock_02 on Group 2, so we need to
enable it for Group 2, and disable it for Group 1.
| | 00:52 | We want rock_03 on Group 3, so we enable
it on Group 3, and disable it from Group 1.
| | 01:00 | So now, rock_01 is on Group 1, rock_02
is on Group 2, and rock_03 is on Group 3.
| | 01:07 | Once that's all set up,
go ahead and click OK.
| | 01:11 | Now, it seems like we only have one rock,
because they're all in the same spot,
| | 01:14 | but remember, Group 1 is going to
control rock_01, Group 2 is going to control
| | 01:21 | rock_02, and same thing with Group 3.
| | 01:24 | Now, in each of these groups,
you'll notice three different categories.
| | 01:27 | We have Particle Replicator,
Particle Look, and then also this thing
| | 01:31 | called Copy/Paste Group.
| | 01:32 | Copy/Paste Group; you really don't
need to worry about for right now.
| | 01:36 | We'll talk about this in a later movie.
| | 01:38 | This is really just a utility.
| | 01:39 | But to control Particle settings, we
use Particle Look, and Particle Replicator.
| | 01:43 | Later, we'll talk about the Particle
Replicator, which allows you to create
| | 01:47 | almost like a little
particle system with 3D objects.
| | 01:51 | And so the Particle Replicator contains the
properties to control the entire replicator.
| | 01:57 | But this is where it also kind of gets
confusing, because if you want to adjust
| | 02:01 | position, we don't do that
in the Particle Look section;
| | 02:04 | we do that in the
Particle Replicator section.
| | 02:07 | So, I'm going to go to Group 1, and I'm
going to change the Position XY of this rock.
| | 02:14 | I'm going to move it over, and I'll
move it back using Position Z. There we go.
| | 02:22 | Over a little bit more maybe.
| | 02:24 | Now, if you want to adjust the size
of the rock, we can't do that in the
| | 02:28 | Particle Replicator section;
| | 02:30 | we have to go down to the
Particle Look section for that.
| | 02:32 | So, I could take this down a little bit,
or make it bigger if I wanted to there.
| | 02:37 | I'm going to close up Particle Look, and
Particle Replicator, and actually all of Group 1.
| | 02:41 | We'll do the same thing for, actually,
we will leave Group 2 in the middle, and
| | 02:45 | then we'll take Group 3.
| | 02:46 | We'll move that rock over to the right.
| | 02:49 | You notice that there is an
effect control point here,
| | 02:51 | so we could move that
over if we wanted to use that.
| | 02:55 | But the Position Z, if I move that
back a little bit, will affect that,
| | 03:00 | so now it's kind of off a little bit
from the effect control point. It's kind
| | 03:05 | of offset a little bit.
| | 03:07 | I might choose to move that
back even further here. There we go.
| | 03:14 | So, those are the basic transforms.
| | 03:16 | Another thing I just wanted to point out
really quick; this really doesn't have
| | 03:19 | too much to do with the tutorial, but
lighting really makes a huge difference.
| | 03:23 | I mean, these rocks are great. The
texture, and obviously the 3D surface of these
| | 03:26 | rocks is just really high-quality, and
amazing, but once we add a light here,
| | 03:30 | which I added a little green key light,
and kind of a back light a little bit on
| | 03:35 | some of these rocks, to kind of go in with
the background a little bit, looks really great.
| | 03:40 | And I've also added another light
that's kind of like a pinkish fill, ambient
| | 03:44 | light thing going on here from the top,
just to kind of blend in, and become kind
| | 03:49 | of like a contrast with
the key green light.
| | 03:53 | And when you put these together, it
really makes a big difference in the
| | 03:57 | realism of our scene.
| | 03:58 | So again, here are the rocks before, and
here are the rocks after, and of course
| | 04:03 | we have this camera in our scene.
| | 04:05 | We could select it, unlock it.
| | 04:06 | Select the Unified Camera Tool, and move
around here, which is really cool as well.
| | 04:13 | So, those are the basic transforms, and
again, it gets a little bit confusing,
| | 04:17 | especially when you get into something
like rotation, because in the Particle
| | 04:21 | Replicator section, rotation controls the
entire group, which again, we will talk about later.
| | 04:26 | But then in the Particle Look section,
there's also rotation, which controls the
| | 04:29 | rotation of the individual object.
| | 04:33 | Now, this becomes especially confusing
when you start dealing with animation,
| | 04:38 | because these properties
are not really named.
| | 04:40 | For example, this property right here is
just called X, so if I set a keyframe
| | 04:44 | for X here, and X here, and I come back
down to my layer, and I press the letter U to
| | 04:49 | reveal the keyframes, I just see those
two properties that just says X and X. I
| | 04:54 | have no idea what these are referring to.
| | 04:56 | So, it does become a little bit of a
challenge more than it might be in other
| | 05:01 | third-party effects.
| | 05:02 | If you're just tweaking settings, and you're
not animating anything, no big deal, but again,
| | 05:06 | if you add animation or expressions
to the mix, you've got to be really careful
| | 05:09 | to take note of what you're doing here.
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| Isolating model components| 00:00 | In this tutorial, we're going to
look at hiding and isolating different
| | 00:04 | components of 3D models.
| | 00:05 | Sounds kind a boring, right?
| | 00:07 | Well, there is actually a lot of
really cool stuff you can do with this.
| | 00:12 | So, I am going to go to Element.
| | 00:14 | I have already applied it for you.
Click Scene Setup to go in here.
| | 00:18 | Let's go to the Starter_Pack in the
Model Browser, and just to understand
| | 00:21 | this concept, let's go down to the paint_can,
and click it once to apply it to our scene.
| | 00:27 | And we have here this paint can. We
click and drag around. We can see it doing
| | 00:31 | its paint-canny thing.
| | 00:32 | I have some blue paint here, and a lid,
| | 00:35 | but we might not want a lid, and
we might not want that paint spill.
| | 00:41 | So, if we look over here, we can see,
underneath the paint_can model, the
| | 00:45 | different materials that are applied to it.
| | 00:47 | And what's really cool is that
Element has to apply different materials to
| | 00:53 | a model, it makes it a
separate isolated component.
| | 00:56 | So if we want to take off the paint
lid, for example, we click this little
| | 01:01 | button here, and this will, they call it mute,
but we're basically disabling that object.
| | 01:07 | So now we can see in here, and we have
no lid, and here we also see the really
| | 01:13 | high quality of the
Video Copilot models.
| | 01:17 | You know, when they modeled this lid, they
could have just stopped here, and not
| | 01:21 | gone on with everything underneath it,
| | 01:23 | but they made it so that when we
take off the paint, there is actually
| | 01:27 | paint underneath, and the paint
spill goes around the edge, which looks a
| | 01:31 | lot more believable.
| | 01:32 | Now, here is the paint_can_paint. I'll
disable that. and now we have an empty paint can.
| | 01:39 | And there's the paint_Drip; if we want
a clean paint bucket, I could click on
| | 01:43 | the paint_Drip to disable it, and now
we have a fresh, clean, empty paint can,
| | 01:50 | which is really cool.
| | 01:52 | So, that's one of the benefits of
isolating these different model components,
| | 01:57 | but it gets better.
| | 01:58 | I'm going to click this little X here,
and I'm going to go, let's say, to the
| | 02:02 | chessboard. I'm going to click the chessboard,
and now we have this chessboard in our scene.
| | 02:07 | As we can see, there are three different
models here. We have the white pieces,
| | 02:11 | we have the brown pieces, and
we also have the chessboard.
| | 02:15 | Well, the cool thing is that once
you have these different objects separated
| | 02:20 | into materials like this, then you
could actually animate them independently by
| | 02:25 | separating them out to groups.
| | 02:26 | Let me show how you do that.
| | 02:28 | If you right-click on the model, and
choose Duplicate All, we'll now have
| | 02:32 | two chessboards, and I am going to right-click
again, and choose Duplicate Model again.
| | 02:37 | So what I'm going to do here is, on the
top chess_board, I'm going to deselect
| | 02:44 | the brown pieces, and the chessboard,
and I'm going to leave this on Group 1.
| | 02:49 | Now I am going to go to the next
instance of the chessboard, and I'm going to
| | 02:53 | click it to activate it, and it
has everything on it; all the pieces.
| | 02:58 | So, now we are going to turn off the
white pieces, turn off the board, the
| | 03:04 | chessboard, and we'll also deselect
this from Group 1, and enable it on Group 2.
| | 03:10 | Finally, we'll come down here to the
third instance of the chessboard, which
| | 03:14 | again, contains everything.
| | 03:16 | We'll take this off of Group 1, and put
it on Group 3, and we'll disable all of
| | 03:21 | the pieces, so we just have the board.
| | 03:23 | So now, because of our wizardry with
isolating components, we've made it so that
| | 03:29 | we have a board separate on Group 3,
we have the brown pieces on Group 2, and
| | 03:35 | the white pieces on Group 1.
| | 03:38 | And now if we click OK, we could come
in here to our scene, we could come to
| | 03:43 | Group 1, for example, and we can move the
white pieces independently of the brown
| | 03:50 | pieces, and the chessboard.
| | 03:52 | So, as you can see, this ability to
isolate different components of a 3D model
| | 03:58 | comes in real handy, especially when
you're using the really high-quality models
| | 04:01 | that come from Video Copilot.
| | 04:03 | It's just little features like this
that add so much functionality to your
| | 04:07 | experience with Element 3D.
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| Working with multi-object objects| 00:00 | All right folks; this is really cool.
| | 00:02 | We are going to be talking
about multi-object objects.
| | 00:04 | Let me show you what I'm talking about.
| | 00:06 | I'm going to click on Scene Setup
in Element, and first, just to show you
| | 00:11 | the difference here, I am going to go
to Primitives, and I'm going to load up a
| | 00:16 | sphere into our scene.
| | 00:18 | Now what I am going to do is go to this
little arrow right here, and I'm going to
| | 00:23 | click it to get this flyout menu, and I
am going to choose Wireframe, so we can
| | 00:27 | see what this sphere is made of.
| | 00:29 | Now, we are not seeing the back-facing
polygons here, but we can kind of see it's
| | 00:33 | just a simple sphere. Nothing big here.
| | 00:35 | So, we are going to go ahead and
click this X to close this out.
| | 00:39 | In contrast, let's go over to the
Starter_Pack group, and I'm going to click
| | 00:43 | on ball_fracture, and wireframe is
still active, and so we can see what's
| | 00:48 | going on with this sphere.
| | 00:49 | We could also see that inside of this
sphere, there are all kinds of cracks and
| | 00:54 | fractures. That's because this sphere
happens to be a multi-object object. In
| | 01:00 | other words, there are many components
and pieces inside of this one sphere.
| | 01:05 | Now, you might find this in other
models as well, such as the floor_fracture;
| | 01:09 | it's almost like a pre-cracked floor
with many pieces.
| | 01:14 | But if I go back, and I deselect Wireframe,
so we're looking at the regular view,
| | 01:19 | we just see a regular box, or a
regular sphere, as it were. Maybe a little
| | 01:25 | lumpiness here, we can see there is
something going on beneath the surface,
| | 01:29 | but we are not going to be able to do
anything with this in the regular Element
| | 01:33 | interface as is, or at least that's the
way it might appear if we didn't know
| | 01:37 | about this great multi-object
feature in Element.
| | 01:39 | So, I am going to go ahead and click the
X on the floor_fracture to delete that,
| | 01:44 | I just want the ball here.
| | 01:45 | I am going to go ahead and click OK.
| | 01:48 | Now, if I open up Group 1, and I open up
the Particle Look section, you notice
| | 01:52 | there is a little parameter here; a
little area called Multi-Object. And
| | 01:55 | actually I am going to hit the little
Tilde key to maximize this, so we
| | 01:59 | can see what happens.
| | 02:00 | So, I have Multi-Object, and by default,
it's disabled, so we have no access to
| | 02:04 | those little pieces.
| | 02:06 | But if I Enable this, you see that
now we all of a sudden have tons of
| | 02:11 | parameters to play with that give us
access to, and let us play around with,
| | 02:16 | those little sub-object pieces.
| | 02:19 | So, I am going to Tilde key
again, so we can see my little ball, and
| | 02:23 | really just to see what's going on
here, I'm going to increase the Displace
| | 02:27 | value, and then bam! Look at that. All
those pieces just expand. They get
| | 02:35 | displaced in a uniform way.
| | 02:36 | Of course, we're going to be talking
much more about displace and scatter in the
| | 02:40 | next movie, but I am just showing
you that that is what we have here.
| | 02:44 | We can actually go to a negative value,
it makes this collapse on itself, but
| | 02:48 | it's all these different
pieces, which is really cool.
| | 02:50 | We could adjust the size of the pieces
independently; if we want to create these
| | 02:54 | little particles, like gravel,
we can do that.
| | 02:56 | We can make these super huge pieces,
I'll just go ahead and right-click on
| | 02:59 | that, and Reset that.
| | 03:00 | We could also rotate the pieces along
one direction; along the Y-axis, for
| | 03:04 | example, or along the X-axis. I'll go
ahead and just zero those back out. Oops!
| | 03:10 | There we go.
| | 03:11 | There is also -- oops!
| | 03:12 | I went to the Layer menu on accident.
| | 03:14 | We also have the Rotation Random, so we
can make each piece kind of rotate in a
| | 03:19 | random way, which could look kind of
creepy, depending on the lighting, and what
| | 03:22 | object is moving around.
That's kind of interesting.
| | 03:24 | And there is also, again, Displace, and
Scatter, which we'll get to. One of the
| | 03:30 | cool parameters here is Position Noise.
| | 03:31 | If I increase the Amount of Position
Noise, it's basically just kind of
| | 03:36 | like a randomness pattern that goes
through these pieces, and moves them in a
| | 03:40 | different direction.
| | 03:42 | And if I use Evolution, you can see
that it's just kind of like wobbling
| | 03:46 | around, almost like there is music
playing, or there is some kind of
| | 03:50 | shockwave going through it, or something
like that. A really interesting effect.
| | 03:54 | Again, this whole thing is all
possible just because we enabled Multi-Object.
| | 03:59 | So we have access to all these different
components, these pieces of this sphere,
| | 04:03 | or the floor; whatever has
multi-object parameters to it.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using Scatter and Displace| 00:00 | In this tutorial, we're going to look
little more closely at the scatter and
| | 00:04 | Displace features of the Multi-Object
functionality in Element. Here's a
| | 00:09 | little example that I
created using Scatter and Displace.
| | 00:15 | So, in the last movie, we kind of
looked at just basically how to use the core
| | 00:21 | features of Displace, what that can do,
and the obvious thing is that you can
| | 00:25 | blow up objects, and scatter those
pieces, and that looks all fine and dandy,
| | 00:30 | but there is a difference between
scatter, and displace, and you can use it to
| | 00:34 | create cool gathering effects like this as well,
which is what we are going to look at here.
| | 00:40 | I have also added some cool other
effects, like depth of field, ambient occlusion,
| | 00:45 | and lighting, all that kind of stuff.
| | 00:47 | We'll talk about that later on, but for
right now, again, scatter and displace is
| | 00:50 | the order of the day.
| | 00:51 | So I am going to go over to
Scatter and Displace Start.
| | 00:54 | I have already added a Light,
and a Camera, and an Element for you,
| | 00:57 | but we need to set this up.
| | 00:59 | So, I'll go to Scene Setup, and go to
the Starter_Pack, and add that chessboard
| | 01:03 | again, and what we are going to
do is use the Multi-Object feature.
| | 01:06 | So, you don't need to separate these
into separate components and different
| | 01:10 | groups like we did last time,
| | 01:12 | so we'll leave this all on
one group, Group 1, and click OK.
| | 01:17 | Now, you instantly notice the light
here; the different that that light makes.
| | 01:21 | There is before, that's how it is
regularly; just one little parallel light
| | 01:25 | makes all that difference. It's beautiful.
| | 01:26 | And we are kind of zoomed down here
pretty far, but I am going to leave it like
| | 01:31 | that, so we can really
see what we are doing here.
| | 01:34 | I am going to open up Group 1, open
up Particle Look, open up Multi-Object,
| | 01:37 | and Enable Multi-Object, and then
again, we have all of these new parameters
| | 01:43 | in the Multi-Object area.
| | 01:45 | Now, you'll notice that there is
Displace XYZ, and there is also Scatter XYZ.
| | 01:51 | There is also a Displace
Amount, and a Scatter Amount.
| | 01:55 | Now, the difference between displacement and
scatter is that displacement is more uniform.
| | 02:02 | So let's say, for example,
I'm going to displace X here.
| | 02:05 | As I displace this X, you see that
it's a uniform adjustment, or uniform
| | 02:10 | displacement along the X-axis.
| | 02:12 | I'm just going to undo that.
| | 02:15 | But as we scatter X, it goes also along
the X-axis, but it's all over the place.
| | 02:21 | All those different
components are going all random.
| | 02:25 | So it's a same thing on every axis.
| | 02:27 | So, Y is the same way; displace is
uniform, and Y scatter is just kind of
| | 02:34 | all over the place.
| | 02:35 | Now, something to be aware of is that
when you displace an axis, or whether you
| | 02:41 | scatter an axis, the transformation happens from
the center, so that might not be what you want.
| | 02:50 | So, in this case, as I scatter Y, the
chessboard goes up through the pieces, and
| | 02:58 | you might not want that.
| | 02:59 | So, in this example, the final
example, I had to deal with that as
| | 03:04 | I was dealing with scattering the
pieces along the X axis, and the Y axis,
| | 03:09 | and displacing them.
| | 03:10 | So, if I select this Element layer,
and press the letter U to see all of its
| | 03:14 | keyframes, you can see that I scattered
the pieces along the X and Y-axis; that's
| | 03:18 | side to side, and up and down.
| | 03:20 | And what happened was that these
pieces were intersecting the chessboard.
| | 03:24 | So then what I had to do is to
displace to compensate for that.
| | 03:29 | So, if we go back over to Scatter and
Displace, you will notice that I have
| | 03:33 | scattered these pieces along the
y-axis, but again, the chessboard goes
| | 03:38 | through the pieces,
| | 03:39 | ao to correct that, I need to go back
to Displace, and adjust the Displace Y, and
| | 03:46 | so those pieces are no longer intersecting.
| | 03:49 | So, I find that even if I want to just
scatter pieces randomly, I'll often use
| | 03:54 | Displace as well to help offset
things that are messed up with Scatter.
| | 03:59 | So again, these kind of work hand-in-hand.
It's kind a push-pull type of thing
| | 04:03 | sometimes as you're working
with Displace and Scatter.
| | 04:06 | If you're looking for something clean, and
more uniform, Displace is the way to go,
| | 04:10 | and again, if you want crazy
chaos, Scatter is the way to go.
| | 04:14 | Now I am just going to reset the
Scatter and Displace Y parameters, and you'll
| | 04:20 | notice that there is a Displace, and a
Scatter, and this is kind of like Displace XYZ
| | 04:26 | and Scatter XYZ all in one.
| | 04:28 | So, if I Displace, then it's kind of like
a uniform spread apart, which is, again,
| | 04:34 | good for, like, a uniform kind of
gathering like that. Let's undo that.
| | 04:39 | And of course, Scatter is the same
thing, except it's super chaotic, and all over
| | 04:43 | the place, so everything
just kind of goes all random.
| | 04:46 | But again, once you scatter something, or
even displace it, it's frozen like that
| | 04:51 | in time, so you could go over to a
camera move, for example, I'll select the
| | 04:56 | Unified Camera Tool, and click around,
and we can actually move through this,
| | 05:03 | because it's just frozen that way in time.
| | 05:06 | So, it's a great way to create maybe stopped
time, or maybe Matrix-like effects, where
| | 05:10 | objects kind of explode, or maybe they
gather together. Kind of a cool trick.
| | 05:19 | But again, just remember if, when you
are scattering things around, if things
| | 05:24 | don't quite line up like this, you
might need to offset things with some extra
| | 05:29 | displacement to get things
the way that you want them.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Changing an object's anchor point| 00:00 | Another really important part of
working with 3D Objects, especially when
| | 00:03 | you're going to animate, is working with
the object's anchor point, and that's not
| | 00:08 | super clear where that is in Element,
| | 00:10 | so that's what we are going
to talk about in this movie.
| | 00:13 | We have this little project; I have this
telephone pole, the one which ships with
| | 00:17 | Element, tracked to a live-action shot
here, and I want to make it seem like it's
| | 00:22 | toppling over, like it's going to fall
over, and of course, my shadow is fake here,
| | 00:26 | so when I drop this down, it's not
going to look right with the shadow.
| | 00:33 | But also, it spins from the center,
because by default, when you create a 3D
| | 00:37 | object in Element, it puts the anchor
point right in the center, so if we want
| | 00:41 | to have this topple over,
it's not going to work.
| | 00:43 | So to remedy this, let's go head and
click the Scene Setup button, then click on
| | 00:48 | the object itself, and then when we see
the options down here, we will see the
| | 00:53 | Anchor Point dropdown, and like I said,
by default, this is in the Model Center.
| | 00:57 | We want this on the bottom.
| | 00:59 | You could choose the models anchor point,
if you've set it up somewhere else in
| | 01:04 | the original modeling program; 3D program.
| | 01:07 | We also have these orthographic views.
| | 01:09 | So we're going to use Bottom, and
we're going to click OK, and then I need to
| | 01:14 | reposition this at the Particle
Replicator stuff. Put that back into place right
| | 01:21 | about there. That's good. Then we
can go to the Particle Look section, and
| | 01:27 | now I could adjust Z Rotation, and make
this thing topple over, and look right.
| | 01:32 | Of course, we have some shadow issues to
deal with, but the point is, the anchor
| | 01:36 | point is in the right spot, and
now we can animate this correctly.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
5. Creating 3D ObjectsCreating 3D text| 00:00 | So far we've been looking at 3D
objects that come with Element,
| | 00:05 | but now we're going to look at
creating 3D objects from scratch in Element;
| | 00:10 | truly one of Element's greatest benefits.
| | 00:13 | Now, what we're going to look at in this
movie is the ability to create 3D text
| | 00:18 | from scratch, which is absolutely incredible.
| | 00:21 | Now, the text we're going to be creating
isn't going to look quite this great,
| | 00:25 | but towards the end of this training
series, I'm going to show you how to add
| | 00:30 | all the polish that I added here; all
the shadows, and everything else that
| | 00:33 | makes this look great.
| | 00:34 | And we'll talk about how to do
that later, but as you can see, this is
| | 00:38 | really high-quality.
| | 00:39 | This is only 50%. If I zoom in,
we can't really see everything,
| | 00:42 | but you see the shallow depth of field, you
see the bevels, and the lighting on the
| | 00:45 | bevels. It just looks incredible, and
it renders remarkably fast as well.
| | 00:50 | So let's get to the 3D Text Start composition,
and let's go head and create some new text.
| | 00:57 | I'll choose the Horizontal Type Tool,
I'll just go head and click, and because
| | 01:03 | this is so magical, I'm just going to
create the word MAGICAL. I'm going to choose
| | 01:11 | the Selection tool, and move
this into the center of the frame,
| | 01:16 | and I'll go over to my Character
panel here, and scale this up.
| | 01:19 | Of course, you don't have to have this
font. It doesn't really matter. Whatever
| | 01:23 | font you want to use will work fine
for this trick. Actually, I'll make this a
| | 01:27 | little bit bigger, just so we
can see what we're doing here.
| | 01:31 | Even a little bit too big for this composition,
but just so you can see what's going on.
| | 01:37 | Now, I've already added the Element 3D
Effect for you on the Element 3D layer,
| | 01:42 | and what we need to do, before we click
the Scene Setup button, is we need to go to
| | 01:47 | Custom Layers, Custom Text and Masks,
and in a Path Layer 1, we need to choose
| | 01:53 | the Text we just created, which
is the MAGICAL text in my case.
| | 01:58 | Now, once we've done that, we really
don't need this text layer on, so I'm just
| | 02:02 | going to turn off its visibility, but as
long as loaded into Element here in the
| | 02:06 | Custom Layer section, we're good to go.
| | 02:09 | So I'm going to go head and click Scene
Setup, and nothing will be different; it
| | 02:14 | will be blank. That's totally fine.
Don't worry. Just go ahead and click the
| | 02:18 | Extrude button. Click Extrude, and it will automatically
look in the Custom Layers area for the layers
| | 02:25 | to make 3D, and there you have it.
| | 02:28 | Click and drag, and now we have full
three-dimensional text right here inside
| | 02:35 | of Element. It's just that easy, and it renders
just that quickly, which is really remarkable.
| | 02:41 | Later in this chapter, we'll also talk
about Bevel settings. I'm going to use my
| | 02:45 | scroll wheel, and zoom a little bit
closer, so we can see its edges. By default,
| | 02:49 | it creates a nice smooth edge,
| | 02:50 | but you might want a rougher edge, or a
bevel on that, and the Element 3D allows
| | 02:55 | you to do that as well.
| | 02:57 | And of course, we're not really talking
about materials yet, but you can go over
| | 03:00 | here down at the Material and Bevel
Browser, go over to Presets, and we can click
| | 03:04 | on some of the materials
that come with Element 3D.
| | 03:08 | And we can drag and drop -- let's say,
for example, Glass. We'll drag and drop
| | 03:13 | Glass on this, and now we have this beautiful,
glassy MAGICAL 3D text, which is really cool.
| | 03:20 | Go and click OK, and then there it is in
our scene, and we can select this camera,
| | 03:26 | or better yet, choose the Unified Camera
Tool, and click around. We could zoom in
| | 03:32 | with that right-mouse button,
| | 03:34 | and we have 3D text in our scene from
scratch, and this renders faster, and looks
| | 03:40 | better than any other solution I've
ever seen for After Effects, which is
| | 03:45 | absolutely incredible.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating 3D shapes| 00:00 | In addition to allowing you to create
3D texts, which we just saw in the last
| | 00:06 | tutorial, which is amazing in and of
itself, Element also allows you to take
| | 00:10 | masks, and to create 3D objects
with those masks.
| | 00:14 | So, what are we going to do is we are
going to create these little snowflakes, and
| | 00:18 | this is all just one instance of
Element; as you can see, the text, and the
| | 00:23 | snowflakes are all three dimensional,
and these snowflakes were created using
| | 00:29 | masks in Element, which we
will see. Pretty incredible stuff.
| | 00:33 | So, let's go over to the 3D Shapes Start
comp. I am going to choose the Selection
| | 00:37 | tool back again, and we are also going
to learn a few other steps along the way.
| | 00:41 | For example, we are going to be
using one instance of Element --
| | 00:44 | we have already gone into Custom Layers,
Custom Text, and Masks, and set up 3D text,
| | 00:50 | but what happens when we
want to create multiple objects?
| | 00:53 | So, if I look down here, we have multiple
solid layers. Each one has a mask on it.
| | 00:58 | Note that Element is going to use the
first mask on the layer, so if you have
| | 01:03 | dozens of masks, it's not
going to work out as you plan,
| | 01:06 | so I recommend putting one mask per
solid layer. Snowflake 3 is the
| | 01:12 | mask that we want to use as kind of
like this main staple snowflake right there.
| | 01:17 | I am going to choose the Element
layer, and for Path Layer 2, I am going to
| | 01:21 | choose snowflake 3, which
again is that main snowflake.
| | 01:25 | For Path Layer 3, let's say we will use
snowflake 2, and then for Path Layer 4,
| | 01:31 | we will use snowflake 1.
| | 01:33 | Now we are ready to go,
| | 01:34 | so I am going to click the Scene Setup button,
and again, we already have the 3D text, so
| | 01:40 | that's already assembled there for us.
| | 01:43 | Now what I am going to do is I am
going to click the Extrude button.
| | 01:47 | Now, what happens is that it uses
the top custom path when it extrudes.
| | 01:53 | The top custom path was,
of course, the text.
| | 01:55 | So now we have the 3D text, with the material
on it, and now we have this new 3D text.
| | 02:01 | So to change it to be my snowflake, what
I need to do is make sure that this new
| | 02:06 | one is selected here, this new Extrusion
Model, I'm going to come down to Custom
| | 02:10 | Path, and I am going to change
Custom Path to Custom Path 2.
| | 02:13 | Now it's going to be that snowflake,
and while we are here, let's go ahead and
| | 02:18 | disable it from group 1,
and put it on group 2.
| | 02:21 | Now we will click Extrude again, making
another 3D object, which, again, is the
| | 02:25 | text, and I will change Custom Path to Custom
Path 3, which is the next snowflake. And
| | 02:31 | to do it again -- actually, let's change the
group. Disable from group 1; put it on group 3.
| | 02:36 | Extrude again, change this, yet again,
to Custom Path 4, and we will take it off
| | 02:42 | group 1, and put it on group 4.
| | 02:45 | So now we have our 3D text, as
well as our three snowflakes.
| | 02:50 | I am just going to double-click on
this extrusion model with this big,
| | 02:54 | beautiful snowflake selected; I'm going
double-click on that, and I am going to type
| | 02:59 | in Main Snowflake,
and that's how we rename it.
| | 03:02 | I will just go ahead and call this
Snowflake #2, and I will double-click on
| | 03:10 | this last model, and call it Snowflake #3,
and there we have all of our snowflakes.
| | 03:17 | I can go over here to Presets,
in the Material and Bevel Browser.
| | 03:21 |
I will just go ahead and drag and drop
Chrome, and I'll drag and drop it on each
| | 03:27 | one of these objects to put any material
on it. We will talk about materials a
| | 03:32 | little bit more in the next
chapter. And there we have it.
| | 03:35 | We can go ahead and click OK. This will
put all these snowflakes in our scene,
| | 03:39 | but I want to talk about
something else here.
| | 03:41 | As you can see, if we look really close --
I am going to use my wheel mouse to zoom
| | 03:46 | in here -- we get a little bit of weird
texture here. You can see that weird
| | 03:50 | triangulation in that one
little spot there on this model.
| | 03:53 | So I am going to make sure that the
Main Snowflake is selected, and I want to
| | 03:57 | scroll down here to these options,
and we have Tessellation options.
| | 04:01 | By default, the Path Resolution is set
to High, but I know there are a lot of
| | 04:06 | times -- matter of the fact, I would
probably say most of the time -- when you
| | 04:09 | extrude a mask, or text, you will have
these quirky little anomalies like this.
| | 04:15 | It's kind of hard to see,
but it's definitely there.
| | 04:18 | When you go to render, it just creates a
weird ugliness that is very distracting.
| | 04:23 | So we will change the Path Resolution
to Ultra, and a lot of times that fixes
| | 04:28 | things; doesn't seem to be making
that much difference in this case, and we
| | 04:32 | could try Extreme if that doesn't work.
| | 04:35 | Now, in this case,
that actually isn't helping.
| | 04:39 | All of those quality settings are
really not doing too much for this snowflake.
| | 04:43 | So what we could do is change the
material. We could also try rotating the
| | 04:48 | object, because it doesn't have any
problems here on the back side apparently.
| | 04:53 | If we move this around, I
don't see any issues there.
| | 04:56 | And we could also go in and adjust
the Bevel settings, which also might be
| | 05:00 | causing that problem.
| | 05:02 | Notice that there is bevel on the front
here, a beveled edge there, and there is
| | 05:06 | not one on the back.
| | 05:07 | We will talk later in this chapter
about how to adjust bevel settings.
| | 05:10 | We could actually put a bevel on the
back, so when we rotate it, it looks
| | 05:14 | the same as the front.
| | 05:15 | But we are going to go ahead and deal
with that for right now, because these easy
| | 05:20 | methods aren't getting rid of it.
| | 05:21 | If find that probably about 60 to 70% of
the time, changing the path resolution
| | 05:25 | option here in the Tessellation section
will fix little weird problems like this.
| | 05:30 | Let me go ahead and click OK, and now
as you can see, we have our snowflakes.
| | 05:34 | Now, the reason these are all in the
right spot is because I went in ahead, and I
| | 05:38 | adjusted some of these Element settings,
using the replicator that we will talk
| | 05:42 | about a little later
in this training series.
| | 05:44 | Now we have all of these cool 3D
snowflakes because of those masks.
| | 05:50 | Now, in the next movie, we are going to
talk about how to get more of these masks,
| | 05:54 | and basically more of these 3D
shapes into After Effects using Photoshop.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using Photoshop to create 3D objects| 00:01 | In the last tutorial, we made some
cool 3D Objects out of masks, these little
| | 00:04 | snowflakes, kind of what you see
those here in the background texture, and I
| | 00:08 | actually got those from Photoshop.
| | 00:11 | So what we are going to do is we are
going to look at how to create these 3D
| | 00:15 | Objects, the 3D shapes, using Photoshop.
| | 00:17 | What I am going to do is I am going to
go down to these Shapes tools towards the
| | 00:22 | bottom of the tools panel in Photoshop.
| | 00:25 | We don't want to use the rectangle up
here; that's not what we are looking for.
| | 00:29 | We want to go all the way down, and
click and hold down your left mouse button
| | 00:33 | until you see this little fly out
menu here; choose the Custom Shape Tool.
| | 00:37 | Now, you can also use these objects, and
bring these shapes in to After Effects,
| | 00:41 | but After Effects kind of
already have these same shapes.
| | 00:44 | So, I am going to choose the Custom
Shape Tool, and then we come up here to
| | 00:48 | the shape area, click this little
triangle, and now we have a library of
| | 00:53 | shapes to choose from.
| | 00:54 | These all come with Photoshop.
| | 00:56 | To get even more, I am going to go to
this little sprocket, with another down
| | 01:00 | facing arrow, and I am
going to choose All.
| | 01:02 | You see, these are all different libraries
of shapes that come with Photoshop,
| | 01:06 | and all of these shapes can be used in After
Effects with Element 3D to create 3D Objects.
| | 01:13 | So I am going to choose All, so we see
all of the shapes, and I am not going to
| | 01:18 | Append the shapes; I am just going to
Replace the shapes, and click OK, and now we
| | 01:22 | can see all of these shapes -- I will
just stretch this out a little bit here --
| | 01:26 | all of the shapes that come with
Photoshop that, again, can be turned into 3D
| | 01:31 | objects using Element.
| | 01:33 | What am I going to do is I am going to
choose this little hand here, this left
| | 01:37 | hand, go ahead and click up here to
close that window, and then I will click
| | 01:42 | and drag to create my hand. As you
can tell here, I could stretch this, and
| | 01:47 | make it all distorted,
| | 01:48 | ao I am going to press the Shift key to
constrain the proportions, and I am also
| | 01:52 | going to use the Spacebar; if I hold
the Spacebar and the Shift key at the same
| | 01:56 | time, then I could actually
move that hand where I want.
| | 01:59 | Doesn't really have to be centered or
anything like that; just wherever you want
| | 02:03 | to put it. You just want to make sure it's
all on the stage, and then I'll let go, and
| | 02:07 | now we have our path.
| | 02:09 | Now I need to copy it in order to get
into After Effects, and before I do that,
| | 02:13 | I need to select it.
| | 02:14 | So I am going to go over here and
choose this tool here; this is the Path
| | 02:19 | Selection Tool. Not the same thing as
the Selection Tool up here, so we need
| | 02:22 | to select, again, the Path Selection Tool.
Not the Direct Selection Tool; don't do that.
| | 02:26 | It's the regular Path Selection Tool.
Click it to select it, and you get all
| | 02:30 | these dots here; that's how you know
it's selected, and then we can press
| | 02:34 | Command+C, or Ctrl+C on the PC.
| | 02:38 | And then we can go back over into After
Effects, and here's what we have to do;
| | 02:43 | it's a little tricky, a little weird,
but just stay with me. I am going to go
| | 02:47 | to Layer -- actually, let me select this
comp first. Layer > New > Solid, and go
| | 02:53 | ahead and click OK here.
| | 02:56 | And before we just go pasting, we
actually need to do a really weird trick first.
| | 03:00 | We need to select the Pen Tool, and
click once to create just a point there, and
| | 03:06 | then we can press Command+V on the Mac,
or Ctrl+V on the PC to paste that mask.
| | 03:14 | Now we can turn off the layer, go back
to the Element layer, choose that layer,
| | 03:23 | that White Solid layer. I should have
named it better; I apologize. Forgive me.
| | 03:27 | I am going to choose that as Layer 1
there, and there is already 3D set up in the
| | 03:32 | effect, so we don't have to go in and
do all that, and here we have this totally
| | 03:37 | 3D hand, thanks to Photoshop.
| | 03:40 | Open up Group 2, and in rotation, we can
rotate this around; as you can see, we
| | 03:45 | have a three dimensional hand
set up for us, because of Photoshop.
| | 03:51 | We can even go in, and later we
will learn about beveling; we could bevel
| | 03:55 | around those edges, and make this smoother,
so it looks even more like a hand, or
| | 03:59 | whatever shape you want to use.
| | 04:00 | It's really a great resource, if you
have Photoshop and After Effects, to be able
| | 04:04 | to have this huge library of 3D shapes,
or potential 3D shapes at your disposal,
| | 04:09 | because of Element 3D.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Working with bevel presets| 00:00 | One of the things that adds a lot of
character to the 3D objects that we create
| | 00:04 | in Element is to be able
to add bevels to the edges.
| | 00:08 | This can make things smooth, or otherwise
add more texture, again, to these edges.
| | 00:14 | If I zoom in here, you could see a little more
closely what this bevel is doing. It's pretty cool.
| | 00:22 | What I am going to do is, in this Bevel
Presets Final comp, I'm just going to
| | 00:26 | click Scene Setup, just so we can see
it without the lights, and we could see
| | 00:30 | what's going on with this beveled edge.
| | 00:33 | I'm going to zoom out using my wheel
mouse, and so you could see this edge; this
| | 00:37 | is just one text layer,
| | 00:38 | but with this bevel, it adds, again, a lot more
interest to what we can do with this 3D text.
| | 00:47 | Very cool!
| | 00:47 | So, let's look at how to do that.
| | 00:49 | I'm going to go ahead and click this
little X here to cancel out of this, click
| | 00:53 | Yes, and let's go over to Bevel Presets
Start, where we have just the plain text.
| | 00:58 | And it's holiday season,
hence the inside joke here.
| | 01:02 | I'm going to go ahead and click on Element,
and go back to our Path Layer 1, and
| | 01:07 | we'll choose Potter for Path Layer 1.
| | 01:11 | For Path Layer 2, we'll choose the dash.
| | 01:14 | For Path Layer 3,
we'll choose savings and loan.
| | 01:17 | Now we can go back up to Scene Setup,
| | 01:21 | and we'll go ahead and
click Extrude three times.
| | 01:25 | And on the first one, actually, we'll
just double-click that to rename that.
| | 01:30 | We'll call this Potter.
| | 01:32 | And then on the second one, we'll change
the Custom Path to Custom Path 2, and
| | 01:38 | double-click again on
Extrusion Model to call this dash.
| | 01:42 | And then on the final one, we'll change
the Custom Path to Custom Path 3, and
| | 01:50 | we'll double-click on Extrusion Model,
and we'll just call this S&L, and click OK.
| | 01:59 | So now, if I go ahead click on Potter,
and I zoom in here, we could see that
| | 02:05 | default beveled edge.
| | 02:06 | In next few movies, we're going to
dig a little bit deeper into bevels, and
| | 02:10 | how to tweak them, and customize them.
| | 02:12 | For now, we're just going to go
over to Presets, and we're going to do
| | 02:16 | this really easy style.
| | 02:17 | So, for those styles, you don't want
to spend a bunch of time playing with
| | 02:21 | bevels, because there are a lot of
choices that an Element 3D gives you.
| | 02:25 | So, I'm going to go over to Bevels here.
| | 02:27 | We have a series of the Bevel
Presets that ship with Element,
| | 02:31 | and everything from a really simple stuff --
maybe Round_White, where we have just kind
| | 02:36 | of a bloated bevel around the
edges; just kind of interesting.
| | 02:41 | We also have more complex stuff, such
as the Gold Stripes. A bunch of different
| | 02:49 | bevels here. A lot of complexity.
| | 02:51 | There is also Century, which seems
like a very classy setting. Very nice.
| | 02:58 | And you can see, there are just tons of
different settings that you can choose from.
| | 03:03 | The Detective one is actually the one
that I used on the previous example.
| | 03:07 | So, you can go ahead and click OK
here, or we could also apply this same
| | 03:13 | Detective setting to the dash,
| | 03:15 | and we could also go over to the Savings
and Loan, and apply, maybe, Easy_Read on
| | 03:21 | that, or another setting if we wanted to.
| | 03:25 | Now, one of the things that we can do
-- we're going to talk about, again, more
| | 03:29 | about customizing bevels in the next
couple of movies, but while we have this
| | 03:33 | selected, you notice that when we
applied it to the Potter text, it worked
| | 03:36 | perfectly, like it was built for it,
| | 03:38 | but when we apply it to the much smaller
Savings and Loan text, it just looks all wonky.
| | 03:43 | Look at that; it just
doesn't look very good at all.
| | 03:47 | You can see the potential is there to be great,
but itjust doesn't look that impressive.
| | 03:50 | So, what we can do is, with this Savings
and Loan text selected, we come down to
| | 03:55 | Bevel Scale, and click this, and drag it
to the left to reduce the Bevel Scale.
| | 04:00 | So again, we're scaling down the bevel,
| | 04:04 | and at some point, we will get to a
happy medium, where the Bevel Preset looks
| | 04:11 | like it fits this text.
| | 04:15 | And as we zoom in with our wheel mouse,
that's actually looking pretty decent there.
| | 04:20 | Maybe it's a little bit too
small, but I think that that works.
| | 04:24 | Now, we're seeing some of these problems
that we talked about before, where
| | 04:28 | we're getting these really
weird triangulations on this text.
| | 04:33 | It is just not converting over to 3D very
good, because of the way that the font is.
| | 04:39 | So again, we can go and scroll down to
Tessellation, and change the Path Resolution.
| | 04:44 | Let's just jump right to Extreme.
| | 04:46 | And it doesn't seem to be doing much
of anything, and that happens sometimes.
| | 04:53 | It does look a little better
in the E over here.
| | 04:56 | The A still has some weird triangulation
on the inside, but all in all, it
| | 05:01 | looks pretty clean,
| | 05:02 | and our dash, and our Potter look great!
| | 05:07 | Another thing I should also point out
is that in addition to having the Bevel
| | 05:13 | Presets, these Bevel
Presets also contain materials.
| | 05:17 | So our text is now black, and silver
and black, and it was just white before.
| | 05:23 | So, we really didn't add any materials;
we just added these Bevel Presets, and it
| | 05:27 | gets Materials come along with the package.
| | 05:28 | And in the next chapter, we'll
look at how to tweak those materials,
| | 05:31 | so it doesn't even have to stay like
that, but it's just kind of nice that we
| | 05:35 | can get these looks right away, just by
dragging and dropping on to our text.
| | 05:40 | And once we click OK, then we now have
all of these different pieces, which are
| | 05:47 | still loading here,
and there they are in 3D.
| | 05:51 | Now, one of the things I neglected to do,
if I go back into Scene Setup, is I didn't
| | 05:55 | put these on different groups.
| | 05:57 | So, we'll keep Potter on group 1, dash off
of group 1, and onto group 2, and S&L off of
| | 06:02 | group 1, and onto group 3.
| | 06:05 | Now, we can click OK.
| | 06:06 | We could actually turn off the
Visibility of the Potter, dash, and
| | 06:11 | savings and loan layers.
| | 06:13 | And now we can go to group 2, and reduce,
or rather, increase the Y Position for
| | 06:20 | the dash on group 2.
| | 06:22 | And now on group 3, we increase the Y
Position for the Bedford Falls Savings and Loan.
| | 06:28 | And there we have a much more professional,
cleaner text, because of the beveled
| | 06:34 | edges, and it just adds a lot more
personality to it, and also power, because
| | 06:39 | this is, like, a fake bank
logo that we're doing here.
| | 06:43 | So again, these bevels can do a lot
for your text, and for your 3D Objects,
| | 06:49 | because of the way it plays with the edges.
| | 06:52 | In next couple of movies, we'll dig
much deeper into how to create these custom
| | 06:57 | bevels and adjust them on your own.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Tweaking bevel settings| 00:00 | So, working with Bevel Presets is cool,
but if you really want to unlock the
| | 00:04 | power of the bevel, then you need to be
able to start from scratch, and work with
| | 00:09 | your own custom bevel settings.
| | 00:10 | That's what we're going to talk about
in this movie, and also in the next movie.
| | 00:14 | Now, the first day that I had a chance to
play with Element, I was really inspired by
| | 00:19 | all of the choices
that you have when you bevel,
| | 00:22 | so I made this 3D text, and I made
this little animation. We kind of are
| | 00:27 | flying through this wall, and then we turn
around, and see that it's just this 3D text.
| | 00:33 | And really what this is,
| | 00:34 | this is one single layer of text itself,
one little component of text, and one
| | 00:40 | instance of Element,
| | 00:41 | and what I did is I played with
the bevel settings; I extruded them.
| | 00:45 | And so all of these ridges and
valleys; this is just from the text, from
| | 00:51 | extruding it, and adjusting
the bevel settings.
| | 00:54 | Now, we're actually going to make this
in the next movie, but I just wanted to
| | 00:58 | share with you first that there is so
much potential here when you're talking
| | 01:02 | about bevels. It's more than
just curving the edges slightly.
| | 01:06 | So, let's go over to Bevel Settings Start,
and I've already created that text for you,
| | 01:12 | but we're going to again
start from scratch here.
| | 01:15 | So, go ahead and click on the
Scene Setup button in this comp,
| | 01:18 | and we're going to be focusing on this
Potter text, so I'm going to use this
| | 01:22 | scroll wheel to zoom in close.
| | 01:24 | I'm actually going to go to this T, and
I'm going to hold down the middle mouse
| | 01:28 | button and move that over, so we
can really get in there, and see what's
| | 01:33 | going on with this text.
| | 01:34 | I also want to apply material to this
that will allow me to see what's going
| | 01:38 | on with the bevel
a little more clearly.
| | 01:40 | So, I'm going to go to Presets
here in Material and Bevel Browser,
| | 01:44 | and in the regular Materials, I'm going to
apply Gold_Basic; just drag and drop that.
| | 01:48 | So now we've applied that the
Gold_Basic material to this text.
| | 01:53 | Now, what we want to do is
actually click on the texture.
| | 01:56 | That's where we get the detail of
all of these Bevel settings here.
| | 02:01 | Now, just to be clear, a bevel is just
this little ridge in the front of the text.
| | 02:09 | If we take Bevel Depth to 0 -- I am going
to click in there, type 0, and hit Enter --
| | 02:17 | you can see this is what text
looks like when it has no bevel.
| | 02:21 | It does seem rather flat, and lifeless,
almost like something you'd find in Circa
| | 02:26 | 1990s computer graphics.
| | 02:28 | It just doesn't look quite right.
| | 02:31 | So, as we increase the Bevel Depth,
you could see that it's actually creating
| | 02:36 | an extra ridge in front of the text, and
this is the bevel; this extra portion there.
| | 02:43 | Now, you'll notice that as I went
backwards on accident there that this
| | 02:46 | actually can recede back, and go backwards,
like a negative bevel, and that also could
| | 02:53 | create an interesting effect.
| | 02:55 | A lot of these settings
actually go to negative value,
| | 02:57 | so again, there is a lot to play with.
| | 03:00 | I'm going to take this back to its
default setting of 1, and click OK.
| | 03:05 | And before we get any further, I want to
share with you this idea of a curved bevel.
| | 03:10 | By default, this setting,
the Bevel Curve, is set to 1.
| | 03:15 | If I take this to 0,
then we get a chiseled edge.
| | 03:20 | That could look pretty cool in
its own right. For a bank logo, which
| | 03:24 | essentially this is, that
actually might look more preferable.
| | 03:28 | I could also take the Bevel Curve to
a negative, so there is kind of like a
| | 03:33 | concave surface on the ridges of these
bevels, which is interesting, and from this
| | 03:39 | angle, from this almost profile shot,
you can see the difference of the curved
| | 03:44 | bevel for the positive Bevel Curve
value, and a negative Bevel Curve value.
| | 03:49 | I'll take this towards a slight positive.
If you're getting to where you see
| | 03:55 | kind of a choppiness, a lack of smoothness
in this bevel curve, you could just
| | 04:00 | increase Bevel Segment
to smooth that out.
| | 04:03 | Now, I'm going to go ahead and
click, and rotate this, and then zoom out.
| | 04:07 | The bevel section here, when we click
on our material, is also where we adjust
| | 04:12 | the extrusion value.
| | 04:14 | So, if we want our text to be much thinner,
then we'd take the Extrude value down.
| | 04:19 | If we increase the Extrude value, obviously,
it gets much thicker, and we create
| | 04:23 | this cool warp through time effects.
| | 04:26 | So, if I again expand this quite a bit,
and then zoom out, you see we have really
| | 04:33 | long text, which could be very cool, especially
if we had a wide-angle lens. Very cool!
| | 04:38 | I'm actually going to click here, and take
this back down to about 1, and roll around
| | 04:44 | here, so you could see that
beveled edge a little bit.
| | 04:46 | Bevel Size is another setting; be
careful with this. This basically takes
| | 04:50 | all of the Bevel settings,
including extrusion, and increases that.
| | 04:56 | So everything kind of gets bigger
there. And so a lot of times, if you have
| | 05:01 | applied Bevel Preset to your
text, and it doesn't look quite right,
| | 05:05 | especially with the Bevel Presets, if you play
around with the Bevel Size, that can help fix things.
| | 05:10 | Now, if I click on the actual object itself,
| | 05:13 | so if I click on the word Potter, I
see kind of like the master settings,
| | 05:17 | and then I have this Bevel Scale, which
also, again, controls the scale of all of
| | 05:22 | the Bevel settings,
including extrusion as well.
| | 05:24 | So, you can see that as I increase this,
the bevel and the extrusion is getting big.
| | 05:29 | I'll take this back to 1, and you'll
see everything is kind of back to normal.
| | 05:33 | But if you apply a Bevel Preset to
smaller text, like this Savings and Loan,
| | 05:37 | again, we can adjust the Bevel Scale to fix
that if it's not working out quite right.
| | 05:42 | So, take that down to a really
small amount, and it looks much better.
| | 05:47 | I'll go back to the Potter text, and
actually click on the material to get
| | 05:53 | back the Bevel settings.
| | 05:54 | Now, we notice that we
have this cool bevel here --
| | 05:58 | it's not that cool; I'm kind of
exaggerating a little bit, but it's okay.
| | 06:01 | It looks pretty decent.
| | 06:02 | And actually, I'll take
this Bevel Curve down the 0,
| | 06:05 | so we have, like,
this cool chiseled edge.
| | 06:08 | If we're going to do some kind of
animation where we saw the back of our text,
| | 06:12 | there is a noticeable difference between
the plain old back, without a bevel, and
| | 06:17 | the cool, chiseled, beveled front.
| | 06:19 | So, what we can do on the back of
a text here is, if we check Bevel
| | 06:24 | Backside, we'll see this.
| | 06:25 | Check Bevel Backside; it will apply
the same Bevel settings to the front and
| | 06:29 | the back of the text.
| | 06:31 | Now, if you're not going to see the back
of the text, don't check that settings.
| | 06:35 | It's just going to be more
work for the computer to process,
| | 06:37 | but if you are going to see it, that
will definitely help things look more
| | 06:41 | beautiful behind the scenes there.
| | 06:44 | Now, when we talk about materials in
the next chapter, we'll see that if we
| | 06:49 | right-click on a texture, we
can save a Material Preset.
| | 06:53 | Now, unfortunately, there's no way as of the
time of this recording to save your Bevel Preset,
| | 06:58 | but there's not too many settings, so
if you have to write these numbers down,
| | 07:02 | it's not the worst thing in the world.
| | 07:04 | And if you go over to the Preset Bevel
shapes, there're a lot of really cool
| | 07:09 | bevels here, and these
could be jumping off points.
| | 07:11 | So, you can start with one of these that
you're closest to, and then tweak it from there.
| | 07:16 | I should also point out that
when you use an existing 3D objects,
| | 07:19 | so if I were to create, or maybe go
to Starter_Pack, or go to the icons, they're
| | 07:24 | probably better example, and if we
were click on the biohazard logo; that's
| | 07:28 | kind of Bevel here,
| | 07:30 | but if we go to the Base_Material
here, we won't see any Bevel settings.
| | 07:35 | So, the Bevel settings are only for
things that you've created yourself
| | 07:39 | with masks, or with text.
| | 07:42 | Now, in the next movie, we're going to
look at another interesting aspect of
| | 07:47 | these bevels, which is the
ability to create multiple bevels.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding multiple bevels| 00:00 | As promised, in this video, we're
going to look at how to create multiple
| | 00:04 | bevels, and also a few creative
reasons why you might want to do that,
| | 00:08 | one of them being this cool effect here.
| | 00:10 | Maybe it's just me;
maybe that's not that great,
| | 00:12 | but I think that's so cool to be able to
create this cool texture with multiple bevels.
| | 00:17 | Anyways, go to Bevel Offset Start, and
let's go ahead, and select the Element
| | 00:20 | layer, click Scene Setup,
| | 00:22 | and that's all that we're
dealing with here; just some 3D text.
| | 00:25 | Regular old 3D text.
| | 00:28 | First, I'm going to show you
the real use for multiple bevels,
| | 00:32 | and that way, if you don't want to see
my stupid little example, you could just
| | 00:35 | close the tutorial, and move along.
| | 00:37 | But let's go ahead and we'll
click on this shiny texture,
| | 00:40 | and as you could see here, we just have
this one texture, we have our Bevel settings,
| | 00:44 | but what really makes this cool is
when we actually click on the model itself,
| | 00:48 | then we could see that there
is a Bevel Copies dropdown.
| | 00:52 | By default, it's set to 1.
| | 00:53 | If we take this up to 2, it actually
creates a second texture on this object.
| | 00:58 | It looks kind of funky right now, because
they are overlaid on top of each other,
| | 01:02 | so we're getting some weird
graphic stuff there.
| | 01:04 | What I'm going to do is click Bevel 2, this
new texture, and I will Extrude it a little bit.
| | 01:10 | And let's go ahead
and increase the Bevel Size.
| | 01:13 | Now, we've completely
dwarfed our original texture.
| | 01:16 | So, I'm going to move this
white texture back,
| | 01:20 | so I'm going to click on Z Offset,
click, anddrag to the left, and now
| | 01:24 | we're moving this back.
| | 01:26 | And so now you can see that this
original black material is kind of like an
| | 01:31 | inset bevel of the new
white material that we've added.
| | 01:36 | I'll go ahead and, making sure that
the white is still selected, the white
| | 01:39 | texture, I'll click Extrude some more,
and Z Offset that back a little bit again,
| | 01:45 | and let's expand edges.
| | 01:47 | So, we talked before about Bevel Size;
that basically makes the bevel bigger, and
| | 01:51 | kind of makes everything
swell up a little bit,
| | 01:54 | but if we just increase Expand Edges,
that doesn't make things go out in
| | 01:59 | front, it just expands the edges, which for
creating bevels can sometimes work really great.
| | 02:05 | Sometimes you get really weird
little artifacts like this, because as you
| | 02:10 | expand the edges, the model starts to kind
of wrap around itself as these edges overlap.
| | 02:15 | So you do sometimes get
some weird things like that.
| | 02:18 | As you could see, it's only on
the W, and not on the other letter.
| | 02:21 | So, it's only an occasional thing,
but we definitely don't want that,
| | 02:24 | so I am going to take that
down a little bit.
| | 02:27 | But I can play with Bevel Size, and
Expand Edges, and Extrude until I get
| | 02:31 | the look that I want.
| | 02:32 | I can also go back to the Black Texture,
and increase the extrusion there, or I
| | 02:37 | might want to maybe decrease the Bevel
Size there, or maybe curve this a little
| | 02:43 | bit more or less, because of
this now stacked up texture.
| | 02:48 | Let's go ahead and keep the party going.
| | 02:50 | Let's go back to the main model here,
the top, and then we'll change the Bevel
| | 02:54 | Copies to 3, and now we have three objects.
| | 02:56 | So, I can click on the third bevel,
which actually, I'm going to give this a
| | 03:00 | different material here.
| | 03:01 | I'm going to go to the Presets
> Material and Bevel Browser.
| | 03:04 | Now, we'll go ahead and
drag and drop Chrome.
| | 03:06 | Now, you want to be careful;
| | 03:08 | a lot of the times when we've been
adding materials so far in this chapter, or
| | 03:12 | in this training series, we've been
just dragging and dropping right here.
| | 03:15 | What that will do is that will add the
material to everything in your scene, or
| | 03:19 | everything on that group.
| | 03:20 | So, I'm just going to hit Command+Z on
the Mac, or Ctrl+Z on the PC to undo that,
| | 03:25 | and what I want to do instead is drag
and drop this material over here in the
| | 03:30 | Scene panel onto the bevel 3,
| | 03:34 | and now it just applies it
just to this one little object.
| | 03:37 | So now I could extrude this a little
bit, and let's take down Bevel Size,
| | 03:44 | and I can take down Expand
Edges to a negative value.
| | 03:48 | Now this is kind of like a
subcomponent of the black texture.
| | 03:52 | So now we have a really
interesting layered bevel effect.
| | 03:56 | Actually, let me Extrude this a little
bit more. A much more interesting layered
| | 04:01 | bevel effect, because of this multiple
Bevel Copies thing. It's very cool.
| | 04:08 | Now, what I did, if you're interested
in my cool little trick before was -- I'm
| | 04:13 | going to go ahead and click on the
Bevel 2, and actually, while were at it,
| | 04:17 | let's go ahead and apply
Chrome texture to that as well.
| | 04:19 | What I did is I just extruded it a lot,
a lot, a lot, and took down the Z Offset
| | 04:27 | quite a bit. And actually, let me
zoom out, so we can see what we're doing.
| | 04:32 | And then what I did is I went back to
the main model, and made another bevel
| | 04:38 | copy, and we'll go ahead and apply Chrome
to that as well, and again, Extrude that.
| | 04:45 | So, the same type of thing, where we're
extruding a lot, and then we decrease the
| | 04:50 | Z Offset, so it goes behind everything,
| | 04:55 | and after a while, you have this really
cool texture that doesn't look like text
| | 05:02 | at all, but could allow you to
do some pretty interesting things.
| | 05:05 | Later when we talk about the Replicator,
we could actually use this as maybe a
| | 05:09 | background, or a wall, make a wall of it.
| | 05:11 | You never think that it's text, but
using the variety that comes with text, we
| | 05:17 | could make again a very interesting
wall, or floor pattern, or something else.
| | 05:22 | So, really cool idea,
it's really fun to play with,
| | 05:24 | and again, we can make as many copies of
this going back in Z space as we want.
| | 05:28 | Well actually, there is 5 here if
we're going to make just bevel copies, but
| | 05:33 | then when we get into the Replicator
section, we'll see that we can replicate
| | 05:37 | this, and make as many copies as we'd like.
| | 05:39 | So again, bevels are a really fun
thing to play with, and they're great for
| | 05:44 | creating more
interesting text effects, of course,
| | 05:47 | but because of these multiple copies,
we could also create really interesting
| | 05:51 | textures, like this here.
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| Importing 3D objects| 00:00 | Another one of Element 3D's great miracles
is that it can actually import 3D objects natively.
| | 00:08 | It imports OBJ files, which is a
standard universal 3D file format, but it also
| | 00:16 | imports C4D file; that's Native
CINEMA 4D project files, which is absolutely
| | 00:21 | incredible; it's almost unheard of.
| | 00:23 | However, there is a little bit of a
gotcha here. There is some stuff we have
| | 00:28 | to do to set this up.
| | 00:29 | I have this model here, this is the
bucket original file, and I want to import
| | 00:33 | this into After Effects.
| | 00:35 | You can see it's a bucket original.c4d.
| | 00:37 | If I go over to After Effects, and
Element, click Scene Setup, and I'll go
| | 00:43 | ahead and go to the Model Browser, in
the right-hand side of the Model Browser,
| | 00:47 | there is a little arrow here.
| | 00:49 | Click that, and choose Import 3D Object.
| | 00:51 | In the Media folder of the Exercise
Files, you'll find the 3D Files folder, and
| | 00:57 | inside of that, choose bucket
original, and click Import 3D Object.
| | 01:02 | Now, this doesn't look at all like
the bucket. It's not tapered like the
| | 01:05 | bucket, it doesn't have the handle like the
bucket, and it just doesn't look all that great.
| | 01:11 | As a matter of fact, if you try to
import CINEMA 4D objects, you might not even
| | 01:17 | get anything at all, let alone
something that doesn't look right.
| | 01:20 | So, there are a few things
you've got to do.
| | 01:23 | So back in CINEMA 4D,
here's what we have to do.
| | 01:25 | When we have objects such as this
group here, the bucket itself actually is
| | 01:29 | using a taper modifier,
| | 01:30 | so what I need to do on the bucket, I
need to go over to the Objects Menu, and
| | 01:36 | choose Current State to Object.
| | 01:38 | That creates a duplicate of the object
that I can actually use in After Effects.
| | 01:44 | So, things that are unique to CINEMA 4D,
that are not geometry, such as modifiers,
| | 01:51 | and unique CINEMA 4D objects, many of
which you'll find up here in this bar, it
| | 01:57 | doesn't really read
very well by Element 3D.
| | 02:00 | So, delete this bucket,
and then use this new bucket.
| | 02:06 | For the other objects, like this
bucket bottom, this is actually a disc
| | 02:10 | object; this is also
not recognized by Element.
| | 02:13 | So, what I need to do is go
to the Objects dropdown again.
| | 02:17 | I could choose Current State to
Object, or I could make it editable, and it
| | 02:21 | becomes a polygon mesh, and
then it will be read by Element.
| | 02:24 | Another huge point, another huge thing
that we have to do here is we have to go
| | 02:29 | over to the Edit menu, and go to
Preferences, and go to the Files section here,
| | 02:35 | and there's this option that
says Save Polygons for Melange.
| | 02:38 | And Melange is kind of like a way that
CINEMA 4D files can speak to other programs.
| | 02:44 | So, you need to make sure that this is
checked, and this is one of those things
| | 02:48 | that will prevent you from seeing
nothing if you import a C4D file.
| | 02:52 | So, I have that selected, and that's fine,
| | 02:54 | so when I save it, this option will
make sure that it speaks to CINEMA 4D.
| | 02:58 | One other thing that's important here is
that you'll notice that I have separate
| | 03:02 | materials for each of these objects.
| | 03:05 | It's important that everything that
you want to be grouped into a different
| | 03:09 | object, that you give
a different material to.
| | 03:12 | That's how Element knows how to
interpret these different objects as
| | 03:16 | separate components.
| | 03:17 | Now, just to be clear, it's not the
object that Element 3D sees; it's the material.
| | 03:25 | So, right now, we have two materials;
| | 03:27 | we have Wood, and Metal.
| | 03:29 | So, right now, what's going to happen
is that Element 3D is going to see two
| | 03:34 | different objects. All of the objects
that have Wood, that's the bucket, and the
| | 03:37 | bucket bottom; it will group
those together as one object.
| | 03:40 | And then it sees Metal, so we have
the handle, and the bucket binding, and
| | 03:46 | Element 3D will see those as one object.
| | 03:48 | So, if we want the handle, for example, to
be different, we have to duplicate this
| | 03:53 | Metal texture, and create something
different, because again, nothing comes in,
| | 03:57 | none of your materials come in
when you import this into Element,
| | 04:00 | Sso it doesn't do any good to
really worry about the materials.
| | 04:03 | Really, when you're taking an object
from CINEMA 4D into Element, you're really
| | 04:07 | just concerned about using these materials
as kind of like an object selector, or
| | 04:12 | in other words, something that
will enable you to select an object.
| | 04:15 | So, if I want the handle, again, to be a
separate object, I've got to create a
| | 04:19 | different material for it.
| | 04:21 | Now, let's go back in to After
Effects, and we'll go ahead and delete
| | 04:25 | this bucket original.
| | 04:27 | We'll go to the Model Browser,
and click the Import 3D Object again
| | 04:31 | from that flyout menu.
| | 04:32 | And this time, we'll click the regular
bucket; one that I've saved correctly
| | 04:36 | with the Melange, and the whole bit.
| | 04:38 | I click Import 3D Object, and
everything comes over just fine.
| | 04:43 | We have the Wood, and the Metal,
| | 04:45 | but again, all Wood objects are on one component,
and all Metal objects are on one component.
| | 04:52 | And because of that, we only have access
to all Wood things, and all Metal things,
| | 04:58 | but from this point forward,
this is a regular 3D object.
| | 05:01 | You can go to the Presets area, and I
could drop some Chrome on the Metal, and
| | 05:06 | I don't have any wood textures that
ship with Element, but I have some gold;
| | 05:11 | we'll make a gold bucket.
| | 05:12 | I've seen stranger things.
| | 05:14 | And now we have this really cool golden
bucket that we were able to import into
| | 05:21 | Element, and use
just as any other 3D object.
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| Using expansion packs| 00:00 | Another cool thing to be aware of when
you're working with Element 3D is that
| | 00:04 | Video Copilot, the creators of
Element 3D, have a bunch of extra expansion
| | 00:09 | packs that you could buy.
| | 00:10 | So with models, for example,
you'll see these blue folders;
| | 00:13 | that's an indication of an
expansion pack that I've purchased,
| | 00:16 | such as Motion Design. Open that up
and there are collections of broken glass,
| | 00:20 | and cloth, and a bunch of different
subjects like that. There is also a
| | 00:26 | projectile weapons pack that I've purchased,
as well as over here in the Presets
| | 00:31 | panel, you'll see that I've got
some materials called Pro Shaders.
| | 00:35 | And these objects are
actually ridiculously cool.
| | 00:39 | I purchased these the day that
Element went on sale, and when you buy an
| | 00:44 | expansion pack, or something like that,
you never know exactly what you're getting.
| | 00:49 | Sometimes it could be garbage, or whatever,
but I'm happy to report that these are
| | 00:53 | actually ridiculously amazing.
| | 00:56 | I'll click on the crossbow, for
example, and here is this really detailed
| | 01:01 | crossbow that has an arrow in it, and the
arrow is actually a separate component,
| | 01:07 | so you could animate that
independently. It's actually incredible.
| | 01:12 | Or, for example, this handgun up
here; 45 millimeter handgun. Just
| | 01:21 | incredible. I'll go ahead and
increase the brightness, so you can see the
| | 01:24 | details, and it's just beautiful.
| | 01:28 | All the details in this gun. And they
really thought of everything. All these
| | 01:31 | little layers here; the trigger, for example,
is its own separate component that we
| | 01:35 | could put them on its own group.
| | 01:37 | And we also have this top little component,
so we could slide this little gun top -- I
| | 01:43 | don't know what that thing is called, but
whatever that is, you could slide it, and
| | 01:46 | make it look like it's going
off, which is really incredible.
| | 01:49 | I was blown away by
how many really good models --
| | 01:52 | a lot of times when you buy packs like
this, there's usually a couple good models
| | 01:57 | that they could put on the
advertising, and then a bunch of junk,
| | 02:00 | but these are all really cool, and
it's from a range of subjects. They really
| | 02:05 | thought of everything. And same thing
with the Pro Shaders, and the Motion Design
| | 02:08 | pack. I've just been so happy.
| | 02:10 | And the reason why these are so cool, or
another reason why I really like them,
| | 02:14 | is that they come in an Element 3D
format, so the textures are already applied.
| | 02:20 | Even when you have something like the
exhaust of this rocket, with all of the
| | 02:25 | textures, it's all set up, and ready
to go instantly, and when you import 3D
| | 02:30 | models, you import OBJs, or CINEMA 4D,
you kind of have to reapply all the
| | 02:35 | textures; it's really a great situation.
| | 02:37 | So, when you are here on Video Copilot,
you can go to videocopilot.net/products,
| | 02:43 | and here you can purchase, of course,
Element 3D. You can also purchase the
| | 02:48 | Pro Shaders, which again, are 200 really
well-designed materials, and we'll take a
| | 02:53 | look at those in just a moment.
| | 02:55 | The Motion Design pack, which has a
bunch of kind of random elements that are
| | 02:58 | really handy. Weapons, and
food, and music themed stuff,
| | 03:03 | and again, from my experience, these
are all really incredible, and well worth
| | 03:08 | it, from my experience.
| | 03:09 | I'm not a salesman for Video Copilot. I don't
get anything from you buying them, but
| | 03:12 | it's definitely something to be aware of.
| | 03:14 | Let's go back here in After Effects. I'll
go ahead and delete these other objects,
| | 03:18 | just to clean things up a bit.
| | 03:19 | I'll go into Motion Design,
| | 03:21 | and again, we have all kinds
of really interesting objects.
| | 03:25 | We have Greebles, which are just kind of
these really intricate, detailed objects,
| | 03:30 | and if we close up on them, it could
look like we're looking at a city, or
| | 03:34 | something. Really interesting.
| | 03:36 | I'll take down the brightness back to
100%, and let's go ahead and open up the
| | 03:41 | Pro Shaders if you have that.
| | 03:43 | You could see that there is concrete. You could
apply it, and you get concrete texture there.
| | 03:47 | There is also a some organic ones,
like electrons, that's kind of weird;
| | 03:53 | frog_skin, and also if you go down,
there is tiles. I am going to apply some
| | 03:59 | interesting tiles to this. So, a lot of
really cool materials and shaders that
| | 04:04 | are just ready to go, and they are fully tweakable,
as we'll talk about that in the next chapter.
| | 04:08 | There are some translucent ones,
which are also very interesting.
| | 04:11 | So, just some really cool stuff to play
around with. So again, if you are really
| | 04:15 | into Element 3D, and what it can do for
you, I highly recommend checking out some
| | 04:19 | of these really great expansion packs.
| | 04:21 | Again, you kind of can't know what
they are like until you use them, but from
| | 04:25 | what you can see here, and I could tell
you from my own personal experience, they
| | 04:29 | are actually amazing.
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|
|
6. Working with MaterialsCreating custom materials| 00:00 | In this chapter, we're going to look
at the exciting world of materials.
| | 00:04 | Materials are the textures and other
things that we do to clothe our 3D models.
| | 00:11 | Think of 3D models as skeletons and
materials like textures and skin and muscle,
| | 00:18 | and everything that we put on the
surface of the object, and just like with
| | 00:22 | human bodies, the
covering makes a huge difference.
| | 00:25 | So, we're going to start with this plain
old basic model, and we're going to add
| | 00:29 | some basic materials to it and talk
about basic materials in this movie, and in
| | 00:34 | the next tutorial, we're
going to make it look beautiful.
| | 00:37 | So, let's go ahead, and start in the
Custom Material START composition, go ahead
| | 00:40 | and select the Element layer,
and click the Scene Setup button.
| | 00:43 | And here, we have the plain old
bucket from the last chapter, you might
| | 00:47 | remember, we imported
this as a CINEMA 4D object.
| | 00:50 | I coated this in gold which was a
horrific and embarrassing mistake, and now
| | 00:54 | we're going to rectify that a little bit.
| | 00:56 | So, go ahead and select the wood
texture, scroll down here, and we get to
| | 01:00 | the Basic Settings.
| | 01:02 | So, the Diffuse Color for all intents and
purposes, is the base color of the object.
| | 01:07 | So, go ahead and click the Diffuse Color
swatch to the right of the name Diffuse
| | 01:10 | Color. And we'll change the Hue Slider
here to about an orange and click in
| | 01:17 | somewhere in this neck of the woods,
kind of towards the center, to pick a wood
| | 01:22 | color that you're happy with and click OK.
| | 01:25 | Now, one of the cool things here, is
if we look in the Material and Bevel
| | 01:29 | browser, we know that if we click on Presets,
we have all these presets to choose from.
| | 01:34 | But, if we go to the Scene Tab, we can
actually see the materials in our scene.
| | 01:38 | And we get these kinds of sample
spheres of materials which is really helpful
| | 01:42 | as we're customizing our materials, and we'll
get into that a little bit more in just a moment.
| | 01:48 | Now, I'm going to click the Metal
texture, and I'm going to come down to the
| | 01:52 | Diffuse Color and we'll give that
a metallic gray look, and click OK.
| | 01:58 | Now, both of these materials as you
can see here are completely flat, and
| | 02:02 | that might be okay for the wood
texture, but that's absolutely unacceptable
| | 02:06 | for the metal texture.
| | 02:07 | What metal absolutely needs is
specularity, and specularity is basically what
| | 02:12 | happens when there is
little highlights on an object.
| | 02:16 | So, if we increase the specularity by
bumping up the Specular value--let's
| | 02:20 | go ahead and take that to about 1 or so--
we could then see it update here on
| | 02:25 | the sphere. And now we're seeing this specular
highlight here, that bright little highlight.
| | 02:30 | And then, because we can see the sample here,
we can customize it and know what we're doing.
| | 02:34 | Now, I'm going to make this a little
bit brighter, and I am also going to
| | 02:38 | adjust the shininess.
| | 02:39 | The shininess is basically the size of
that specular highlight except it's backwards.
| | 02:44 | So, the higher the Shininess value, the
smaller the little highlight, and when
| | 02:50 | we have a really shiny texture, and
the highlight is very small, it kind of
| | 02:54 | tends to look plastic.
| | 02:55 | Now, if we want something to look more
metallic, then we could take this down
| | 03:00 | to a smaller value which spreads out
that specular highlight, and gives us a
| | 03:05 | more metallic look.
| | 03:06 | That's probably a little too hardcore;
| | 03:07 | we could bump that up just a little bit.
| | 03:09 | And now, we have a fairly
decent shiny metal texture.
| | 03:14 | We can even give a little bit of
specularity to the wood if we wanted to.
| | 03:18 | Most subjects or most materials
have a little bit of specularity.
| | 03:22 | Now, that looks pretty good.
| | 03:23 | We can drag around here and we see
that we have a fairly decent basic bucket.
| | 03:29 | Go ahead and click OK.
| | 03:30 | And let's look at another example
here, a little more complex example.
| | 03:34 | If we go to car START, actually
let's go to car FINAL first, this
| | 03:38 | composition down here.
| | 03:39 | Now, one thing I want you to notice
about this example is that this car paint
| | 03:43 | job here looks completely fake, there's
no specularity, and you can see how it
| | 03:46 | looks really cartoony and flat without that.
| | 03:49 | Later in this chapter, we're going
to take a deeper look at how to get
| | 03:53 | complex materials such as car paint, and
we'll revisit this example, make it look better.
| | 03:57 | But, for now, this is a good practice to
work on an object with complex materials.
| | 04:01 | Go over to the car START composition, and
we have here this car that has no materials.
| | 04:08 | So, go ahead and select the Element
layer, and press Scene Setup, and you could
| | 04:13 | see all the different objects
that we can color and texture.
| | 04:17 | I'll leave you to do most of this on
your own, but there are a couple of things
| | 04:20 | I want to share with you.
| | 04:21 | Go ahead and click on Car_paint, and
scroll down to Basic Settings again.
| | 04:24 | Go ahead and give this a red diffuse
color, somewhere in that neck of the
| | 04:30 | woods, be about 170 or so as a red value, and
then green and blue can stay at zero, click OK.
| | 04:37 | One of the things that's
really interesting about metal.
| | 04:43 | Now, the car paint is a little bit
different because it has this interesting
| | 04:47 | shellac feature over it. It's really
actually much more complex than just paint on metal,
| | 04:51 | but, it essentially is metal.
| | 04:53 | So, one of the attributes of metal
that's interesting is the specular color.
| | 04:57 | With most objects--let me just bump up
the Specularity here--as we increase the
| | 05:02 | Specular value, we can see those
specular highlights coming on the paint job.
| | 05:06 | One of the things that's interesting
about most objects is that the color of the
| | 05:10 | specular highlight comes from the light.
| | 05:12 | But, when we're talking about metal,
the color of the secular highlights is the
| | 05:18 | color of the object.
| | 05:19 | So, one of the things that makes this
look kind of like a fake plastic car is
| | 05:24 | the fact that these highlights are
white, so it says that this is not metal.
| | 05:28 | So, if we click the Specular Color, and
make a brighter version of that red, now
| | 05:34 | this looks more like a metallic surface.
| | 05:37 | Now, of course, we're going to talk a
lot more about this car paint texture
| | 05:41 | later on in this chapter.
| | 05:42 | But, one other thing to be aware of
is that you might spend a lot of time
| | 05:46 | creating a beautiful material.
| | 05:47 | And when you do, I recommend that you
right-click on the Material slot here, and
| | 05:51 | choose Save as Material Preset.
| | 05:54 | I could then call this Chads Red
Paint, or something like that, and I can
| | 06:00 | choose where to save it; I'll click OK.
| | 06:03 | And then, anytime I use Element,
from now on, I can go to Presets, and
| | 06:08 | there's Chads Red Paint.
| | 06:09 | I can drag-and-drop it and use it
on the windows or on the whole car,
| | 06:14 | whatever I wanted to do.
| | 06:15 | And that's always going to be there for me.
| | 06:18 | So, just be aware, when you take a lot
of time to create custom materials, it's
| | 06:22 | a good idea to save them for reuse.
| | 06:24 | Now, I'm going to go ahead, and cancel
out of that by clicking this X. Yes, I do
| | 06:29 | want to cancel without saving.
| | 06:30 | So, that's all for basic materials.
| | 06:32 | But, in the next movie, we're going to
dig a little bit deeper, and learn how to
| | 06:35 | create and apply custom
textures as maps to objects.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using custom textures| 00:00 | One of the things that really helps to
sell the believability of a material is
| | 00:05 | when we use custom textures.
| | 00:08 | These are basically images that we put
on objects, and it adds a really high
| | 00:14 | degree of photo realism, such as we
see in this bucket here, and that's what
| | 00:18 | we're going to be doing in this movie.
| | 00:21 | And we're actually not going to be
importing images, which you can totally do
| | 00:24 | and the workflow is exactly the same as
what we're going to go through in this
| | 00:28 | tutorial, but we're going to be creating
this texture from scratch in After Effects.
| | 00:32 | So, what I am going to do is go over to
the Custom Texture START comp where we
| | 00:37 | see our humble bucket from before,
and we are going to make it beautiful.
| | 00:41 | I am going to right-click in this
area in the timeline, this blank spot,
| | 00:45 | and choose New>Solid.
| | 00:47 | I will call this Wood Texture, and go
ahead and apply the Fractal Noise effect
| | 00:57 | to this solid. And let me give
you some settings to use here.
| | 01:03 | We are going to increase the Contrast to 150.
| | 01:06 | I am going to take the
Brightness down to about -15.
| | 01:11 | And here is the real important part, I
am going to open up Transform, uncheck
| | 01:17 | Uniform Scaling, and I am going to
stretch this texture out vertically.
| | 01:21 | And I actually want to
stretch this texture out a lot.
| | 01:24 | So, I am just going to click in here,
and type-in 9000, and that will give us
| | 01:30 | these beautiful straight lines.
| | 01:33 | Now, I want to make sure that when I
use this as a custom texture, that Element
| | 01:38 | sees the Fractal Noise pattern, and
not just the white solid it's applied to.
| | 01:42 | The way to do that is to right-click
on the layer, and choose Pre-compose.
| | 01:47 | This kind of bakes in the texture, so
that all Element can look at is this
| | 01:52 | Fractal Noise pattern.
| | 01:54 | So, I am going to call
this PRECOMP Wood Texture.
| | 01:57 | Make sure that Move all attributes
into the new composition is selected.
| | 02:02 | I can deselect Open New
Composition, and I will click OK.
| | 02:06 | Now, I will turn off the visibility of
this layer, because I don't need to see
| | 02:10 | it, I just need Element to see it.
| | 02:12 | So, I am going to select the Element
layer, open up Custom layers, open up
| | 02:16 | Custom Texture Maps, and take the
Layer 1 dropdown to this Wood Texture.
| | 02:21 | Now, we can use this as a
texture inside of the Scene Interface.
| | 02:28 | So, beware that if you wanted to use
any other texture, this is how you do it.
| | 02:32 | So, if you imported it, you brought
it into your composition, you could
| | 02:36 | use JPEGs or PNGs or TIFF files,
whatever you want to do, you can use from
| | 02:40 | this dropdown here.
| | 02:42 | So, I will close up Custom Layers,
click Scene Setup, where we have our bucket,
| | 02:46 | and I will go ahead and
click on the Wood Texture.
| | 02:50 | And up here at the top, we have Textures.
| | 02:52 | This is where you could use custom
maps or textures to control different
| | 02:56 | properties such as Reflection,
Specularity, or other things.
| | 03:00 | It's pretty advanced.
| | 03:01 | But, we're going to stick to the
Diffuse texture for right now, that's where we
| | 03:04 | put the basic texture of objects.
| | 03:06 | Where it says None Set, go ahead, and click it.
| | 03:09 | And then from this dropdown, the Load
Texture dropdown, we'll go ahead and
| | 03:13 | choose Custom Layer 1 or
PRECOMP Wood Texture, and click OK.
| | 03:19 | Now, we are not seeing it except for
at the bottom of the bucket because the
| | 03:23 | mapping is a little weird.
| | 03:24 | So, we've got to go to the bucket,
just click on bucket, the top level of all
| | 03:30 | the properties here where we get a bunch
of different properties for our whole model.
| | 03:34 | I need to change the texture mapping.
| | 03:36 | A lot of times these objects come in
with their own coordinate systems and
| | 03:41 | textures don't apply quite right.
| | 03:42 | So, what we can do is change the
texture mapping from the UV Coordinates to Box
| | 03:47 | (Preserve Aspect Ratio).
| | 03:49 | This is going to retexture the object
as if it were a box, which it's similar,
| | 03:54 | it's straight up and down and flat
on the top, and so it works better.
| | 03:57 | We can see the details, the
textures, and it just looks beautiful.
| | 04:04 | Now, if we go back over to our Wood Texture,
we have a few parameters we can adjust.
| | 04:08 | Here we have the Influence essentially
of this texture on the Diffuse Channel,
| | 04:15 | or the diffuse part of the texture.
| | 04:17 | So, if we want this color to have more
influence, we can take down the value
| | 04:23 | here. As you can see, now it's kind of
fading the Opacity, the influence, if you
| | 04:29 | will, on the texture, we're
seeing more of this color.
| | 04:31 | I could also take up the
Diffuse Color influence here.
| | 04:37 | And that works if we take down a
little bit, the Diffuse value here.
| | 04:43 | All in all, that looks pretty great.
| | 04:45 | So, I am going to go ahead and click OK, and
now we have our bucket which looks fantastic.
| | 04:51 | Now, it doesn't quite look this good because
I used a couple of other bells and whistles.
| | 04:56 | I used a shallow depth-of-field with the
camera, and I also used some cool lights.
| | 05:00 | So, I have a Key Light here.
| | 05:02 | And you could see that with shallow depth-
of-field our buckets look the same here.
| | 05:06 | But, I have the Key Light coming from
the back and I also have a Fill Light from
| | 05:11 | the front, and you put those
together and this looks much cleaner.
| | 05:14 | But, even without lights, it's very
obvious how much improved our model was
| | 05:20 | because of the use of image-based textures.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Working with reflections| 00:00 | One of the best material
attributes in all of Element is Reflection.
| | 00:06 | Now, the reflections, as well as some
other objects and elements that we'll
| | 00:10 | talk about later on throughout this chapter,
the Reflections in Element 3D are not exact.
| | 00:15 | So, we can't have this ground bouncing up and
reflecting on the bottom part of this object.
| | 00:22 | It just doesn't work like that.
| | 00:24 | But, the good news is, is that
reflections don't have to, the human eye is very
| | 00:28 | forgiving when it comes to reflection.
| | 00:29 | So, the reflections that we have here
in Element 3D will work fantastic 99%
| | 00:33 | of the time for you.
| | 00:35 | So, what we're going to do is
we're going to learn how to apply basic
| | 00:39 | reflections, and also how to
customize those reflections.
| | 00:42 | Let's go over to the Reflection
Basics composition, select the Element
| | 00:47 | layer, click Scene Setup.
| | 00:49 | Nothing has been done here yet by the way.
| | 00:51 | We'll go ahead and click on Icons,
and we'll scroll down, and go ahead and
| | 00:57 | click on the Wi-Fi logo;
| | 00:59 | little Wi-Fi symbol here.
| | 01:01 | It's important to know that when you
bring in one of these base models, it
| | 01:08 | actually has a base
material already applied to it.
| | 01:10 | If we click that material, we will see
that the Diffuse Color has been changed,
| | 01:15 | there is some specularity, and
there is also some reflection.
| | 01:19 | We don't want any of that stuff,
we want to start from scratch.
| | 01:23 | So, I am going to right-click on
this material, and choose Reset.
| | 01:26 | Now, we have a true base
material, no reflection, no, nothing.
| | 01:31 | So, let's scroll down with
this Base Material selected.
| | 01:35 | And we don't want to play with the
Diffuse Color or any setting like that, we
| | 01:39 | want to actually just come
right down here to Reflection.
| | 01:41 | And as we increase the Intensity, notice
that, that's all we have to do, we just
| | 01:46 | have to increase the
intensity of the Reflection.
| | 01:48 | What we are doing is that we are
increasing the intensity of the reflection of
| | 01:53 | the environment into this model.
| | 01:57 | So again, as we talked about before,
we could click on the Environment button
| | 02:00 | here, and this is the default
environment which is what we're seeing now
| | 02:04 | reflected in our object.
| | 02:05 | But, we can click this dropdown, and
of course change the Environment map.
| | 02:08 | I can click on Roof for example, and
maybe Roof_blurred would look better in
| | 02:14 | this case, a little softer So now we
have a completely different look to our
| | 02:17 | object, because again, it's just
reflecting the Environment map, and that's
| | 02:22 | controlled just by the Intensity.
| | 02:23 | Now, of course, we can add a color to this.
| | 02:26 | So, we can click on the Color
Tint, and maybe add a red color.
| | 02:30 | And so now, we have a reflection, and
also a red tint to that reflection.
| | 02:36 | Obviously that's a little hardcore;
| | 02:38 | we might want to increase that, maybe just
to have that influence it just a little bit.
| | 02:44 | But, that's the basics of how to add reflection.
| | 02:46 | All you have to do is just increase
intensity and be aware of the environment map.
| | 02:50 | Now, I am just going to go ahead and
click X here to cancel out of this; click Yes.
| | 02:55 | And I am going to go
over to Reflection FINISHED.
| | 02:58 | Now, here is our final project here,
and we have some lights to add a lot here.
| | 03:03 | We have an ambient light to kind of
give it some fill, and we have this key
| | 03:07 | light, this parallel light which kind of
mimics the sunrays, and that direction.
| | 03:13 | But, the problem is, is that if we go
over to Reflection START, this is how the
| | 03:18 | reflections are by default, and when
you have default reflections, we can't
| | 03:24 | have lights applied.
| | 03:25 | These lights have no influence
because the reflection is so strong.
| | 03:28 | So, if we go to Element, click the Scene
Setup button, and then we click on this
| | 03:34 | Chrome texture, scroll down back to
Reflection, we take the intensity of the
| | 03:39 | reflection down a little bit,
maybe to about 25 or so, and click OK.
| | 03:46 | And now, we have a much darker
reflection, there's still a reflection.
| | 03:50 | You can still definitely see this
background texture in that, which we'll
| | 03:54 | show you how to do later on in this
chapter, and these lights now have a
| | 03:58 | little bit of influence.
| | 03:59 | Now, it's not that much, so we could go
back to Scene Setup, and again take the
| | 04:06 | intensity of the reflection down a little bit.
| | 04:09 | Also, the Diffuse Color is black which
also changes the way that we receive light.
| | 04:16 | So, I'm going to increase a little
bit the Diffuse Color so it's not pitch
| | 04:21 | black, and click OK.
| | 04:24 | And now, as we click the Parallel
Light, you could see that we have
| | 04:27 | more influence here.
| | 04:28 | So, as we go back to Scene Setup, this
is basically how I work with textures,
| | 04:32 | especially as we get into more complex
textures. I often just go back and forth.
| | 04:36 | I play with the Diffuse Color, the
Color Tint and the Reflection, the amount of
| | 04:39 | intensity of the reflection, and the
Specularity and so on and so forth until I
| | 04:44 | get the texture that I am looking for.
| | 04:46 | I might click the Diffuse Color here,
and get a kind of more of a cyan color.
| | 04:52 | Click OK, click OK here.
| | 04:54 | And now, we have a little
bit more of these bright cubes.
| | 04:59 | And so it's starting to look better,
definitely some more work to be done.
| | 05:02 | But, the point is, is that if we want
to work with reflections, we have to be
| | 05:06 | aware that lighting which is another
really important key ingredient in getting
| | 05:11 | realism for Element 3D, lighting is
inhibited sometimes by reflections.
| | 05:16 | So, be aware that sometimes, if you're
working with reflective surfaces and
| | 05:20 | lighting, that you might have to mitigate;
take down those reflections a little
| | 05:23 | bit so that the lighting can work.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding illumination| 00:00 | Illumination is another one of those
material attributes that I just love.
| | 00:04 | We can see that the centers of these
spheres here are illuminated with this
| | 00:08 | really cool blue that pops through
lights, and just looks really awesome.
| | 00:14 | Having illuminate texture works great
for motion graphics and other elements
| | 00:19 | where you just want to be glowy, but
things like neon or other things where to
| | 00:23 | need lights to pop or other materials
to just kind a pop regardless of the
| | 00:27 | lighting, illumination is great for that.
| | 00:30 | So, let's take a look at this.
| | 00:31 | I'm going to go over to the
Illumination START composition.
| | 00:35 | We have plain old black spheres, and we
need to make them cooler with Illumination.
| | 00:42 | So, go ahead and select the Element
layer, click the Scenes Setup button and
| | 00:47 | let's go and click on the material
and we will scroll down here, pass
| | 00:52 | Reflection, pass
Refraction down to Illumination.
| | 00:55 | This is really easy to setup. All
you have to do is click on the Color
| | 01:00 | swatch. Pick the color that you want.
In my case I want a bright blue. And I
| | 01:04 | find that for Illumination, unless
you have some specific needs obviously,
| | 01:07 | but usually I like to use the upper
right-hand corner of the Color picker,
| | 01:12 | which is going to get you the most
vibrant saturated and brightest version of
| | 01:17 | that particular color.
| | 01:19 | So, go ahead and click OK and then we
just have to increase the Intensity.
| | 01:23 | Super easy, and then if we go back and
click OK, we can see that at all of all
| | 01:29 | our spheres are lit up.
| | 01:32 | Now of course, you can use the glow
effect to enhance this, make this look
| | 01:36 | better, but I actually want to do
something else to make this look cool.
| | 01:39 | I am going to click on Scene Setup again,
click on the Material, go back down to the
| | 01:43 | Illumination settings.
| | 01:45 | And I want to talk about one of my
favorite properties here, it's called
| | 01:49 | Fresnel, it's spelled like it's
Fresnel, but it's actually pronounced
| | 01:54 | Frenel, it's French.
| | 01:56 | And what this does is it allows you to
push the Illumination to the outside of
| | 02:02 | the object as we increase the Fresnel
setting. So you see, we are pushing the
| | 02:06 | Illumination outwards and we can also
use a negative value to pull it inwards.
| | 02:12 | And so, now we have the Illumination just
in the core of the object. We can tweak
| | 02:18 | it with the Fresnel Bias Parameter.
| | 02:20 | So, if we want this to be in the center,
but if want it go out a little bit less
| | 02:24 | or a little bit more, we could do that.
| | 02:27 | We can also again make it go all the
way out to the edge at the value of 1 and
| | 02:32 | adjust the Fresnel bias that way as well.
| | 02:34 | So, it's just right on the edge
where it goes almost all the way in.
| | 02:38 | So, playing around with the Fresnel
settings gives us really cool options, where we
| | 02:43 | have kind of these Crystal Ball effects.
| | 02:45 | Some of the presets actually that
comes with Element 3D, such as the outside
| | 02:50 | glow, or the two color red, or the
regular two color, deal with this Fresnel,
| | 02:56 | where they have the Fresnel in the Illumination,
which really creates very cool looks.
| | 03:02 | So, I'll go back to click OK and of courses
this now using the preset that I just added.
| | 03:08 | But again, we have the specularity
still on the sphere and the reflectivity
| | 03:12 | on the outside, and the core is illuminated,
we also have some of the blue from that texture.
| | 03:18 | So, again it's not only a way to create
more complex materials, but it's a way
| | 03:22 | to create more beautiful and
interesting stuff with Illumination as well.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Customizing the environment| 00:00 | All right, folks, just a quick movie here on
how to make your own Custom Environments.
| | 00:04 | In one of the examples that we saw a
little bit earlier in this chapter, one of
| | 00:08 | the things that make it work is I
actually use this background texture as the
| | 00:12 | reflection map, as the environment
basically, inside of these, on top of these cubes.
| | 00:18 | So, let's see how to do.
| | 00:19 | If we go over to the Custom
Environments START you'll see that I've used one of
| | 00:23 | the stock reflection maps that come
with Element and it's just really mismatched
| | 00:28 | and we can see how badly that composites here.
| | 00:31 | So, we actually want to use this dirt
field background layer as the environment
| | 00:36 | map, but I want to blur it a little bit.
| | 00:39 | So, what we are going to need to do
is duplicate it, which you can do by
| | 00:44 | selecting the layer dirt field.movie
and pressing Command+D on the Mac or
| | 00:47 | Ctrl+D on the PC, then right click on
the layer, choose Pre-Composed, and you
| | 00:54 | can choose either Leave all
attributes, or Move all attributes.
| | 00:57 | It doesn't matter in this case.
| | 00:58 | I am going to label this PRECOMP
new environment and choose Open New
| | 01:05 | Compositions, so we can look at, click OK.
| | 01:08 | And let's go ahead and apply the Fast
Blur Effects, so we can soften this. Apply
| | 01:13 | to that layer, and we will
increase the blurriness to about 20.
| | 01:21 | Now, I will go back to my Custom
Environments START. Here this blurry background is
| | 01:24 | visible, which I don't need, so I am
going to take off the visibility of the
| | 01:28 | PRECOMP new environment layer.
| | 01:29 | I'll go to Element and what I will
do is I will open up Custom Layers >
| | 01:36 | Custom Texture Maps, and from the Layer 1
drop-down I'll choose PRECOMP new environment.
| | 01:42 | Close that up and then click Scene
Setup and here we have again this
| | 01:48 | background that does not work.
| | 01:50 | I'll go ahead and click the Environment
button, because we don't need to change
| | 01:54 | any Reflection settings;
| | 01:55 | that's not what we are going to do
here, we are just going to change the
| | 01:57 | Environment and that will
change the look of our object.
| | 01:59 | Click Environment and from this drop-
down I'll go down to the bottom and below
| | 02:05 | all the Preset Environment Maps, we
have our own PRECOMP new environment,
| | 02:10 | click OK, click OK here.
| | 02:12 | Now we are seeing this
texture reflected in our cube.
| | 02:18 | Now all is fun and good, or so it
would seem, but as we rotate around this
| | 02:22 | object, we are going to see little
quirks like, little anomalies where things
| | 02:27 | are pinched, and they are cut really weird,
and it's not seamless, and it's kind of ugly.
| | 02:32 | Now a lot of times that doesn't
matter too much depending on your object.
| | 02:36 | But if you really need the
flexibility to move around 360 degrees, then this is
| | 02:42 | not going to be good.
| | 02:43 | The reason why the default Environment
Maps that ship with Element don't have
| | 02:48 | this issue is because these are
what are called Equirectangular Map.
| | 02:52 | It's basically a 360-degree photo of an Environment;
| | 02:57 | you can almost like these trademarks
little arches as they create a seamless map
| | 03:03 | and so there are no seams.
| | 03:05 | Hence the description of a seamless map,
and it totally works, but this is a
| | 03:10 | special kind of map, I don't have
that, I just want to use my background.
| | 03:14 | So, as you can see when you use your
own custom background, it's not an
| | 03:18 | Equirectangular Image, then you do get these
little pinched and problematic areas on your maps.
| | 03:25 | But if I click OK we now have a much better
composite as this background is reflected.
| | 03:30 | If you want to tweak this further, you
could open up Render Settings, open up
| | 03:34 | Environment, open up Rotate
Environment, and we can adjust the X Y and Z
| | 03:39 | rotation, so that we can place this map on our
object exactly where we want it to be.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Faking opacity reduction| 00:00 | The OpenGL engine that Element 3D is
based on is obviously incredible, very
| | 00:04 | powerful, very fast, and has a lot of benefits.
| | 00:07 | But, as I mentioned throughout the
training series there are some limitations.
| | 00:10 | It doesn't do accurate shadows for example.
| | 00:13 | It also doesn't do accurate reflections.
| | 00:16 | It also doesn't handle
Opacity changes very well.
| | 00:20 | But, they have added a fake way
to force the Opacity of objects.
| | 00:25 | So, we're going to look at
it to create this example.
| | 00:28 | (video playing with music)
| | 00:38 | So, I'm going to go ahead and go to the
Opacity Start Comp where you could like
| | 00:42 | the before version of this without Opacity.
| | 00:46 | You could see how these spheres are
getting in the way of the text and just
| | 00:49 | looks really clunky.
| | 00:51 | Not really good at all here.
| | 00:54 | So, I am going to go ahead and select
the Element layer, click Scenes Setup, and
| | 00:58 | this is all you have to do.
| | 00:59 | I want to click on the Material for the sphere.
| | 01:02 | The extrusion model is actually the text
| | 01:03 | so, pay no attention to the extrusion model.
| | 01:06 | So the material on this sphere--
| | 01:07 | scroll all the way down--and
you'll see a Force Opacity.
| | 01:14 | What this does if we take this down is
it's essentially Opacity of the entire
| | 01:18 | material, the object that
| | 01:20 | that material is applied to.
| | 01:21 | If we click on the Environment map, we
can see it a little more clearly that we
| | 01:26 | now have some transparency. It's not perfect.
| | 01:28 | It's not really accurate Opacity.
| | 01:31 | You can't really map the Opacity like
you can in 3D programs and more advanced
| | 01:36 | 3D Environments, but this can
get you out of some pitches.
| | 01:39 | Again, it doesn't always work like you
would expect it to, but it does make a
| | 01:43 | big difference, especially
in this case. I'll click OK.
| | 01:46 | Even that little bit of opacity that we
lowered makes these spheres into bubbles.
| | 01:51 | And in this case and in other cases, it
makes things a lot more beautiful.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Faking complex materials| 00:00 | Earlier in this chapter we looked
at this SUV model and as we mentioned
| | 00:05 | there's really no way that you're going
to get this red texture to look like a
| | 00:10 | real car paint job.
| | 00:12 | It just when you're talking about car
paint jobs, you need something in a 3D
| | 00:17 | program called Subsurface Scattering.
| | 00:19 | It's for complex materials that have
layers with them like the shellac and sheen
| | 00:24 | of a car paint job or like human skin
where there are multiple layers of tissue
| | 00:30 | or when you're talking about
marble or milk or something like that.
| | 00:33 | But, there is a way where we
can fake it with other materials.
| | 00:37 | If I look at the Complex Mats FINAL
composition, here I've tweaked things a
| | 00:43 | little bit and this material looks a
little more complex and it gets a little
| | 00:47 | bit closer to achieving that subsurface
scattering look in 3D programs. And again
| | 00:51 | this functionality is not
built into Element right now.
| | 00:54 | This is just a trick that I want to
show you where you can fake more complex
| | 00:59 | materials like this so you don't have to
have this car with this cartoony red or
| | 01:04 | simple color scheme to it.
| | 01:06 | Let's go ahead and select the car
layer in the Complex Mats START Composition
| | 01:11 | and I will go ahead and
click this Scene Setup button.
| | 01:13 | Now, really, all we care about is
the car paint texture on the SUV.
| | 01:19 | Let's ago ahead and select that.
| | 01:21 | Now, one of the cool things about this
tutorial, we are going to learn a little
| | 01:23 | bit about Materials as well. It's kind of fun.
| | 01:26 | So, let's go and just make sure that our
Diffuse Color is in the right spot and
| | 01:31 | it is, this red color is good.
| | 01:33 | But, of course, we want to change the Specular
Colors, because this is in metallic texture.
| | 01:36 | So, go ahead and click on the Specular Color.
| | 01:38 | I'll give the numbers to dial in here.
| | 01:39 | We want to leave red all the way up to 255.
| | 01:42 | Well, let's take green and blue to 90.
| | 01:46 | Get that light red color, click OK.
| | 01:49 | For Specularity or for
Specular value, go ahead type .55.
| | 01:54 | As you could see here, this is the car
paint texture that we were working with.
| | 01:58 | So, we can see a representation
of what that looks like there.
| | 02:01 | We want to increase Shininess or
rather decrease Shininess to .06.
| | 02:06 | That makes us so we have more of a
glossy sheen rather than a pinpoint
| | 02:09 | plasticky highlight.
| | 02:12 | This is what we did before.
| | 02:13 | Nothing cool just yet.
| | 02:14 | But, here is where it gets interesting.
| | 02:16 | Scroll down to Reflection and what we
are going to initially do is we are going
| | 02:20 | to color the Reflection 10.
| | 02:21 | So, click on Reflection 10 and we are
going to type in actually a blue-color.
| | 02:25 | So, we are going to type in 157, 220,
and then leave blue at 255 and click OK.
| | 02:32 | Then we want to take up the Intensity
just a little bit and actually, just overdo
| | 02:35 | it right now so we could see what's going on.
| | 02:38 | So, reflection is when an object
obviously reflects the outside surface.
| | 02:43 | Refraction, which we are about to talk
about, is when the opposite happens. The
| | 02:48 | inside reflects what's going on
rather than when light passes through an object,
| | 02:53 | rather than on the outside of the object.
| | 02:57 | What we are going to do is we are actually
going to use opposite colors from our red.
| | 03:01 | We're going to use is blue
for Reflection and Refraction.
| | 03:04 | Not exactly opposite colors, but they
are really different and it's going to
| | 03:07 | create a really unique look here.
| | 03:11 | Again, here's without the intensity
super cartoony and with just a little bit of
| | 03:15 | that and actually let's even
dial that down a little bit more.
| | 03:18 | Maybe just 12% there.
| | 03:19 | We have a little bit of blue
sometimes in this paint job.
| | 03:25 | It already looks more realistic.
| | 03:27 | Now let's add some Refraction.
| | 03:28 | Let's go ahead and click on the Color
Tint here and look for the red value.
| | 03:33 | Let's go ahead and make that 125.
| | 03:35 | The green value 190.
| | 03:37 | We'll leave blue to 55. Click OK.
| | 03:41 | Now if we increase the Intensity again
just you can see what's going on here,
| | 03:45 | this is the opposite of the Reflection.
| | 03:49 | So, I am going to undo that by using
Command+Z on Mac or Ctrl+Z on the PC.
| | 03:54 | Let's take the Refraction down just a
little bit, may be just 2% is enough. And
| | 04:02 | now we have a much more
Complex Material that we did before.
| | 04:08 | Let's click OK to see this in our scene
and now again, you could see the before
| | 04:13 | and after. It looks much more realistic.
| | 04:16 | Again, this is not
accurate subsurface scattering.
| | 04:18 | So, I just want to manage
some expectations there.
| | 04:21 | But this does look significantly better.
| | 04:23 | Now, if we go back to the Complex Mats
FINAL Comp one of the things I also did is
| | 04:29 | I added a few warm lights.
| | 04:31 | I added this warm spot key, and if I
double-click this here, you can see
| | 04:37 | that I'm actually using a somewhat
warm light and that adds even more
| | 04:42 | variation to the colors.
| | 04:43 | So, we have red here in the Diffuse Areas.
| | 04:46 | We have kind of an orange color where
the light is hitting it and then we also
| | 04:50 | have blue in areas that are
not being hit directly by light.
| | 04:55 | Add to that and under light fill and a
parallel backlight and we have a pretty
| | 05:01 | decent looking shot here.
| | 05:03 | Pretty good faked car paint material.
| | 05:07 | Now, let's go back to
Complex Mats START really quick.
| | 05:11 | Let's open up the output and
then open up Multipass Mixer.
| | 05:18 | If you want to have a final pass at your
object, you can use the Multipass Mixer
| | 05:25 | as a final pass over all of your object.
| | 05:30 | So, let's say you want to take all
the reflections down a little bit.
| | 05:33 | We want take this down 2.6, we
could turn that down just a little bit.
| | 05:38 | If we want to take down the Refraction
or if we want to take down the Diffuse
| | 05:42 | color all the way or little bit or
wherever we want, we can do that with these
| | 05:47 | options. Or if everything is too specular,
we could take down Specularity here.
| | 05:51 | The Multipass Mixer is a cool way to
have master controls for all the 3D
| | 05:57 | objects for each instance of element
so that you can dial back some of these
| | 06:02 | settings if you want.
| | 06:03 | As you can see even if there are some
limitations to Element, which there are,
| | 06:07 | there are a lot of incredible tools
here that if used creatively can help you
| | 06:13 | get the results that you need.
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| Obscuring objects with materials| 00:00 | Most of the time of course we use
materials and textures to clothe objects and
| | 00:05 | make them look beautiful or
more realistic or whatever.
| | 00:08 | But sometimes, sometimes they are used
for very useful purposes that you might
| | 00:14 | not think materials would be used for.
| | 00:17 | Say for example, we have this thing
where we have asteroids circling around
| | 00:23 | an image of a planet.
| | 00:26 | We actually are going to use
materials to make this happen.
| | 00:30 | Not that probably doesn't seem that
cool until we actually go in and look at
| | 00:35 | this project and see what's happening
and see the challenges that we face and
| | 00:39 | how these materials are
going to help us solve them.
| | 00:43 | It's a really interesting lesson in
more intermediate and advanced materials.
| | 00:48 | I am going to go over to
Obscuration START the composition here.
| | 00:54 | I want to just show you the
problem, the dilemma that we face.
| | 00:59 | Before we do that we need to
know about our project here.
| | 01:02 | You realize it is really not
the most interesting thing.
| | 01:05 | We need to understand what's going on here so
we realize the challenge that we are facing.
| | 01:09 | So we have this image of a planet here
of Callisto, which is the moon of Jupiter.
| | 01:13 | I could turn that on and off.
| | 01:15 | This is a flat 2D TIFF image.
| | 01:18 | I have on the Element layer an asteroid.
| | 01:22 | The asteroid circles around and I
obviously want it to go around the planet, but
| | 01:28 | the planet is on a different layer.
| | 01:30 | I can't use masks, because
I need it to go around.
| | 01:34 | I need this to be a flexible option where
it seems like it's going around the planet.
| | 01:40 | So, I can animate however I want and
not have to worry about the masks.
| | 01:44 | In a lot of cases masks aren't feasible.
| | 01:47 | So, what I need to do here is create a
material that will knock out the asteroid
| | 01:57 | as it goes around behind the planet.
| | 02:01 | So, here's how we are going to do this.
| | 02:03 | Click the Scene Setup button and what
we are going to do is we are going to go
| | 02:09 | to Primitives and we're
going to take a sphere here.
| | 02:13 | Now there are three spheres.
| | 02:14 | There is regular old sphere, it's a
middle of the road Goldilocks sphere.
| | 02:19 | There is also an HD
sphere and a low poly sphere.
| | 02:22 | So, this regular old
sphere is right in the middle.
| | 02:25 | That's what we want.
| | 02:26 | Click that to add that to our scene.
| | 02:28 | We want to do is first click OK, make
sure it's on Group 1, because our rock is
| | 02:32 | on Group 2, click OK.
| | 02:35 | We want to do is use the settings of
Group 1 to move this sphere so that it is
| | 02:41 | exactly the size and shape of the planet.
| | 02:44 | That's going to be the mask.
| | 02:46 | We want to make sure that it's lined up.
| | 02:48 | If it's not perfect, we can go back
and fiddle with it and adjust this.
| | 02:52 | It doesn't really sound like
life and death or something.
| | 02:54 | We will line that up best of our ability.
| | 02:57 | Go ahead and click Scene Setup again.
| | 02:58 | Now, what we want to do is come over
here to the material of the sphere, scroll
| | 03:02 | down for the material options here.
| | 03:06 | What we want to do is
enable Matte Shadow, click OK.
| | 03:11 | You could see Matte Shadow material
enabled, which makes it completely invisible.
| | 03:16 | Even if we turn on the
environment we will see nothing there.
| | 03:19 | So, we click OK and now the material is gone.
| | 03:23 | But if we go back to our rock which
is on Group 2, adjust the Y rotation.
| | 03:28 | Now, when that rock goes around the
sphere it forms a mask and blocks it out.
| | 03:37 | Now, as you could see here I did an
awful job of lining up the sphere.
| | 03:42 | I am going to zoom in so we can see
it's a little bit more closely, because
| | 03:45 | it's in shadow here.
| | 03:47 | What we need to do is go back up to
the size of the Group 1 particle which is
| | 03:52 | the sphere and reduce it a lot.
| | 03:55 | Probably to about 9 or so.
| | 03:57 | Now, I will go and move that back into position.
| | 04:03 | Let's try rotating that rock again.
| | 04:07 | If I have to and if I am really having a
tough time seeing this and lining this
| | 04:11 | up, I can go back and take off Matte Shadow
so I could line this up a little bit more easy.
| | 04:16 | Yes, it's off kilter a little bit.
| | 04:18 | So, I could go back and turn this Matte
shadow off to realign, but I am a little
| | 04:23 | too stubborn for that actually.
| | 04:24 | I could go and just move this over
and that's going to work right there.
| | 04:31 | So, now when I rotate around, it works perfectly.
| | 04:35 | It goes around the other side and it
appears to wrap around this planet, because
| | 04:41 | of the Matte Shadow material that we added.
| | 04:43 | This is really important for
compositors if you are going to be compositing 3D
| | 04:48 | objects into photos or live-action video,
you want to make sure that you've got
| | 04:53 | this idea of the Matte Shadow down pat.
| | 04:56 | You also use Matte Shadow to generate
ambient occlusion shadows which we will
| | 05:02 | talk about ambient occlusion a little
bit later on in this training series.
| | 05:05 | If you want the shadows, but you
don't want the object that the shadows are
| | 05:09 | falling on, then you could use a Matte
Shadow object for that as well and that's
| | 05:12 | really its intended purpose.
| | 05:14 | But, I just want to show you here that
you can do a lot when compositing 3D
| | 05:18 | objects and regular old layers that are
anywhere else in the layer stack by
| | 05:24 | using these Matte Shadow objects.
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| Creating bumps with normal maps| 00:00 | In this more advanced tutorial, we are
going to take a look at how to create a
| | 00:05 | displaced surface like we are
seeing on the face of this ogre.
| | 00:08 | Usually we could paint texture like
that in but it just doesn't look the same.
| | 00:13 | If we can have this normal bump map
as it's called, it can help the surface
| | 00:18 | appear like it's really got a lot
of fine details and texture to it.
| | 00:23 | Now, this is little bit
more of an advance concept.
| | 00:25 | You will need 3D skills to do this, in
our case here, this 3D model has this
| | 00:31 | normal map, and this is not something
that you paint in Photoshop that you
| | 00:35 | can create from scratch on your own, it
needs to be generated by your 3D application.
| | 00:39 | So, we are going to be using this map
to tell Element where to displace the
| | 00:44 | surface of this ogre's face.
| | 00:46 | I will go to the Normal Map START,
the composition here and you will notice
| | 00:51 | --here is something interesting--here a
little extra tip along the way is that we
| | 00:54 | don't have any images in our
composition, and yet there is an image for the
| | 01:00 | texture of this ogre's face.
| | 01:02 | So, I am going to show you a little
secret here, I am going to click on Element,
| | 01:04 | click on Scene Setup and I am going
to click on the texture for this ogre's
| | 01:10 | face, and we have the diffuse texture
already loaded in, and so go ahead and
| | 01:14 | click on Normal Bump.
| | 01:15 | This is where we put that surface
displacement, also called a Bump map.
| | 01:19 | In most applications you can actually
use a black and white image as a bump
| | 01:23 | map but here it has to be normal map,
kind of like the weird one I just showed you.
| | 01:29 | So, I am going to click on None Set
and typically what we have been doing is
| | 01:33 | going to this dropdown
and choosing a Custom Layer.
| | 01:35 | But, what you could also do is click
here where it says Load Texture to load a
| | 01:40 | texture from your hard drive.
| | 01:41 | So, navigate to the Media folder in the
Exercise Files, navigate to the Images
| | 01:45 | folder in there and select normalmap.png.
| | 01:48 | Now, this really cool trick of just
loading it in, in the quick style in the
| | 01:53 | Texture Channel dialog box here,
only works with JPEGs and PNG files.
| | 01:58 | All other files like these Tiffs or
the CR2s you will need to load in the
| | 02:03 | regular way using Custom Layers and
then selecting it from the dropdown.
| | 02:07 | So, let me go ahead and click OK, and
this is kind of hard to see, so what I am
| | 02:13 | going to do is I am going to change the
lights from Default Lights to Stylized,
| | 02:17 | and now we can see that
displacement in the surface a little bit more.
| | 02:21 | As before we can control the influence
of this map by using this slider here. So
| | 02:26 | if we want no influence, take it down
to 0% and you see as we increase this, it
| | 02:31 | gets more and more ridiculous.
| | 02:33 | So, I am going to take this to about 40
or 50 somewhere in there. Maybe 60, that
| | 02:39 | looks okay; looking pretty good. And
we can click OK, and now there is this
| | 02:45 | displacement on our object.
| | 02:48 | Creating this kind of displacement where
we would have all these little vertices
| | 02:52 | sticking out, it is really difficult
to do through modeling and it would make
| | 02:56 | our model much more
robust and hard to work with.
| | 02:59 | So, these maps are kind of
a great way to cheat that.
| | 03:02 | One of the things about this is that,
this is not really changing the model,
| | 03:06 | this is really a trick that this
map is doing with the lighting.
| | 03:10 | So, if I select my camera, an Unified
Camera tool, you could see that this
| | 03:14 | surface looks really messed up and
really detailed, but as I rotate around, you
| | 03:19 | could see that the edge is smooth.
| | 03:22 | So, it's really not affecting the mesh
at all, the 3D model, it's really just
| | 03:27 | again a light trick that makes it look
like there is a bunch of detail here and
| | 03:33 | it definitely adds to the complexity,
the apparent complexity of the model, but
| | 03:37 | really it's not doing anything to
the geometry of the actual object.
| | 03:41 | And that is how you work with
Normal Bump Maps inside of Element.
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|
|
7. Particle ReplicatorsReplicating 3D objects| 00:00 | In this chapter we are going to
look at the exciting world of 3D
| | 00:03 | object replication.
| | 00:04 | We are going to be looking at this example
to take a trip back to 8-bit video games.
| | 00:09 | We have one single ring here, boom!
| | 00:13 | And it explodes and becomes many rings.
| | 00:16 | So, what we are going to do is we are
going to use Element to replicate that
| | 00:20 | single three-dimensional ring and blow
it up into a bunch of different rings.
| | 00:24 | Now, this is not exactly a particle
system per se, usually particle systems have
| | 00:29 | things like birth and death so that
you control how many particles are being
| | 00:33 | emitted and they are constantly being emitted.
| | 00:35 | And with Element that's not really the
case, we are taking one object and we are
| | 00:40 | basically duplicating it a bunch of times.
| | 00:42 | So, I'm going to go ahead and
minimize this and go over to the Practice
| | 00:46 | composition. So we could just kind of
get a look at this before we see this in
| | 00:49 | action in our project.
| | 00:52 | So, in the Practice composition, select
the Element layer and go ahead and click
| | 00:55 | the Scene Setup button in Element.
| | 00:57 | And let's go ahead and go to the
Icons folder and let's add a few of these
| | 01:02 | little circular icons.
| | 01:04 | So, I am going to click on fastforward,
play, pause and radio_active, why not.
| | 01:11 | And what I am going to do is I am
going to go over to my Presets in the
| | 01:14 | Material and Bevel browser.
| | 01:16 | I am going to give each one
of these its own material.
| | 01:19 | I'm going to probably
stick to reflective material.
| | 01:21 | So, I am going to drag-and-drop Chrome,
and then on the pause_button, which is
| | 01:25 | not actually spelled correctly, it kind of
driving me crazy little bit, but it still works.
| | 01:30 | I am going to drag-and-drop Gold_Basic.
| | 01:32 | For the play_button, I'm going
to try Glow_Glass and then on the
| | 01:39 | fastforward_button I'm
going to use Shiny, there we go.
| | 01:44 | Now before we click OK, it's really
important to note that I've left all of
| | 01:48 | these objects on the same
group. They're all on Group 1.
| | 01:53 | And the reason I want to show you
that is because you could do something
| | 01:57 | cool with this, one second, I will
click OK, and now we seem to have just
| | 02:00 | the one object initially.
| | 02:02 | But let's go up here to Group 1 and
open this up and again everything that we
| | 02:06 | are going to be doing is on Group 1.
Actually I am going to resize this so we
| | 02:09 | can see more options, because this
start getting really hairy, really quick.
| | 02:14 | And we have this Particle
Replicator inside of Group 1.
| | 02:16 | And actually I should tell you that
Element 3D was actually designed to be a
| | 02:20 | Particle Replicator.
| | 02:21 | As they were developing it they
realized you know what we have got something
| | 02:24 | really great in our hands here, so
let's add more bells and whistles.
| | 02:28 | But initially this is the core of
what Element was designed to do.
| | 02:31 | So, this is very full featured.
| | 02:32 | I am going to go ahead and increase the
Particle Count, because by default it's
| | 02:36 | set to 1, so we're only seeing one object.
| | 02:38 | As I click this to 2, we see a
different one of those objects.
| | 02:44 | And I click 3 and we see
another one and so on and so forth.
| | 02:48 | If I click a bunch of them, you could
see that we have a bunch here, but we
| | 02:52 | can't really see all of them
because they're all on top of each other.
| | 02:56 | That's because the replicator shape is
a point, so they are all being generated
| | 03:01 | from this same point.
| | 03:03 | So, to see them we can increase let's
say for example the Scatter parameter and
| | 03:08 | as we scatter them, I am just going
to hold the Shift key down so that this
| | 03:12 | scatters a little bit
more there. And then, boom!
| | 03:15 | Look at all those objects. Woo hoo!
| | 03:18 | Now, if you are like me you are going to
want to have the Particle Look section
| | 03:22 | open while you're adjusting the
Particle Replicator, because you constantly
| | 03:25 | need to go back and forth between the Particle
Look stuff and the Particle Replicator stuff.
| | 03:29 | For example, this size is way too big
for my liking, so I am going to take
| | 03:33 | these down a lot, that was actually
too big, well I guess it wasn't that much
| | 03:38 | bigger than I thought.
| | 03:39 | We could also increase the Size Random,
so if we want some of these to be small,
| | 03:44 | some of these to be big,
we can increase Size Random.
| | 03:46 | A lot of times I will increase the
size after I just, Size Random makes a lot
| | 03:51 | more blank space there.
| | 03:52 | And again, we could
increase the number of particles.
| | 03:54 | We could also adjust the Position XY,
so if we want these to kind of rain down.
| | 03:59 | And because we scattered these, some
of these were scattered along the Z-axis
| | 04:05 | and so they have variations in Z depth.
| | 04:08 | So, when we make it rain these little
objects, then they are staggered, they are
| | 04:14 | some kind of like veridical parallax
there, which is a really cool effect.
| | 04:19 | Now you start to deal with Particle
Replicator, this is actually where
| | 04:22 | Element gets a little confusing and
almost overwhelming as well, because in a
| | 04:27 | Particle Look section there is
rotation and there is also rotation in the
| | 04:30 | Particle Replicator section.
| | 04:31 | Well here is the difference.
| | 04:33 | The Particle Look section generally
controls each individual particle.
| | 04:38 | So, if we adjust rotation, we are
adjusting the rotation of each particle.
| | 04:43 | If we go to be Particle
Replicator's Rotation, they were adjusting the
| | 04:47 | rotation of all the objects.
| | 04:49 | In this case it looks the same
because the Replicator Shape is a point.
| | 04:54 | But as we will see in the next few
movies we can actually create a bunch of
| | 04:58 | different Replicator
Shapes like spheres or whatever.
| | 05:00 | And so then as we adjust the rotation
here, it adjusts all of them at once.
| | 05:06 | So, there's the whole shape getting
rotated as opposed to the individual
| | 05:11 | particle is getting rotated.
| | 05:13 | Now, I am going to take off the Rotation
of this object, and the Replicator and
| | 05:20 | I'll close these up.
| | 05:21 | Take this back, oops, not there.
| | 05:23 | Take the Replicator Shape back to Point,
we will be covering all the stuff as we
| | 05:27 | go throughout this chapter.
| | 05:28 | But again, it's a good idea to look in
both the Particle Replicator section and
| | 05:32 | the Particle Look section for what you want.
| | 05:35 | Say for example, I want to randomly
rotate these, I might think that the
| | 05:40 | Particle Replicator would handle
Random Rotation, but it doesn't.So I need to
| | 05:44 | come down here actually to the Particle
Look section, and then here is Rotation
| | 05:48 | Random here and then I can have those
rotating in all kinds of crazy directions.
| | 05:53 | I am just going to type 0 to zero that back out.
| | 05:56 | We could also rotate
randomly along a specific axis.
| | 06:00 | So, we want to randomly rotate along the
X-axis, each object can have a random X
| | 06:05 | value, also the same thing with Y or Z.
| | 06:08 | Now we could also randomize the Angle
which is really interesting, and what this
| | 06:12 | does, let me zero out that
Randomize X really quick.
| | 06:17 | What this does, let's say we want to rotate
everything on a 45 degree angle or a 90 degree angle.
| | 06:23 | I could click 90 here on the X-axis and
it will randomize the angle, but every
| | 06:28 | single object on the X-axis will
have to be 90 degrees or zero degrees.
| | 06:33 | And so that's kind of cool if we have
certain objects that maybe should be flat
| | 06:36 | or straight up and nothing in between.
| | 06:39 | So, those are the basics of how
to use the Particle Replicator.
| | 06:42 | Let's go over to our
Project and see this in action.
| | 06:44 | And we have the
Replicating Basics START composition.
| | 06:47 | And so, the ring comes down, this is
without all the 8-bit effects on it.
| | 06:52 | And the ring comes down--let me just
play that really quick--the ring comes
| | 06:57 | down to bonks this and then flies back.
| | 06:59 | And we want to have happen, I have
already put a number of comp markers here,
| | 07:03 | so you just type 1 on your keyboard, on
the main area of the keyboard and jump
| | 07:07 | to that if you want.
| | 07:08 | But at that point we want to have it expand
into multiple objects, into multiple rings.
| | 07:12 | This is basically just the ring that
comes with Element with the Basic_Gold
| | 07:17 | texture that also ships with Element.
| | 07:19 | So, nothing complex going on here.
| | 07:22 | So, what I'm going to do is I am going
to select the Element layer and I want to
| | 07:28 | set a keyframe, the frame before this, so I
am going to press the Page Up key to back up.
| | 07:34 | And I want to set a keyframe for the
Particle Count, and when this ring hits
| | 07:39 | these posts here I want to have these
rings explode into a bunch of rings.
| | 07:44 | So, now I am going to increase the
Particle Count a lot -- and it doesn't really
| | 07:51 | matter that we can't see them.
| | 07:54 | Because I actually don't want the rings
to be here on this frame because nothing
| | 07:58 | is really happened yet, it's just now hitting.
| | 08:00 | I really want everything
to explode from here on out.
| | 08:03 | But with all of these particles, all
of these rings stacked up on top of each
| | 08:08 | other looks like one, but
again there's a bunch here.
| | 08:10 | So, we can animate the Scatter property,
so I am going to click the Stopwatch for
| | 08:15 | the Scatter property at my comp marker here.
| | 08:19 | And then we can move in time towards
the later end of the composition here.
| | 08:25 | I am just going to increase Scatter a
lot, I can even hold the Shift key down,
| | 08:29 | make that happen even faster.
| | 08:32 | And I want to Randomize
the Z-axis a little bit more.
| | 08:37 | So, there's a little bit more depth in
these rings that are just of like coming
| | 08:41 | at you, rings in your face, rings in your face.
| | 08:44 | I also want to go down to Particle
Look, open up Rotation and then add some
| | 08:48 | random rotation to these rings, that
helps them catch the light better and just
| | 08:53 | looks a lot more random.
| | 08:56 | Now, what I want to do is I am going
to select like this layer, I am going
| | 09:00 | to press U. And just to make this
look better, I'm going to select the
| | 09:04 | second Scatter keyframe.
| | 09:05 | I'm going to right-click on it, choose
Keyframe Assistant>Easy Ease In and then
| | 09:09 | to really enhance that I am going to
click this button right here which takes me
| | 09:14 | to the Graph Editor and I'm going to
pull this handle to the right, simply to
| | 09:20 | the left and then I'm going to go to
the left keyframe and drag that handle all
| | 09:25 | the way to the left as well, so we
have a big explosion and then it kind of
| | 09:30 | comes to a screeching halt by the end
here, makes things freeze a little bit.
| | 09:33 | So, let's preview that back
and see what we have. Oops!
| | 09:36 | Getting this little error, so I am just
going to use the Spacebar, and then boom!
| | 09:43 | It explodes.
| | 09:44 | Now, you could see that my
ring is already rotated.
| | 09:51 | So, what I should have done actually, is
set a keyframe for Random Rotation at
| | 09:56 | this point right here, and so
we can go to a Rotation Random.
| | 10:02 | And now, I am going to press Page Up again
to back up one frame and take that to zero.
| | 10:07 | I will do the same thing with Z Scatter,
I will set a keyframe for Z Scatter,
| | 10:14 | and then go back to my comp
marker and take this down to zero.
| | 10:18 | And now everything should
look normal, there we go.
| | 10:22 | One ring, boom, it explodes into many rings.
| | 10:26 | So you could see this is just two
examples of really basic uses of this
| | 10:32 | Particle Replicator.
| | 10:33 | This is just using the Point replicator
shape which I actually find to be one of
| | 10:37 | the least useful replicator shapes.
| | 10:38 | So let's go over to the next tutorial
where we are going to learn little bit
| | 10:42 | more about these replicator shapes.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using replicator shapes| 00:00 | In this tutorial we are going to
take a look at some of the basic
| | 00:03 | replicator shapes in Element.
| | 00:04 | So, I am going to select Element from
the Sphere composition, the Element layer.
| | 00:09 | I am going to go ahead and go to Group 1.
| | 00:12 | I just have a basic rounded, rectangle
cube or basically a cube with round edges.
| | 00:18 | I want to change the replicator shape
to Sphere which won't do anything because
| | 00:22 | we are only seeing one particle.
| | 00:23 | Before we could really see what's
going on here, I need to go down to Particle
| | 00:27 | Look and reduce the size of this cube a lot.
| | 00:34 | Now, with the smaller cube I can go
back up to the Particle Replicator and
| | 00:38 | increase the Particle Count.
| | 00:40 | As we do we will see that it's making these
cubes appear to be in the form of a sphere.
| | 00:47 | So, the replicator shape refers to the
shape that the cubes are going to be in.
| | 00:52 | Now, one of the cool parameters I find
myself using a lot in going back and forth
| | 00:56 | with Particle Look, Size
with, is the scale of the shape.
| | 01:00 | Now, this is not referring to the
scaling of the cubes which is what Particle
| | 01:03 | Look Size refers to, but this actually
refers to the scaling of the sphere.
| | 01:09 | So, as I increase this,
this creates a larger sphere.
| | 01:12 | Taking it down creates a smaller sphere.
| | 01:15 | Of course, a lot of these properties,
most of them I should say, could be animated
| | 01:19 | so you could have an object blow up like this.
| | 01:22 | Also, if we get a big enough, the
shape big enough, then we can increase the
| | 01:28 | particle count a lot here.
| | 01:31 | Seeing flashes of black, because we need
to maybe use position Z to kind of zoom
| | 01:35 | in a little bit; increase the Particle Count.
| | 01:38 | Then we have this wall, this 3D wall of cubes.
| | 01:42 | Then we could open up Rotation and
adjust Y Rotation for example and
| | 01:47 | rotate around there.
| | 01:48 | Pretty cool effect.
| | 01:50 | We will just zero that out.
| | 01:52 | Zero out position Z. It takes scale of
shape back down to 10 and then take the
| | 01:58 | particle count down the something a
little bit more reasonable. About 40 or so.
| | 02:03 | Now, let me scale this shape down a
little bit and let me also scale the size of
| | 02:09 | those cubes down a little bit.
| | 02:11 | You also see how fast this renders.
| | 02:13 | It's just incredible it's so quick.
| | 02:15 | Just so responsive and snappy it
makes it a real joy to work in Element.
| | 02:19 | Now, with the smaller shape and the
smaller particles we can go and play with the
| | 02:24 | layers in the Shape options area.
| | 02:26 | Now, a lot of times when you change the
Replicator Shape like say from point, for
| | 02:31 | example from sphere to point, it's
just gone, that whole section is gone.
| | 02:35 | It's only there when you choose Sphere.
| | 02:37 | A lot of these shape options are like
this where, when you change the replicator
| | 02:41 | shape a lot of options appear or disappear.
| | 02:43 | So, just be aware of that.
| | 02:44 | I am going to open up Shape Options and
I am going to increase the layers to 2.
| | 02:49 | Now, what this does is that it
creates another sphere of cubes outside the
| | 02:53 | original sphere of cubes.
| | 02:55 | But it only uses this many particles.
| | 02:57 | So, as we increase the layers we are
going to increase the number of particles
| | 03:01 | outside the cube and it's going to
stretch the same number of particles out
| | 03:06 | over those spheres.
| | 03:07 | So, now instead of looking like spheres
this actually looks like as just series
| | 03:12 | of sticks which is really cool in and of itself.
| | 03:15 | I am go back up here and let's actually
increase the Particle Count and we could
| | 03:21 | see that this is actually now a
series of spheres, which is interesting.
| | 03:25 | If I take this back down
to 1, you could see that
| | 03:29 | --actually, let me take
down the Particle Count too--
| | 03:31 | see, it's kind of just like a hollow
sphere, but as we increase the layers there
| | 03:36 | then we are actually filling in that sphere.
| | 03:40 | So, now we have kind of like two spheres there.
| | 03:43 | Now, we have the Layers Offset.
| | 03:44 | I will take this down a little bit
so we could see what's going on here.
| | 03:48 | As we have extra layers, take this up
to 3, they stack on top of each other and
| | 03:54 | they are equidistant.
| | 03:55 | If you would like to scale out those
extra layers, you could use the Layers
| | 03:59 | Offset property for that.
| | 04:00 | So, we could scale those out and again
this is animatable too so you can create
| | 04:05 | some really interesting animations
by adjusting these layers offset here.
| | 04:11 | That's important to note that if you
want to adjust the original cubes, the
| | 04:15 | original shape, then you need to Scale Shape.
| | 04:18 | So, you could actually use Scale Shape
which scales all the layers uniformly and
| | 04:22 | then Layers Offset which scales just
the extra layers in tandem with each other
| | 04:28 | to again produce some really
interesting original animations.
| | 04:31 | Now, I want to take the Layers back down
to 1 and I'm going to increase the Scale
| | 04:36 | Shape value just a little bit.
| | 04:38 | Another cool trick with this is
the Distribution Parameter here.
| | 04:41 | It's set to Automatic by default, which
basically just makes it look like a sphere.
| | 04:45 | But if we change this to Set Rows we
actually are now working with rows of spheres.
| | 04:52 | So, if I increase the rows or let's say
decrease the rows and maybe increase the
| | 04:58 | particles here, you could see what we are doing.
| | 05:01 | It's really interesting and actually
I could scale the shape up or down.
| | 05:04 | I can increase the number of rows
and I could actually take down maybe the
| | 05:10 | particle size and I could
adjust the scale of the shape again.
| | 05:17 | Really to see the rows we need to have a
really high particle count here. But look at that.
| | 05:22 | This looks so interesting and unique as
we have these rows of cubes in a sphere.
| | 05:30 | So, it's kind of another way to
create a sphere and again these attributes
| | 05:35 | are all animatable.
| | 05:37 | So, we can move them around, adjust the
number of rows, and create some really
| | 05:42 | interesting looks that way.
| | 05:43 | When we go back to an Automatic
Distribution if we play the Automatic Bias it
| | 05:48 | can create these interesting looks too.
| | 05:50 | So, as we go to a negative value, it creates rows.
| | 05:53 | As we go to a positive value
it kind of creates columns.
| | 05:56 | Again, these are all an animatable.
| | 05:58 | So, as you could see as we are moving
around it creates some really interesting
| | 06:02 | movement to these particles.
| | 06:03 | Keep in mind here that everything
that we've been talking about in this
| | 06:06 | tutorial hasn't covered scatter or position
noise, which we will talk about little bit later.
| | 06:12 | There's just really so much going on here.
| | 06:14 | And this is just cubes in a sphere.
| | 06:16 | So, imagine if we change the 3D object
or if we change the replicator shape, the
| | 06:20 | possibilities are endless.
| | 06:21 | Let's look at another example here.
| | 06:23 | Let's go over to be plain
composition where I have created some text and
| | 06:26 | this example is going to be like what
we saw earlier a few chapters ago when
| | 06:30 | we looked at bevels.
| | 06:31 | I am going to select the Element
layer and we have our Particle Count.
| | 06:35 | I am going to change the
Replicator Shape to Plane.
| | 06:38 | What that's going to do is it's going to
spread out the particles on a flat plane.
| | 06:42 | So, I'm going to increase the particle
count and then to make sure I could see
| | 06:47 | what I am doing I am going to go to
the Rotation in the Particle Replicator
| | 06:51 | section and on the X axis I am
going to and rotate this 90 degrees.
| | 06:55 | Now, we can not only scale the entire
shape with the Scale Shape parameter, but
| | 07:00 | I could also scale individual parameters
as well and that's really what I want here.
| | 07:04 | So, I am going to just scale X for example
and you see what that does. I could scale
| | 07:11 | --well, Y is not going to do anything--
| | 07:13 | but if I scale Z that brings these
layers closer together or farther apart.
| | 07:19 | As I increase the Particle Count here
then we could make a bigger wall essentially.
| | 07:26 | That's really what I am doing here.
| | 07:27 | The reason why I use that text and it
really doesn't mean anything, but the
| | 07:31 | point is that as I use letters like W
and I and T, it creates different patterns
| | 07:40 | in my makeshift wall here.
| | 07:43 | So, again we scale in these different
dimensions and we could create similarly
| | 07:46 | interesting textures.
| | 07:47 | Now this doesn't look like text at all, but
instead it looks like a wall or something.
| | 07:52 | So, we could create like a tiled floor
or a cool industrial surface somehow, all
| | 07:58 | because we made a plane out of text if
you can believe it. Very interesting.
| | 08:04 | Finally, and very quickly, let's go to
the 3D Grid and Ring composition where we
| | 08:08 | have a very simple sphere and we will
go ahead and select the Element layer and
| | 08:12 | we will change the Replicator Shape
to 3D Grid and we will bring down the
| | 08:17 | Particle Look Size value down a lot
so we could see what we are doing here.
| | 08:23 | Yeah, maybe to about 1 or so.
| | 08:25 | I will open up Rotation and rotate this.
| | 08:30 | We could see what's going on.
| | 08:31 | This just creates a very
simple grid of your 3D object.
| | 08:36 | So, you can control the grid X, grid Y, and grid
Z. It gets really dense when you adjust these.
| | 08:46 | So, you need to use these in
conjunction with Scale Shape.
| | 08:53 | Of course, everything that we've
already looked at really comes in handy here,
| | 08:56 | because we can scale X, we can
scale Y to bring these closer together.
| | 09:02 | And we could also scale Z to make them
kind of come out at you if we rotated
| | 09:07 | that back around to 0.
| | 09:08 | It creates some really cool looks
like that, like we are going through a
| | 09:12 | tunnel of particles maybe.
| | 09:14 | In some cases too where you might use
Plane I actually find myself using 3D
| | 09:19 | Grid, because I have more control over
exactly where I want the duplicates to be.
| | 09:23 | So, just a suggestion.
| | 09:25 | I am going to change the
Replicator Shape to Ring.
| | 09:28 | This is also kind of cool.
| | 09:29 | I am going to increase the Particle Count.
| | 09:32 | And I have a cool little ring here.
| | 09:35 | I am actually going to scale this shape
down back to its default value of 10 and
| | 09:39 | then we will use some X rotation here.
| | 09:42 | Let me 0 out the scale X, Y, and Z here.
| | 09:47 | Actually, I don't want to scale them out.
| | 09:49 | I will get them back to
default value of 1. There we go.
| | 09:53 | Now, we have this ring of
spheres which is really cool.
| | 09:57 | It also looks really interesting with
an illuminated texture is these spheres
| | 10:01 | kind of smashed together.
| | 10:02 | Of course, we can scale the shape out
so that the spheres don't quite touch.
| | 10:06 | We could also reduce the particle
count so that, that happens.
| | 10:09 | It's kind of a beautiful texture.
| | 10:13 | Again, we could use layers here.
| | 10:15 | You could use layers of almost every
one of the Replicator Shapes to create
| | 10:19 | interesting looks here.
| | 10:21 | I will adjust the Layers Offset to
kind of bring them closer together.
| | 10:24 | It almost looks like a cross between 3D Grid
and the Ring as these stack on top each other.
| | 10:29 | If I expand those using Layer Offset,
you could really see what's going on there
| | 10:35 | as they stretch out.
| | 10:36 | Also, Layers Distribution kind of
determines where the particles get allocated.
| | 10:41 | By default all 42 particles here,
whatever your Particle Count is, gets evenly
| | 10:45 | distributed across each instance or
each layer of particles and as you adjust
| | 10:50 | layer distribution, it adjusts how
many particles are in each layer.
| | 10:55 | So, with a Layers Distribution value
all the way up of 2 we have most of the
| | 11:00 | particles in the initial layer and then
we have less than that in the second and
| | 11:05 | less than the third and so on and so forth.
| | 11:07 | In the next tutorial we will look at how
to use a layer and a 3D object to create
| | 11:13 | custom 3D Replicator Shape.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using a custom replicator shape| 00:00 | In this movie we're going to look at
how to use your own custom shape to make
| | 00:04 | Replicator Shapes for
elements such as this heart here.
| | 00:08 | There're two ways you can do that.
| | 00:09 | You can do that with the Alpha
Channel of a layer or you can do that
| | 00:13 | with another 3D object.
| | 00:14 | We'll be looking at both in this tutorial.
| | 00:16 | This is the final project we'll be making.
| | 00:18 | Well, heart that beats and
then sweet little love comes up.
| | 00:23 | What I want to do here is I want to
do something that's very different
| | 00:27 | stylistically than what we've done so
far, because I have found that Element
| | 00:31 | is so versatile, so fast, and such
an amazing tool with so many different
| | 00:36 | options that it really comes in handy
in so many other places rather than just
| | 00:41 | the standard options.
| | 00:42 | So, obviously if you have a 3D object,
you're doing a visual shot, obviously
| | 00:46 | Element is going to come in handy.
| | 00:48 | If you have really flashy motion
graphics that are all shiny and metallic,
| | 00:51 | obviously, Element is going to come in handy.
| | 00:53 | But even when you're doing
something right like this that is
| | 00:56 | obviously two-dimensional.
| | 00:57 | If you have this 3D heart that's
moving and undulating in a very 3D way, even
| | 01:03 | then it comes in handy.
| | 01:04 | I find this is one of fastest
options and the most flexible options for
| | 01:08 | creating stuff like this.
| | 01:09 | On top of that, should you want to
go 3D then you have that flexibility.
| | 01:14 | So, if we wanted to go down to Element
for example here and we wanted to rotate
| | 01:20 | this heart in 3D or if we wanted to
maybe scatter these pieces more, or
| | 01:25 | whatever we wanted to do, we totally have the
flexibility to do that because of the 3D engine.
| | 01:31 | Now, what we're going to do before we
get to this heart example, we're going to
| | 01:35 | look at using a 3D object as a Replicator Shape.
| | 01:39 | Your own custom 3D object.
| | 01:41 | So, I have Element here, click Scene Setup.
| | 01:44 | We're going to start from scratch.
| | 01:45 | Go to Primitives and we'll
scroll down and get to a Sphere here.
| | 01:50 | Go and click on Sphere and I have
this set to Point Cloud already.
| | 01:55 | I'll talk about that in just a moment.
| | 01:57 | We'll go to the Material and Bevel
Browser, the Presets, and we'll scroll the
| | 02:01 | way down and we'll drag-and-drop the Two
_Color_Red preset that has the Fresnel
| | 02:06 | with the illumination and the whole bit.
| | 02:08 | So, this is going to be our particle.
| | 02:11 | Now we need to get an object here that
will be the shape, the Replicator Shape.
| | 02:17 | Here is the little trick.
| | 02:18 | We are going to do some
something different here.
| | 02:20 | Scroll all the way down here, at the
bottom of the Primitives to the water_drop.
| | 02:24 | Go ahead and click water_
drop to add that to your scene.
| | 02:27 | This was it was supposed to look like.
| | 02:29 | But if we flip it upside down, we're
going to turn this into a hot air balloon.
| | 02:34 | Because what's going to happen is
that we're going to use the shape of the
| | 02:38 | water_drop as the 3D Replicator.
| | 02:43 | In order to see what that's going to
look like, we can come here to flyout and
| | 02:46 | go back to Point Cloud.
| | 02:48 | You could see all these points.
| | 02:50 | Everywhere where there is a vertex, I
have all these little vertices all over
| | 02:54 | the place, those are where
our spheres are going to be.
| | 02:57 | So, you can see it's like a hot air
balloon if we rotate it upside down.
| | 03:02 | I'm going to take off the
visibility of the Point Clouds.
| | 03:05 | We are seeing it in the regular mode here.
| | 03:07 | The way to do this is we need to take
this icon actually, which is the default
| | 03:12 | and make it an Atom Particle.
| | 03:13 | Atom was original name of Element 3D.
| | 03:16 | We need to switch it to this which
allows it to be used as a Replicator Shape,
| | 03:22 | and actually I totally blew it.
| | 03:23 | I just looked at the
first object that was closest.
| | 03:26 | I actually want to do this on the
water_drop, because the water_drop is the
| | 03:30 | shape, the sphere is the particle.
| | 03:31 | I am glad I've caught that.
| | 03:33 | Go ahead and click OK here and we'll go
ahead and open up Group 1 and we will go
| | 03:38 | down to the Particle Look and
take the size down quite a bit here.
| | 03:41 | A lot, a lot, actually.
| | 03:43 | Maybe just to 0.5 and a little bit
bigger than that. Probably about 1.
| | 03:50 | Then we can change the Replicator Shape
to 3D Object and that's all we have to
| | 03:54 | do, because we set it up in the scene
interface that the water_drop was the
| | 03:58 | shape we're going to use.
| | 03:59 | Now, when you use a custom 3D object as
a Replicator Shape, you no longer have
| | 04:03 | access to how many particles you have
in your scene or that cover the object,
| | 04:09 | because you adjust that with a 3D
Object Percentage which is how much as far as
| | 04:14 | the percentages of vertices in the 3D
objects are being covered with particles.
| | 04:19 | So, that's how you control a
number of particles in your scene.
| | 04:22 | As we increase this, more of the
vertices are covered until you get to 100%.
| | 04:28 | Then if we rotate this line along the X
let's just go ahead and take that to 180 degrees.
| | 04:34 | We have kind of a hot air balloon.
| | 04:36 | Of course, we could scale this.
| | 04:37 | Maybe X isn't the best.
| | 04:40 | Maybe a little bit X, little bit of Z,
and we can shrink it in the Y axis.
| | 04:45 | So, we can shape our little hot air
balloon just a little bit and we have
| | 04:50 | camera in our scene.
| | 04:51 | We can select the Unified
Camera tool, orbit around this.
| | 04:54 | That's a little wonky,
because of the Z, but here we go.
| | 05:01 | There we have a custom 3D object. It's amazing.
| | 05:04 | If you think about it, if you have any
3D object, you can put spheres or cubes
| | 05:10 | or any other 3D object in
the shape of that 3D object.
| | 05:13 | It's really incredible.
| | 05:14 | Now, let's go over to Custom
Replicator START, that composition, and I've
| | 05:18 | already set up just a basic sphere for you
| | 05:21 | --let me go back to my regular
| | 05:23 | Selection Tool so it doesn't drive me crazy--
| | 05:24 | and what we want to do is we have this heart 2
layer, just a regular old solid with a mask on it.
| | 05:30 | So, I want to use this as the shape.
| | 05:34 | But we can't use it as the shape until
it is precomposed, because really what
| | 05:38 | Element is going to be doing,
| | 05:40 | it's going to be looking at the Alpha
channel of the layer and it isn't going to
| | 05:44 | see Alpha channel of the
layer with the mask on it.
| | 05:47 | So, we need to right-click on this and
choose Pre-compose. And we'll go ahead
| | 05:50 | and Move our attributes into the new
composition and Open the New Composition and click OK.
| | 05:56 | There is our layer with the mask on it.
| | 05:59 | And if we click on transparency grid at
the bottom, we could see now this is the
| | 06:03 | Alpha channel of the layer.
| | 06:05 | So, we can back to Customer Replicator
START, go back to Element, and from the
| | 06:09 | Replicator Shape change it from Sphere to Layer.
| | 06:13 | This creates the custom layer dropdown.
| | 06:15 | From this we can choose--where are you--
there we go, heart 2 Comp 1, and now our
| | 06:20 | Replicator Shape is a heart.
| | 06:23 | Now it's a little stretched.
| | 06:26 | The reason why is because
our composition here is wide.
| | 06:31 | It needs to be square or else this happens.
| | 06:34 | So we can fix that by going to our
heart 2 Comp 1 and we can click on the
| | 06:40 | Region of Interest button and click-and
-drag our Region of Interest that's a
| | 06:46 | little bit more square shaped.
| | 06:49 | Then we go to Composition menu and
choose Crop Comp to Region of Interest.
| | 06:55 | Now, this composition will be square and
when we go back to Customer Replicator
| | 07:00 | START, our heart will be more...hearty. (laughing)
| | 07:02 | Then select on Element and of course
we go to Scale XYZ again and we can
| | 07:08 | customize this if we want.
| | 07:09 | We can get a taller heart or
shorter heart or whatever we want to do.
| | 07:13 | Now, one of the things I like doing with
this particular shape is going down to
| | 07:18 | Particle Look and Size and instead of
adjusting the Size which probably needs to
| | 07:23 | come down just a little bit
is adjusting the Size Random.
| | 07:25 | So, if I increase that value, you will
get little bit more randomness in the size
| | 07:31 | of the particles in our heart.
| | 07:33 | And I might want to take down
overall size in the Particle Look section.
| | 07:37 | Then we have more randomness.
| | 07:40 | I like the way that looks.
| | 07:43 | Now, to get the final look here, I added some
fast blur which is going to smooth the edges.
| | 07:49 | I also use something called position
noise to animate this and make it all
| | 07:53 | wobbly, which we will be
looking at a lot in the next movie.
| | 07:56 | Also, I animated the scale
shape to create the heartbeat there.
| | 08:01 | So, if we go back to Custom Replicator
START and we adjust Scale Shape, it makes
| | 08:06 | the heart seem to beat a little bit.
| | 08:12 | So, that's how I did that.
| | 08:15 | As you can see, being able to create a
Replicator Shape out of anything, out of
| | 08:21 | the Alpha channel of an object or out
of a 3D object, gives you so many options
| | 08:25 | when playing with Element.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Animating Position Noise| 00:00 | In this movie, we're going to look at
a really cool way to breathe life into
| | 00:04 | your 3D objects in Element using an
animation tool called Position Noise.
| | 00:09 | Eventually, in this movie, we're going
to be looking at this cool example of
| | 00:12 | savage stampeding miniature cows.
| | 00:16 | I apologize if this is too intense for
those of you that have suffered miniature
| | 00:20 | cow related trauma.
| | 00:22 | But, the Position Noise is actually
giving some randomness to these cows, making
| | 00:28 | them move and wobble and
appear to stampede violently.
| | 00:33 | So, we'll get to that in just a second.
| | 00:35 | Let's actually see how this works
and then we'll use it in action.
| | 00:38 | So, go to the Position Noise BASICS
Compositional where we have a simple sphere
| | 00:42 | made out of spheres.
| | 00:43 | So, it's basically spheres
using this Sphere Replicator Shape.
| | 00:47 | Now, in the Particle Replicator, you want
to make sure that Element layer is selected.
| | 00:51 | You're actually in the element effect here.
| | 00:53 | In the Particle Replicator for Group 1,
if we scroll the way down right before
| | 00:56 | we get to the Particle Look
here, we have Position Noise.
| | 01:00 | And what this does is it basically
applies a Noise Map to use to displace the
| | 01:06 | spheres or whatever 3D objects you have.
| | 01:08 | So, I'm going to increase the Amount and
as you watch the spheres there you could
| | 01:12 | see them distorting as the Noise Map is applied.
| | 01:16 | Some come forward and some
come back based on the Noise Map.
| | 01:20 | And we could actually adjust the
Evolution parameter which kind of revolves
| | 01:25 | around that Map or causes the Map to
revolve around, actually, to appear to create
| | 01:32 | waves of distortion in this object.
| | 01:34 | Now, the more we increase the Amount, the
more they will distort this object, obviously.
| | 01:40 | So, if we wanted to have a big swarm
or something, this is the way to do it.
| | 01:45 | So, it doesn't really look like a
sphere any more, it just kind of looks like a
| | 01:49 | swarm of these spheres.
| | 01:51 | So, it's a great way to
give random life to objects.
| | 01:55 | You could create a greater Replicator
Shape and then animate it with Position Noise.
| | 02:00 | I'm going to right-click and reset the
Amount value and the Evolution value.
| | 02:05 | I'll take up Amount just a little bit again.
| | 02:07 | I want to talk about Noise Scale.
| | 02:09 | This refers to the size of the map used for
displacement, but it actually works backwards.
| | 02:15 | So, as we actually decrease this,
let's say 0.1 or 0.2 something like that,
| | 02:21 | and we increase the Evolution, you'll
see that we have a nice soft undulation
| | 02:26 | here, just a really soft
subtle movement which is very cool.
| | 02:30 | If you want it something to look like
maybe it was bobbing through water or
| | 02:34 | something else along those lines.
| | 02:36 | That's a great way to do that.
| | 02:38 | You could also increase the Noise Scale
so that there is a lot of little action
| | 02:42 | all over the place and again
adds to that kind of swarming feel.
| | 02:47 | One other property that we haven't
talked about yet is Surface Offset.
| | 02:50 | So, all of these spheres are on,
essentially, the surface of the Replicator Shape,
| | 02:56 | the surface of this sphere.
| | 02:58 | As we increase the Surface Offset,
these kind of spread out a little bit.
| | 03:02 | This will give you a little bit more room
when you're animating with Position Noise.
| | 03:07 | This gives a more room to spread out there.
| | 03:09 | You could also -- just right-click
on both the Amount and Noise Scale to
| | 03:13 | Reset those really quick.
| | 03:14 | We could also use Surface Offset Random.
| | 03:18 | So, we could increase this so that
some of them stick to the surface, some of
| | 03:22 | them go out, some of them go in and
again it's a little bit chaotic, which when
| | 03:27 | used with Position Noise, could
also produce some interesting results.
| | 03:30 | Of course, you only need to use
Position Noise to offset the surface, offset
| | 03:34 | objects from the surface but, it's just
another tool, you can use with Position
| | 03:38 | Noise to get the results, you are looking for.
| | 03:40 | Now, I'm going to right-click and Reset
both, Surface Offset and Surface Offset
| | 03:44 | Random as well as Amount and Evolution.
| | 03:48 | Let me show you one more aspect of this here.
| | 03:51 | As I increase the Amount of
Position Noise, I get this distortion here.
| | 03:55 | Be very aware that when you move the object
that the Noise Map stays in the same place.
| | 04:01 | So, as I move the object, you'll see
that the Noise Map stays in the same place,
| | 04:06 | but the object kind of moves through it.
| | 04:08 | So, all you have to do is really
increase the Amount and then once you move the
| | 04:13 | object, you'll get - you're getting
some interesting movement there along the
| | 04:17 | surface of the object even
in Z space. Very interesting.
| | 04:20 | Now, you may want this,
| | 04:22 | you may not want that but, be
aware that this is how it works.
| | 04:25 | Now, let's move along to our example.
| | 04:27 | Go to Position Noise
START, the composition there.
| | 04:30 | We have the evil devil cow staring at us.
| | 04:33 | And we'll go to the Element layer.
| | 04:36 | Group 1 is where the grass is. This is
the grass that comes with Element as the
| | 04:40 | sample of 3D object.
| | 04:41 | And I have the Plane Replicator Shape.
| | 04:44 | So, it spreads out that grass.
| | 04:46 | And we're going to now look at
Group 2 which is where the cow is.
| | 04:50 | Now, let's change the
Replicator Shape for the cow to Plane.
| | 04:54 | And let's make more than 1 by
increasing the Particle Count to let's say 21.
| | 04:58 | Now, I want to rotate the
actual Particle Replicator.
| | 05:02 | So, make sure you're in the Particle
Replicator section, not Particle Look and
| | 05:06 | under Rotation, we want to rotate this -90�.
| | 05:12 | And let's actually open up Particle Look
and change the Size to be 3. There we go.
| | 05:21 | And let's move these down by increasing
the Position XY, the Y part of that and
| | 05:26 | we'll move that down.
| | 05:27 | And let's actually move these little guys back.
| | 05:30 | So, I'm going to decrease the position--excuse me--
actually, increase the position Z value.
| | 05:35 | Go back and forth with Position XY, Positions
Z and until I get those cows where I want them.
| | 05:41 | And it kind of looks little
militant cows because they're very orderly.
| | 05:44 | So, we could spread this out with Scale
XYZ, but what that's going to do is it's
| | 05:48 | going keep them in order.
| | 05:50 | We want to randomize them.
| | 05:51 | So, let's go ahead and open up Scatter XYZ.
| | 05:55 | We don't want to do a pure scatter here.
| | 05:57 | That might work in our case, in some
cases but that's going to give us a little
| | 06:01 | bit of Y scatter and we don't want that.
| | 06:04 | So, I'm going to right-click and choose
Reset, increase Scatter X and I'm going
| | 06:08 | hold the Shift key.
| | 06:10 | And I also might want to increase the
Scatter Z, these spread out and as far as
| | 06:15 | their relation to the camera goes.
| | 06:18 | And I could just keep playing with that
until I get settings that I like, move
| | 06:22 | them back and all that stuff.
| | 06:23 | I'm going to say, this is good
enough for our purposes here.
| | 06:26 | I may go back to the first frame and
I'm going to get these cows in their
| | 06:30 | starting positions here
on x-axis, move that back.
| | 06:34 | It's okay, if you've a start on screen.
| | 06:37 | Give the viewers a taste of what's coming up.
| | 06:38 | Click the Stopwatch for Position XY
and now, we go to end our composition and
| | 06:44 | along the x-axis, we'll scoop them into
place and we actually might want to move
| | 06:50 | those back here and further
a little bit. There we go.
| | 06:53 | And so, basically these cows come walking on.
| | 06:57 | As you could see here, this
is going to float into place.
| | 07:01 | It doesn't look very realistic.
| | 07:02 | So, what we are needing
here is some Position Noise.
| | 07:07 | So, I'm actually going to start with
this kind of in the middle of Comp so, you
| | 07:11 | could see those cows.
| | 07:12 | And then, I'm going to go down to
Position Noise at the bottom of the Particle
| | 07:16 | Replicator section and increase Amount to 30.
| | 07:19 | So, we could kind of really see the
movement of the cows that there's some more
| | 07:23 | anger in their stampeding.
| | 07:26 | And then I need to animate the Evolution value.
| | 07:28 | So, at frame 0, I'm going to click the
Stopwatch for Evolution I will hit the
| | 07:32 | End key to jump the end of the
composition and I'll just make one full
| | 07:37 | rotation of Evolution.
| | 07:40 | And now, we can preview this.
| | 07:42 | Here, we could see that Position
Noise has caused enough randomness in
| | 07:47 | their movement to make them seem like
they're kind of going crazy a little
| | 07:52 | bit and stampeding.
| | 07:53 | Now, we are kind of burying their legs
in the grass so that the viewers can't
| | 07:57 | really see what's going on as much
and where you can't see it, it kind of
| | 08:01 | breaks the illusion.
| | 08:02 | But, we can just see their heads
kind of bobbing through the grass.
| | 08:05 | This Position Noise really gives
them a great sense of random movement.
| | 08:08 | And that's really the purpose of Position Noise.
| | 08:11 | It is to take these particles
| | 08:13 | and just breathe life into whether they are
stampeding through the grass or whether
| | 08:17 | they are floating in water
or maybe blowing in the wind.
| | 08:20 | Position noise is a really great option,
just to give random organic movement
| | 08:25 | to your particles.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
8. Integrating with After EffectsAdding lighting| 00:00 | In this chapter, we are going to take
a look at native 3D tools and how that
| | 00:05 | impacts the look of your work in Element.
| | 00:07 | First up, we are going to
be talking about lights.
| | 00:10 | If you're new to the world of 3D, then
you will be very surprised by the power
| | 00:15 | of lights when you're working with a 3D object.
| | 00:18 | In regular After Effects, lights are
cool and they make a big difference,
| | 00:22 | but nothing compared to the
difference that they make when you are working
| | 00:24 | with actual 3D objects.
| | 00:26 | Here for example is this
asteroid that we saw earlier.
| | 00:28 | This is with its default
textures and its custom lights.
| | 00:32 | It not only looks so much better but
also composites better into our scene.
| | 00:37 | So, I am going to show you how
to set up a basic lighting setup.
| | 00:40 | And then, after the tutorial is over, I
am going to give you some cinematography
| | 00:44 | basics for those of you that are interested.
| | 00:46 | Now, what I want to do is right-click
in a blank area of the Timeline Panel.
| | 00:50 | I am going to choose New>Light.
| | 00:53 | What I am going to do is I am
going to choose a Parallel Light.
| | 00:57 | Now, in regular, in real life I would
say, in regular After Effects work, I
| | 01:00 | really prefer to use spotlights, like
conical shape of the spotlight, and the
| | 01:07 | feathered edges and everything
else that comes with a spotlight.
| | 01:10 | It really looks fantastic.
| | 01:12 | But, I find that, and let's go ahead and
choose spot for a second. I will click OK.
| | 01:17 | I find that when I use a spotlight--oops!
| | 01:19 | Let me lock my Element layer there.
| | 01:21 | When I use a spotlight in Element, it's really
hard to get it exactly where I want it to go.
| | 01:29 | Later in this chapter, we will be
looking at the elementary script which
| | 01:32 | will help with that.
| | 01:33 | But, a lot of times, actually probably
about 80-90% of the time when I use a
| | 01:38 | spotlight and I want to get it to do a
specific thing, I can never get it right.
| | 01:43 | So, what I am going to do is delete this,
make another new light, and this time
| | 01:47 | I am going to make a parallel light.
| | 01:50 | And when I work with Element, I get
far better results 9 times out of 10 when
| | 01:55 | I'm using a parallel light
than when I am using a spotlight.
| | 01:58 | So, the way the parallel light works is
it basically just shoots light from a
| | 02:03 | huge light source, like the sun for
example is a good example of a parallel
| | 02:09 | light where it's just a huge wall of
light coming from a given direction.
| | 02:14 | And it really doesn't matter too
much where the light is positioned.
| | 02:17 | It matters much more just where
the point of interest is here.
| | 02:21 | So, you could just grab this point and
move it around, even though this light is
| | 02:25 | on the left side of the rock, if I move
this over here, we are actually lighting
| | 02:31 | the right side of the rock.
| | 02:33 | So really, you just put your parallel
light anywhere and light all over the
| | 02:37 | object from that one spot.
| | 02:40 | And again, there are exceptions, but I
almost always prefer to at least start
| | 02:44 | with a parallel light.
| | 02:46 | Now, you notice that once we added a
light, any light, it gets rid of this kind
| | 02:50 | of ambient 2D light that is by
default on our objects where it just kind of
| | 02:56 | looks like a regular 2D layer.
| | 02:58 | And now we have lit the object and we
could have shadows and everything else.
| | 03:02 | Now, the first thing I do when I'm getting my
light is to get what's called the key light.
| | 03:07 | This is the dominant light source.
| | 03:09 | It's not necessarily the brightest light,
it's just the dominant light in our scene.
| | 03:13 | A lot of times what will happen--I am
just going to move this out of the way so
| | 03:17 | I could see it a little bit better here.
| | 03:18 | A lot of times what will happen is that
when we get a good key light, we want to
| | 03:24 | create contours, these image contours
which bring out the detail of the texture
| | 03:29 | of our 3D object, and it
creates really strong shadows.
| | 03:32 | So then, what we'll do is right-click,
create a new light again, but this time, I
| | 03:37 | want to change the light type to
Ambient, which is a light type I don't find
| | 03:41 | myself using too much in Aftereffects
outside of Element, but in Element, I find
| | 03:45 | myself using it all the time.
| | 03:47 | So, I use ambient lights for a fill.
| | 03:49 | So, I will change the color to more
like a pinkish color like we have here in
| | 03:54 | the background galaxy stuff,
I'll click OK, click OK.
| | 03:57 | And that's ridiculously bright.
| | 03:59 | So, we will go ahead and open up the
ambient light, and drop the Intensity down a lot.
| | 04:05 | We will bring that up
just a small, little amount.
| | 04:10 | Even that much there, even 9% makes a
difference, and you could see that it
| | 04:15 | composites a little better now because it
has some colors in common with the background.
| | 04:19 | It just fills in the shadow areas.
| | 04:22 | So, if I take that off,
before and after, before, after.
| | 04:26 | It's very subtle, that's
exactly where I'm going for.
| | 04:29 | Now there is one other type of light
that's pretty common, that's called a backlight.
| | 04:32 | I am going to right-click and create
another new parallel light and change the
| | 04:37 | color back to the bluish, greenish blue color.
| | 04:42 | Click Parallel Light, click OK, and
then we're going to maybe move this around.
| | 04:49 | I'm hoping I can pull this off
in the middle of the tutorial.
| | 04:52 | The backlight is much harder to get.
| | 04:55 | Sometimes we'll have to go and
actually open up the Layers property, the
| | 04:58 | Transform properties, and play around
let's say with the X property for example,
| | 05:03 | and the Z until I get the backlight.
| | 05:08 | Basically what that is, is it's a light
from the back of the object that kind of
| | 05:14 | just lights up the edge of the
contours here, and we're getting that here.
| | 05:18 | And actually, let me double-click the
light, and I'll change this back to like a
| | 05:22 | pinkish color, so you could really
see what's going on here, click OK.
| | 05:26 | And now we're seeing it along the edge.
| | 05:28 | It's kind of more of a side light, and you
could tweak it till we get it more of a backlight.
| | 05:33 | But, that's kind of what a backlight
does is just brings out a little bit of the
| | 05:38 | edge textures and makes that pop a little more.
| | 05:40 | This works especially well if you're on
a dark background, and we want to make
| | 05:45 | the subject pop a little bit more.
| | 05:47 | So again, we have our three lights;
| | 05:49 | we have our key light, our main light,
we have the fill to fill in the shadows
| | 05:55 | over on the side, and then
we also have our backlight.
| | 05:59 | Now, that completes the tutorial.
| | 06:00 | So, for those of you that just wanted
to get a basic understanding of playing
| | 06:04 | around with lights in Aftereffects with
Element, then you can go ahead and move
| | 06:06 | on to the next movie.
| | 06:07 | For those of you that are interested,
I want to talk to you a little bit
| | 06:10 | more about some cinematography principles and
how to make your models really look incredible.
| | 06:16 | Now, the lighting setup I've just showed
you is often referred to as three-point
| | 06:19 | lighting because we have a
key, a fill, and a backlight.
| | 06:23 | But, one of the things that I often
see when people talk about this whole
| | 06:27 | three-point lighting things, they
give you a very mechanical explanation of
| | 06:30 | where we want to have a key light
from 45 degrees away from the camera on
| | 06:35 | this side, and then a fill light on this
side and the backlight coming from this side.
| | 06:39 | And it's really a bad idea to think of
three-point lighting as a technique like
| | 06:44 | a mechanical thing to do.
| | 06:46 | Really, it's better to think of
three-point lighting like concepts.
| | 06:50 | So, we have a fill light here or rather
a key light on this spot, but it's not
| | 06:55 | in any relation to the camera,
and it doesn't really matter.
| | 06:58 | We could have our key light anywhere we want.
| | 07:00 | We could put our key light
coming from the top down.
| | 07:03 | We could put it from the bottom up
if we wanted to, we could put the key
| | 07:08 | light wherever we want.
| | 07:09 | But, that is the dominant light source,
and all other lights and the placement
| | 07:13 | of all other lights is really
determined by the key light.
| | 07:18 | Because of that, I really recommend
that you start with the key light and then
| | 07:22 | determine where to put the other lights.
| | 07:24 | Now, I am going to go back into my
Light's final composition here because this
| | 07:27 | is lit a little bit better.
| | 07:29 | I spent a little bit more time on this one.
| | 07:31 | And the whole thing is with three-
point lighting is it's just again concepts,
| | 07:34 | it's just ideas, you don't have to do anything.
| | 07:38 | As a matter of fact, one of the
things I like to do a lot is have
| | 07:41 | two-point lighting.
| | 07:42 | I have just a key and maybe just the
kicker, the rim light, the hair light, the
| | 07:47 | backlight, whatever you want to call it.
These terms are often used interchangeably.
| | 07:50 | I just have that light on the side.
| | 07:52 | So, I really don't have a fill, it's two-
point lighting, I have the key and the
| | 07:56 | backlight, or, I might want to turn off my key
light here, and just have the two backlights.
| | 08:01 | And that looks pretty awesome, and
that's totally legal, and it's not
| | 08:04 | three-point lighting and that's fine.
| | 08:05 | I can also just have my key light
and my fill light if I want to do that.
| | 08:11 | I can also have my fill
light, and my two backlights.
| | 08:14 | You can see there is an infinite
number of possibilities when it comes to
| | 08:17 | lighting, and as a matter of fact, I
actually used four-point lighting for this example.
| | 08:22 | I have my key light, I have my fill light,
and I have two backlights one on each side.
| | 08:26 | So, there really is a lot of flexibility
here, and the key is to make the object
| | 08:31 | look I would say beautiful, but it's
really you want to make the object look
| | 08:35 | like it should look.
| | 08:36 | I want this space rock to look really rocky.
| | 08:39 | So, I wanted to have a lot of lights
that brought out the contours and the
| | 08:43 | detail to really show that detail off.
| | 08:46 | Without the backlights, it looks much more flat.
| | 08:50 | This brings up another good point.
| | 08:51 | I am just going to go ahead and turn off the
other lights, and play with the key for a second.
| | 08:56 | I will open up the key and the Transform here.
| | 08:59 | But, when we move the light around, and
we put the light right in the front of
| | 09:05 | the object, the more we put the
light directly in front of the object,
| | 09:10 | basically where the camera is coming from, the
more we flatten out the textures of the object.
| | 09:16 | This is probably why the lights in
your bathroom are right in front of the
| | 09:18 | mirror pointed right at your face, so that
tends to make you look nice and flat and smooth.
| | 09:24 | So, when we light things from the side,
we tend to bring out all the contours,
| | 09:30 | the details, the wrinkles, and the
scars, and everything else by again
| | 09:34 | lighting from the side.
| | 09:36 | Now, with people, that's not always
desirable, but with objects, a lot of times
| | 09:41 | it is, you want these contours, they
are beautiful, they are something about
| | 09:44 | these little edges and details that
the human eye is really pleased by.
| | 09:48 | So, that's something to be aware of.
| | 09:50 | Another thing to be aware of, I am just
going to go ahead and undo this to get
| | 09:55 | this light back to where it was before.
| | 09:57 | But, another thing here is that if I
unlock the camera and move the camera
| | 10:01 | around, that once we move the
camera that everything is shot.
| | 10:06 | Our backlight is no longer our
backlight, and our other backlight is just
| | 10:11 | kind of a key light now.
| | 10:13 | Everything is completely messed up, or,
if I go back to Element even and I play
| | 10:18 | with the rotation of the object,
then that also messes up the lighting.
| | 10:23 | So, just like in real life, when a
subject or the camera moves, then the
| | 10:27 | lighting needs to change as well,
assuming of course that you want to
| | 10:31 | maintain the same lighting.
| | 10:32 | This is just another reason why
the three-point mechanical setup just
| | 10:36 | doesn't often work.
| | 10:37 | So, that's enough about
cinematography for right now.
| | 10:40 | But, it's just really important to know
that the quality of your lighting, your
| | 10:45 | ability to light a subject will make
such a huge difference when you're dealing
| | 10:48 | with 3D models in Element.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using an After Effects camera| 00:00 | Another very exciting tool to use
with Element is obviously, Cameras.
| | 00:05 | This is just kind of a refresher.
| | 00:07 | I have here this shot, and it's
handheld, and kind of all over the place.
| | 00:14 | And it's been tracked with
CAMERATRACKER from The Foundry.
| | 00:17 | So, I already have a
camera that matches this scene.
| | 00:22 | Just to show you how this works, I have
a little test solid here, and this is a
| | 00:27 | 2D solid, but I am going to put it in
3D space, and I'm going to open up its
| | 00:32 | position, and I'm going to get it
in the right spot. And there it is!
| | 00:40 | And now, that's all I've done,
there are no keyframes here.
| | 00:44 | I could press U and nothing
happens, so there is no keyframes.
| | 00:47 | But, as soon as I play this back and
it's a 3D object, then it automatically
| | 00:53 | matches the movement in our
shot because of the camera.
| | 00:57 | So again, anytime you put 3D
object with the camera, it's going to
| | 01:01 | automatically follow the camera.
| | 01:02 | So, the camera here also
recognizes the 3Dness of Element.
| | 01:09 | So, we don't have to do anything to
animate if we have an animated camera.
| | 01:13 | So, what I'm going to do is I am going
to turn on the Element layer, and we're
| | 01:15 | going to start from scratch here, just
see now there is no tricks up my sleeve,
| | 01:17 | and I'm going to apply Element, and I'm
going to click the Scene Setup button,
| | 01:22 | go to Starter_Pack, scroll all the way
down, click telephone_pole to add that
| | 01:29 | into our scene, click OK.
| | 01:33 | Then we have a telephone pole
that's way too close to the camera.
| | 01:36 | So, we'll open up Group1>Particle Replicator.
| | 01:40 | And usually, you can't mess with the Z
position of an object or it doesn't stay
| | 01:45 | with the track camera, but for
whatever reason, this is fine.
| | 01:50 | So, we can actually use Position Z to
put this a little farther away from the
| | 01:54 | camera, and we could use
Position X and Y to get this into place.
| | 02:00 | Also, open up Particle Look and
reduce the size of the telephone pole, and
| | 02:06 | move this back down.
| | 02:07 | I kind of want to get it on that little
spot right there, it's a little dark spot.
| | 02:11 | It's kind of a natural shadow in the
dirt, and so we'll just, and it seems like
| | 02:16 | a natural place to put that telephone pole.
| | 02:19 | And that's all I've done, is I've just
moved it into place, and because it's a
| | 02:25 | 3D object, it tracks almost perfectly, I might
add, with the background scene. Look at that.
| | 02:34 | And let me just get this full screen so
we could really see what's going on here.
| | 02:38 | There we go!
| | 02:39 | And look how perfectly that
combines with our footage.
| | 02:44 | It's really incredible when you have a
tracked camera in your scene, what you
| | 02:49 | can do with 3D objects in
Element and live footage.
| | 02:52 | Now, one other thing that's
important about Cameras is the ability to get
| | 02:55 | shallow depth-of-field.
| | 02:56 | We're not going to talk about that in
this movie because we have a dedicated
| | 02:59 | movie to that coming up in a few chapters.
| | 03:01 | But, that's what you need to know
about using cameras with Element.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Aligning with nulls| 00:00 | Who doesn't love a Null Object?
| | 00:02 | Null Objects do so much good for us
when working in After Effects and working
| | 00:06 | with Element is no exception.
| | 00:07 | You remember in the last chapter I
had this example, this little video game stuff
| | 00:11 | where these rings blue up in Element.
| | 00:12 | Well, one of things that I want, is I
want to have this ring come down this
| | 00:17 | path and then explode.
| | 00:19 | But the thing is, it's really hard
getting the Element group to roll down this
| | 00:24 | hill and make it look like here it
was connected to this hill because I've
| | 00:28 | already made the background and my
slope is not a very good slope I realize.
| | 00:32 | And so, I was having a hard time and so
I decided, I would make a Null Object or
| | 00:37 | actually a solid layer but it's the
same thing and I can open up position here,
| | 00:42 | I'll click on Position and the benefit
of using this Null Object is that I was
| | 00:47 | able to get motion handle, so I can
control the path, the shape that this null
| | 00:52 | traveled coming down this hill here.
| | 00:55 | So, then in order to get this to work
let's go down to Element here and in Group
| | 01:00 | 1, we want to connect Position XY--I'll
just resize this a little bit here--we want to
| | 01:05 | connect Position XY to the
Position property of the null here.
| | 01:11 | So, I'm going Alt+Click on the PC or
Option+Click on the Mac to stopwatch for
| | 01:15 | Position XY of Group 1 and click-and-
drag the pick-whip over to the Position
| | 01:20 | property of the Null.
| | 01:22 | You can click in a blank area here of
the Timeline panel there is nothing else
| | 01:27 | to accept that and as we resize this we
can see this little better, we can see
| | 01:31 | now that our ring follows the
course of the Null. Boom! And there goes.
| | 01:38 | Now I'm going to go to Edit>Undo and I
want to show you something else here.
| | 01:45 | Now, this is pretty easy
because it was a 2D layer.
| | 01:48 | But if we make the Null a 3D layer then
we have three properties here and there
| | 01:55 | are only two properties on
Position XY, so here is how you do that.
| | 01:59 | Let's do the same thing again where we
Alt+Click or Option+Click on Position XY
| | 02:03 | drag the pick-whip to position.
| | 02:05 | It will take the first two of these
properties which is all we need Position XY,
| | 02:11 | click to accept that and then what
you need to do is click a stopwatch for
| | 02:16 | Position Z and then drag the pick
-whip to the third option here.
| | 02:21 | So, we don't want to drag it to position,
we want to drag it to the Z property of
| | 02:26 | the Null and there you have it.
| | 02:29 | Now, these expressions work pretty
easily but sometimes there are problems with
| | 02:33 | expressions when working in Element and
we'll talk about what that's all about
| | 02:37 | and how to fix it in the next movie.
| | 02:39 | One other thing about working with
Nulls in Element is that when we are moving
| | 02:44 | lights around and trying to control
groups and where those particles are,
| | 02:48 | sometimes I've noticed that element
has a hard time being discovered by After
| | 02:53 | Effect exactly where it is in 3D space.
| | 02:55 | Sometimes spotlight is really hard
to line up and there are other issues.
| | 02:59 | Well, a Null can also be your best
friend in that because as we use a Null to
| | 03:05 | control of a Particle Replicator a
group for example in Element as we use that
| | 03:10 | same Null to control maybe the point
of interest on the spotlight or whatever
| | 03:14 | then we can have a single point of
interest for all those things centered in the
| | 03:18 | Null, and the Null becomes a controller
for that stuff and becomes much easier
| | 03:22 | to get objects exactly in the right spot.
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| Working with expressions| 00:00 | As mentioned in the last movie there
is a little bit of an issue when dealing
| | 00:04 | with expressions sometimes in Element,
and if you don't know how to overcome it,
| | 00:07 | it can really throw you for a loop.
| | 00:09 | So, what I want to do right here is just
explain the projects so you know we are trying to do.
| | 00:13 | I have here one layer of Element that's
controlling all of the blocks which are
| | 00:18 | on one group, that's actually Group 2,
all these little blocks, the cubes.
| | 00:23 | And then I have Group 1
which are the spheres here.
| | 00:27 | And then I have a separate
shape layer with my text on it.
| | 00:30 | So, what I want to be able to do is control my
text with my cubes, the ones on Group 2.
| | 00:36 | So, if I right click in Group 2, and
right click on Position XY and choose Reveal
| | 00:43 | in Timeline, I will see this property.
| | 00:47 | And then, what I need to do is reveal
the Position property of the outlines here,
| | 00:52 | the Outlines layer, that's
layer, that's layer number 7.
| | 00:55 | And what I'm going to do is Option+
Click on the Mac or Alt+Click the PC to
| | 01:00 | stopwatch Position property on
the outlines on the text layer.
| | 01:04 | Then I want to drag the pick-whip to
Position XY on Group 2 and then click
| | 01:13 | anyone to blank area to accept that.
| | 01:16 | So, it seems like everything worked out great.
| | 01:19 | I will go ahead and select Element. I will
resize this so we could see everything here.
| | 01:23 | When I move position XY the
cubes move but nothing else does.
| | 01:30 | So, that obviously didn't work.
| | 01:33 | To add to our frustration when we open
up Group 1 the Particle Replicator and
| | 01:37 | I want to move my spheres...uh oh, the text
comes along for the ride. So, they're connected.
| | 01:43 | Even though we linked up Group
2's position, it used Group 1.
| | 01:49 | The reason why is, that there are five
Groups here in Element and the naming
| | 01:54 | conventions are all the same for all of them.
| | 01:57 | So, what we need to do.
| | 01:59 | In order to connect things up correctly
in Element is to hold the Option key on
| | 02:04 | the Mac or the Alt key on the PC.
| | 02:06 | Now, I'm going to go and undo that, undo
that again to get rid of the expression
| | 02:12 | that we created. And actually we need to
do Command+Z, Command+Z there we go.
| | 02:19 | That would be Ctrl+Z on the PC to undo that.
| | 02:22 | Now, what I want to do instead is I
want to Option+Click or Alt+Click Position
| | 02:27 | again and this time when I drag the pick
-whip, I'm going to hold the Option key
| | 02:32 | on the Mac or the Alt key on the PC.
| | 02:34 | So, I know we've already clicked
that once. We've already Option+Click or
| | 02:37 | Alt+Click the stopwatch but we need
to hold that Alt or Option key one more
| | 02:41 | time, while we drag the pick-whip to
the Position XY of Group 2 and then it uses
| | 02:48 | the number of the parameter in the
expression and that allows us to adjust
| | 02:55 | Position XY. And now, our text layer is linked
to the Group 2 Position XY just, like we wanted.
| | 03:06 | So, just a little trick when dealing
with expressions in element. Again, when
| | 03:11 | you're connecting outside layers or
anything else to properties in Element
| | 03:16 | hold down the Option or Alt key, so
that you use the number of the parameter
| | 03:21 | and not its name.
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| Using the Elementary script| 00:00 | So, I have a little bit of confession
to make, in this project we have been
| | 00:04 | looking at here and there throughout
this training series where I have like this
| | 00:08 | sphere full of cubes casting or
reflection or casting a shadow rather.
| | 00:12 | This shadow was fake I went and I
rendered a still frame of that object and then
| | 00:19 | distorted it and tweaked it so it looks
like a shadow, but actually it's just a
| | 00:23 | single solitary layer it's not a real shadow.
| | 00:25 | And that's because again at the time
of this recording Element can't cast
| | 00:29 | shadows. It's something that they are
working on so, maybe about the time you're
| | 00:33 | watching this, we'll be able to do that.
| | 00:35 | But there are some limitations with
Element as we talked about, the reflections
| | 00:39 | and that type of thing.
| | 00:40 | But there is a script that has
been created that you can purchase.
| | 00:45 | That will allow you to overcome
some of these obstacles and it's called
| | 00:49 | Elementary. And once you install it, I
can to the Window menu and open this up.
| | 00:56 | It's actually a script or the UI scripts
and this is what elementary looks like.
| | 01:02 | And what it can do, it actually does a
host of things. This actually is a really
| | 01:06 | robust few buttons here.
| | 01:08 | What I'm going to is a I'm going to
select the Element layer and I am going to
| | 01:12 | Create what's called an Anchor in
Elementary language and that will allow me to
| | 01:17 | control Group 1. So, anchor is almost
like a separate layer of a group. So, I
| | 01:24 | click OK and now I have
Element-Group 1 on its own layer.
| | 01:31 | I can open up this layer and I have my
Transform properties like Position, Scale.
| | 01:38 | And as I move this layer, the separate
independent layer, it adjusts the group as
| | 01:45 | if it were a separate layer, which it
kind of is, it controls these parameters
| | 01:50 | through Element, so now have access to
Scale and all these other attributes, Y
| | 01:55 | Rotation, everything else through this layer.
| | 01:59 | So now, I could parent other layers to
this and I could control other layers
| | 02:04 | through expressions and everything else much
more easily because it's now its own group.
| | 02:09 | I could also link up lights to it and a bunch
of other things because it is its own layer.
| | 02:15 | I'm going to go head and Undo that by
going back to Edit>Undo Change Value few
| | 02:21 | times. I will just press Command+Z.
Alternately, I could select this Element Group
| | 02:25 | 1 and click the Delete button in
Elementary and that gets me back to square one
| | 02:29 | and undoes all the
expressions and everything else.
| | 02:31 | Now, another great trick of
Elementary is it can recreate reflections and
| | 02:38 | shadows among other things.
| | 02:39 | So, I'm going to select my Spotlight
here, which looks like that, and I'm going to
| | 02:44 | Command+Click on the Mac or Ctrl+Click
on the PC the Element layer and then I'm
| | 02:49 | going to click on Shadow. And in just a
moment, we have this shadow here that we
| | 02:57 | can adjust. And this is not a faked
shadow like the one I've been using.
| | 03:01 | It is an actual real shadow.
| | 03:04 | So, I can move my Light and you could
see that the shadow responds accordingly.
| | 03:10 | So, this is a great handy feature and
this is a pretty advanced example just to
| | 03:16 | give Elementary some extra credit.
| | 03:18 | If you are doing some simple light
text reflections and motion graphics type
| | 03:21 | stuff Elementary is just incredible.
| | 03:23 | There is a bunch of trick too that you could
do. Cel-Shading and a few other things. And
| | 03:28 | Elementary is a script, again, you could
purchase it separately but it is really
| | 03:32 | inexpensive as a matter of fact.
| | 03:34 | If you go to aescripts.com/elementary
this is where you can purchase it, its
| | 03:39 | Name Your Own Price.
| | 03:40 | The suggestion is a very fair $29.99
| | 03:44 | but you can actually pay whatever you wanted.
| | 03:46 | And there's also much more
information about how to use the plug-in and also
| | 03:52 | other things that you can use with it.
| | 03:54 | For example, you could also use
ELEMENTARY that Elementary script to with
| | 03:58 | Trapcode Form in particular as well as
After Effects Shatter and other tools as well.
| | 04:05 | So, if you're serious about using
element I highly recommend checking out
| | 04:08 | the Elementary Script.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
9. Using the Animation EngineUsing the animation engine| 00:00 | We're now going to look at the powerful
Animation Engine inside of Element. And
| | 00:04 | this thing is a beast.
| | 00:06 | Honestly, this chapter is taking me the
longest time to prepare for. There's not
| | 00:10 | too much documentation on it, as of yet.
| | 00:13 | So, let's talk about what
this is. What the animation does--
| | 00:16 | if you open up the Animation Engine
section in Element--it enables you to blend
| | 00:22 | between two groups. Or, in other words,
it allows you to morph or interpolate
| | 00:29 | between the settings of two different groups.
| | 00:32 | So, in this first comp, Animation
Engine Basics, if we open up the Animation
| | 00:36 | section on the Element layer, we
know that we have two shapes here.
| | 00:42 | On Group 1, we have a series of
cubes that are in a ring shape.
| | 00:48 | So, if I reduce this, you can actually
see those rings. And then, on Group 2, we
| | 00:54 | have also a series of cubes, but they
are placed in a grid, a 3D grid. And, notice
| | 01:00 | that there are different material
settings applied there: green material on the
| | 01:05 | ring, and kind of, like, a
grayish-bluish color on the cubes.
| | 01:10 | And, so, if I enable the Animation Engine,
we instantly have Group 2 disappear,
| | 01:16 | because by default, it's going to morph
from Start Group 1 into Group 2. And, so,
| | 01:23 | if I increase the Animation parameter
percentage here, and I increase that,
| | 01:28 | you'll see that the cubes go from the first
position, the first state Group 1, into Group 2.
| | 01:36 | And, you can see that the Material
Properties are changing as well.
| | 01:40 | And also, you could see that in the
interim, in the transition, we have some
| | 01:46 | really cool-looking animation as
these blocks kind of form and assemble. And
| | 01:51 | again, this is a very simple example,
meant to just illustrate the point, but it
| | 01:55 | still looks pretty cool.
| | 01:57 | So, let's talk about this Animation
Engine here, and what all is controlled by
| | 02:01 | the Animation Engine.
| | 02:02 | Again, this is one of those things that
just took me a long time to figure out.
| | 02:06 | So, hopefully, this little chart helps.
| | 02:08 | First of all, we can morph between
Replicator Shapes. And, we saw that in
| | 02:14 | our initial example.
| | 02:15 | So, when we went from a ring, and we
morphed into a grid, we saw how that worked.
| | 02:23 | So, that's one thing that the
Animation Engine could blend between.
| | 02:26 | We also have Basic Transforms. So, if
we have one group's position different
| | 02:31 | than the other group's position, it
will blend between those or Position, and
| | 02:35 | Rotation, and Scale. And also Scatter and
Position Noise are interpolated between.
| | 02:41 | And we also have Material
properties of the same model.
| | 02:45 | So, we saw that also with our example.
We have two different materials on our
| | 02:48 | ring and our 3D grid cubes, and it
morphed between those two materials, but it's
| | 02:53 | important that you
understand that it's the same model.
| | 02:56 | Multi-Object settings are another
one of those things that can be morphed
| | 03:00 | between. We'll talk about this a lot
when we get into shattering and fracturing
| | 03:04 | objects later on in the chapter.
And, this is a key element right here.
| | 03:08 | If we have two different 3D objects,
it'll create a cross-scale between them, and
| | 03:15 | sometimes this creates kind of weird
results, and in some instances, though, this creates
| | 03:19 | a pretty cool effect.
| | 03:20 | Let's go back to After Effects.
| | 03:22 | I'm going to go over to the
Particle Cross-Scale composition.
| | 03:24 | And here we have two different groups.
We have Group 1, which is a series of--I
| | 03:32 | am going to hide my cloud here--we have
a series of raindrops, 3D Raindrops, and
| | 03:37 | we also have a series of blobs, here,
that's supposed to look kind of like
| | 03:41 | stylized snow, and they're spread out
in a 3D grid-pattern on the ground.
| | 03:47 | So, if we go back to Element, and we
enable the Animation Engine, we can see that
| | 03:54 | the raindrops fall, and they do that
Cross-Scale thing I was talking about,
| | 03:59 | because they are two different 3D
objects. And because their animation overlaps
| | 04:04 | perfectly--let me actually zoom in
here, so we could get a better look of
| | 04:07 | what's going on here--
| | 04:08 | So, if you watch some of these particles
here--so like this one here for example,
| | 04:13 | this raindrop in the background--
it's kind of morphing into a blob and it
| | 04:19 | creates a pretty cool look.
| | 04:21 | Now, most 3D objects--and it depends on
the animation that you're doing, of course,
| | 04:26 | too--but most 3D objects don't blend
that nicely together for the result that
| | 04:31 | you're looking for. But, again,
sometimes, it does work out great, and it makes a
| | 04:36 | wonderful-looking example like this.
| | 04:39 | So, just beware that these are
the basics of the Animation Engine.
| | 04:42 | In the next movie, we're going to be
explaining these animation types, and also,
| | 04:47 | as we go through the chapter, we're
going to be, be getting more in the detail of
| | 04:50 | what this Animation Engine does.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Understanding animation types| 00:00 | In this movie, we are going to look at
the Animation Type parameter, as well as
| | 00:04 | many other of these
settings, in the Animation Engine.
| | 00:07 | And, we have, again, a very non-
practical, non-real-world example.
| | 00:11 | We just have two 3D grids of cubes.
| | 00:14 | But, this is what's going to help us
understand really what's going on here,
| | 00:18 | before we get into more practical
examples later on in the chapter.
| | 00:21 | So, again, I just have these two walls
of 3D grid of cubes, and Group 1 is in the
| | 00:26 | front, Group 2 is in the back.
| | 00:28 | So, let's enable the Animation Engine,
and we will just get these first cubes.
| | 00:32 | And let's increase the Animation parameter.
| | 00:35 | What that's doing, by default, is
using the directional animation type.
| | 00:40 | This is making the particles disappear,
or, rather, transition on from the left
| | 00:46 | side to the right side of Group 1, and
then also reappear or morph into Group
| | 00:52 | 2, from left to right.
| | 00:54 | So, if we, let's say, for example, take
this half way--and I will go and select
| | 01:00 | the Unified Camera tool and move this around--
you can see we have a nice, little staircase here.
| | 01:04 | Now, we can use this as, like, a
transition for a logo, or, just a still image, or
| | 01:09 | whatever we want, maybe a
background or something.
| | 01:11 | We don't necessarily have to animate
this parameter. We can leave it stuck here,
| | 01:14 | which gives us some pretty cool results.
| | 01:17 | Now, another thing that we can do
here is change the Animation Type to
| | 01:21 | Radial, for example.
| | 01:23 | Take this back to zero.
| | 01:24 | And, as I increase this, we see the
particles now come from the center in a
| | 01:29 | radial motion, and they also gather in a
radial motion in Group 2, which creates
| | 01:36 | a really interesting and smooth transition.
| | 01:39 | And, again, as we move this around, it
creates, now, this kind of cool bowl look.
| | 01:44 | So, we could use these animation tools.
Animation Engine--almost like a modeling
| | 01:47 | tool--it creates some really
interesting shapes that way.
| | 01:51 | I am just going to undo that.
| | 01:52 | Now, let me take Animation down to
zero, and Animation Type to Uniform.
| | 01:57 | And, as we do that, basically, it's
just going to move the whole object.
| | 02:01 | It's just going to try to move
every, single one of the cubes uniformly.
| | 02:06 | Now, if we increase Randomness, which
actually is the parameter available for
| | 02:11 | every animation type, then, as we
increase Animation, we get pixels uniformly
| | 02:17 | going back, but in a random way.
| | 02:21 | Let's take this to Directional,
and see what Randomness does there.
| | 02:25 | Actually, let me take down right on this
just a little bit. As we increase this,
| | 02:28 | it's still going from left
to right, but in a random way.
| | 02:33 | Now, I am going to take Randomness all
the way down to 0, Animation all the way
| | 02:38 | down to 0, and change the
Animation Type to Random.
| | 02:40 | So, it's actually a random animation type.
| | 02:43 | As we increase the Animation parameter,
you can see that we kind of go all
| | 02:48 | screwy; the particles disappear in
a random way, and they also reassign
| | 02:54 | themselves in a random way, as well.
| | 02:57 | So, it's not like the cube in the
upper left-hand corner is going to the cube
| | 03:00 | of the upper left-hand corner in Group 2;
it's just going to some crazy random place.
| | 03:06 | Now, let's take Animation Type
back to Directional, and we'll take
| | 03:09 | Animation back down to zero.
| | 03:12 | And, let's increase it a little bit,
until we see some of these stairs, here.
| | 03:17 | We see this nice smoothness, as these
particles go from left to right, here,
| | 03:21 | creating that cool stair-
stepping look that we saw earlier.
| | 03:24 | But, I can also adjust that with Smoothness.
| | 03:27 | If I take this down to zero, we see that
these particles still move from left to
| | 03:30 | right, but it's not so smooth; it's very blocky.
| | 03:34 | And they're either there, or they are not there.
| | 03:36 | They are completely in the Group 1 state,
or they are completely in the Group 2 state.
| | 03:42 | Now, we could also do the opposite here.
| | 03:43 | We could take the Smoothness
value, increase that to 100.
| | 03:47 | So, then, when things move, well, it looks
kind of ridiculous, because it's kind of
| | 03:50 | like, Uniform here, but we could
take this down just a little bit.
| | 03:54 | And then, as these particles move, it's
just a lot smoother. They kind of fall
| | 03:59 | nicely into place there.
| | 04:00 | So, you can see, there is just so
much you can do with these properties.
| | 04:04 | And, of course, we don't have to start
with Group 1 and Group 2. We could choose
| | 04:07 | any group and morph into any other group.
| | 04:10 | As a matter of fact, if you wanted
to change these groups, you could just
| | 04:13 | change group directions.
| | 04:14 | Right now, we're going forward, which means
that we're going from Group 1 to Group 2.
| | 04:19 | But, we can also go backwards, so that
we start at Group 2 and end in Group 1 by
| | 04:26 | just changing the Group Direction parameter.
| | 04:28 | Another cool feature of this is
that it automatically eases for you.
| | 04:31 | So, if we were to animate from 0 to 100,
we'd see a nice, smooth easing in and
| | 04:36 | easing out motion with these blocks.
| | 04:39 | But, you might not want that.
| | 04:40 | So, under Ease Type, you can change
Ease, which eases in and out, or you
| | 04:45 | could just ease in, or just ease out,
or you could just turn this off and have
| | 04:48 | Linear Interpolation.
| | 04:49 | Now, for most of these animation
types, you will have additional options.
| | 04:53 | So, for Directional, we
have directional options.
| | 04:56 | So, if I, let's say, take this down--I
should take this back to Forward--then we
| | 05:01 | have these smooth transitions here,
and we could actually change the
| | 05:05 | Directional options--just adjust the
pitch--and so now we have this kind of
| | 05:09 | more diagonal transition.
| | 05:14 | And, if we change the Animation Type to Radial,
we will get radial options and so forth.
| | 05:18 | I am going to go back to Directional
for a second, and I am going to take off
| | 05:23 | the pitch adjustment that I made.
| | 05:25 | And I want to show you something
that looks kind of interesting.
| | 05:28 | When you change the Animation Type, by
default, this changes both the way that
| | 05:32 | the particles leave the start
group, and enter the finish group.
| | 05:38 | So, this Directional applies to
both how the particles leave, and how
| | 05:42 | the particles arrive.
| | 05:44 | But, you may want two different states for that.
| | 05:47 | You might want the particles to leave in a
certain way, and then arrive in a certain way.
| | 05:51 | And, so, that's why we have
the Dual Animation Mode.
| | 05:53 | So, if I open this up here, we can turn
this on to Directional, and we'll change
| | 05:59 | our Initial Animation Type to Radial.
| | 06:02 | So, now, when the particles leave,
they leave in a radial way, and when they
| | 06:08 | gather into Group 2, they gather in
a directional way from left to right.
| | 06:14 | So, we can change these different
modes, and really have a lot of fun with
| | 06:20 | playing around with these different settings.
| | 06:21 | There is a lot to do here; it's very powerful.
| | 06:24 | We actually have all these same Directional
options for the Dual Animation Mode as well.
| | 06:29 | So, really, the possibilities are endless
for morphing from one group to the next.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Making groups similar| 00:00 | In this tutorial, we are going to look
at how to make groups similar. And why do
| | 00:03 | you even want to do that, in the first place?
| | 00:05 | As part of our subject, we are going to be
looking at this little, tiny Lynda bumper.
| | 00:08 | (video playing)
| | 00:16 | So, part of this, is that we have the
Lynda slogan, "You can learn it." And what's
| | 00:24 | kind of fun about this, is that
these two shapes are very similar.
| | 00:29 | As we talked about before, when we
have similar materials on the same object,
| | 00:35 | or when we have the same object with
different Replicator Shapes, they kind of
| | 00:39 | morph into each other nicely.
| | 00:41 | And, so, then, it's a good idea to learn
how to copy from one group to the next.
| | 00:46 | In our case, here, we have the same
Replicator Shape, and we, pretty, pretty much the same
| | 00:50 | Replicator settings. We have different
object, and so we're getting that cross-
| | 00:54 | scaling that we talked about before.
| | 00:57 | But, it's still a really cool effect,
and it comes in so handy to be able to
| | 01:02 | copy groups. So let's look at how to do this.
| | 01:05 | Let's go to Copy/Paste Groups START. Go
to Element, where we have a big mess here.
| | 01:10 | We have our Group 1 set up correctly,
and it's in a Sphere Replicator with
| | 01:15 | the text sticking out.
| | 01:16 | So, if we go into the Y rotation here,
we can see it kind of spinning around.
| | 01:23 | So, that's kind of how we want it. That's good.
| | 01:26 | But, "learn it" is just a mess. I
haven't done anything with "learn it" yet. It is just
| | 01:30 | regular Point Replicator and one object.
Turn that on, and off, there. Put it back to one, there.
| | 01:36 | But, what we can do to quickly to make
these the same is to open up Group 1.
| | 01:41 | I'll close the Particle Replicator area.
| | 01:44 | If you open up Copy/Paste Group, I can click
Copy. This is also a great place to Reset stuff.
| | 01:50 | So, if you play around with all of
these settings, you just want to get back to
| | 01:52 | square one, click the Reset
button, and go back to square 1.
| | 01:56 | I am going to go to Group 2, and I am
going to open up Copy/Paste Group, and now,
| | 02:01 | I am going to Paste.
| | 02:02 | And now, all those settings--the Size,
the Shape, the Replicator, everything--it's
| | 02:07 | all in the correct spot for Group 2.
| | 02:11 | So, now we can turn on the Animation
Engine and animate between these two.
| | 02:17 | Now, additionally, what I did in the
little example, here, is I added some rotation
| | 02:22 | for the, on the Y-axis, for both the
Replicator Groups of "you can" and "learn it."
| | 02:29 | And, I played with Scale Shape to make
that pop up, and then, also animated it to
| | 02:35 | go down at the end there.
| | 02:37 | But, the core of the animation was
created, because of Copying and Pasting the
| | 02:43 | Groups to make them identical.
| | 02:45 | Now, again, you can imagine, if we had the
same text--if we had "learn it," for example,
| | 02:49 | in both Group 1 and Group 2, in
different materials--then we could Copy and Paste
| | 02:53 | them, so that the shapes are the same,
but the materials transfer over.
| | 02:57 | It's a really handy tool to be able
to be aware of as you're working with
| | 03:01 | the Animation Engine.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Fracturing objects| 00:00 | In this tutorial, we are going to
look at blowing stuff up, like this.
| | 00:05 | (video playing)
| | 00:11 | I am not sure what it is, but something
inside of me gets very happy when that happens.
| | 00:16 | But, we're going to talk about blowing
stuff up. I realize we have already talked
| | 00:19 | about, kind of, how to do this, because
we have already talked about Multi-Sub-
| | 00:23 | Objects and how to activate them, and
have those pieces kind of scatter.
| | 00:28 | But, when we are working with the
Animation Engine inside of After Effects, there is
| | 00:33 | actually a little bit more that we
can do. This is actually much more
| | 00:36 | complicated than it seems.
| | 00:37 | If I go over to Fractured FINAL, we
could see the actual composition that I
| | 00:41 | used to render this.
| | 00:43 | And, it seems like there is just a
few things going on, here. But, in
| | 00:48 | actuality, there is a lot.
| | 00:51 | So, I have two layers of Element. Actually,
I have one layer of Element that's just
| | 00:56 | an environment object, with the
environment on it. And, it's the blurred version,
| | 01:01 | because glass looks so much better
when you have really sharp highlights.
| | 01:06 | And, on this Element layer, the main
Element layer, there is actually all five
| | 01:10 | groups taken up. One is the grid of
cubes, one is the little steel ball
| | 01:16 | that comes in and blows everything
up, and the other three groups are
| | 01:19 | actually the wine glass.
| | 01:22 | So, if we look at this, here, and
actually, let's go over to Fractured START, so
| | 01:26 | we can actually play around with this, and
it's a little bit lower quality, so it's a
| | 01:29 | little snappier here.
| | 01:31 | What happens is, again, we have
three different wine glasses here.
| | 01:35 | We have one that's not broke, so the
3D is not Fractured. Then, at the one mark,
| | 01:42 | here, we swap out to a Fractured
glass, and that's on Group 2. That's just a
| | 01:48 | Regular 3D Object that's
cracked, but it doesn't move.
| | 01:53 | And then we have the same groups. So, I
copy Group 2, and put it on Group 3. And, that's
| | 01:58 | the shattered glass. It's actually
spread out. It has Multi-Object enabled, and
| | 02:04 | the pieces are spread out.
| | 02:05 | So, that way, when I come down to
Animation Engine, and I increase the
| | 02:09 | Animation, it kind of morphs from the
cracked glass to the cracked glass with
| | 02:15 | the pieces going everywhere.
| | 02:17 | If I disable this, here, so that we're
seeing both at the same time, you could see
| | 02:22 | that the cracked glass comes on, and we
can see the pieces of the cracked glass
| | 02:28 | before the ball hits it.
| | 02:30 | So, again, what I did is, I had the
good glass, and I animated it from 1 Particle
| | 02:37 | Count, and then, when it gets to this
mark here, I animated it so the Particle
| | 02:41 | Count goes to zero, so that clean glass disappears,
| | 02:45 | and then, the shattered glass goes,
morphs into--using Animation Engine--morphs
| | 02:51 | into Group 3, with the shattered
glass with the pieces going everywhere.
| | 02:54 | Now, as fun as it is to blow stuff up,
Element, as of the time of this recording,
| | 02:59 | cannot fracture 3D objects. They have
to be brought in already fractured.
| | 03:05 | The way that I did that was I went in
CINEMA 4D. Let's go and create a simple cube,
| | 03:09 | here, and then I used a Plugin called
Xplode. This does not come with CINEMA 4D.
| | 03:14 | This is an extra purchase, but it's
like really, really inexpensive.
| | 03:18 | And so, I click on Xplode, and with the
object selected, I will add it, and then I
| | 03:22 | will click Scatter, and in few moments,
it does its thing, and then we have a
| | 03:27 | fractured cube with a bunch of different pieces.
| | 03:30 | These pieces are recognized by Element
when we go back to AfterEffects here, and
| | 03:37 | we open up the Particle Replicator section.
| | 03:41 | Excuse me, not the Particle Replicator
section, Particle Look. Multi-Object, and
| | 03:45 | then we enable Multi-object, and then
we can scatter these pieces, or displace
| | 03:50 | them, whatever we want to do with them.
| | 03:53 | And, I find it easier--even though we
could just animate Scatter with Multi-Object,
| | 03:56 | and not use the Animation Engine--
| | 03:58 | I found it was much easier, and I had
more control, when I got this initial
| | 04:03 | state of the fractured object in
Group 2 or whatever group it is.
| | 04:07 | And then, the completely scattered
object, with the pieces exactly the way
| | 04:11 | I wanted them in another Group, and then I
animated between them with one parameter.
| | 04:17 | So, basically, instead of setting a
bunch of keyframes, I just changed the
| | 04:20 | settings of the two groups, and then
I set one keyframe for Animation to
| | 04:25 | animate between them.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Animating object materials| 00:00 | In this movie, we are going to take a closer
look at animating materials and we are going
| | 00:04 | to learn a few little tricks along the way.
| | 00:06 | We are going to be looking at
this example here.
| | 00:08 | (video playing)
| | 00:14 | A little sci-fi hallway, and you'll notice
that these materials here, that these lights
| | 00:19 | flicker on and off.
| | 00:20 | This is actually just a change in materials.
| | 00:23 | So, this is a very different example than
what we've seen, this is not just a bunch
| | 00:26 | of spheres or cubes changing materials.
| | 00:30 | This is a more practical example of this.
| | 00:33 | So, let's go to the Animating Materials START
composition, where we have our little hallway,
| | 00:37 | and we are backing out.
| | 00:38 | We just have this one object.
| | 00:40 | So, let's go ahead and select the Element layer,
click Scene Setup, and jump in and take a look here.
| | 00:46 | We have this sci-fi hallway,
there we go, that looks like there.
| | 00:50 | We have the sci-fi hallway
and it's just one object.
| | 00:53 | So, what we want to do is create another sci-fi
hallway with a different- colored light panel here.
| | 01:00 | This is just an illuminated
texture on this little part right here.
| | 01:03 | So, what we can do is right-click on the
hallway, and we'll choose Duplicate All.
| | 01:08 | This will duplicate the
model and all of its materials.
| | 01:12 | So, without further delay, I am going to
take the Duplicate off of Group 1 and put it on
| | 01:17 | Group 2, so we can animate between them.
| | 01:19 | So, with this selected, I am going to scroll
down to its Materials Settings here and you'll
| | 01:25 | notice that Illumination has just a plain, old,
white color, but it says Use Diffuse Color.
| | 01:31 | So, it's actually using the Diffuse
Color of the object for the Illumination.
| | 01:36 | So, we want to actually change the
Diffuse Color, not the Illumination Color.
| | 01:39 | So, we will click this swatch here, and
we'll change the color to red, just drag the Hue
| | 01:45 | slider down there, and
we'll go ahead and click OK.
| | 01:48 | So, now we have on Group 1, the hallway
with the orange lights, and then on Group 2, we
| | 01:54 | have the hallway with the red lights.
| | 01:56 | Now, we'll go ahead and click OK.
| | 01:58 | Now, what we can do is enable the
Animation Engine--if it's not enabled already-- and
| | 02:03 | we could animate between these. Look at that.
| | 02:08 | Now, it appears as we animate between them,
that there's a little bit of a position shift.
| | 02:14 | So, what we can do is go to Group 1, open
up Copy/Paste Group, and we'll copy Group
| | 02:19 | 1, and we'll paste that onto Group 2.
| | 02:23 | That ensures that these are both the exact, same
position, and there's no more movement between the two.
| | 02:30 | That Copy/Paste comes in handy so much.
| | 02:32 | Now, close up these two groups.
| | 02:34 | And, what I want to do, to animate
this, is actually create an expression.
| | 02:40 | I kind of want to just go on
and off and kind of cycle through.
| | 02:43 | So, instead of just setting a bunch of
keyframes, I am just going to use an expression.
| | 02:46 | So, I am going to right-click on the
Animation Property and choose Reveal in Timeline, and
| | 02:51 | I could see it here, where I am
going to be able to create my expression.
| | 02:54 | I'm going to hold the Option key on the Mac or
the Alt key on the PC and click the Animation
| | 03:01 | Property, and the expression I am going to
use is a simple sine wave, Math.sin(time).
| | 03:08 | Now, it's going to return very low values
that we won't really even see, so I am going
| | 03:15 | to multiply this times 100,
and click outside to accept it.
| | 03:20 | Now, if we play this back, we'll see that it,
indeed, oscillates between the two parameters,
| | 03:28 | but it goes really slow.
| | 03:29 | So, let's go ahead and click inside the
expression again, and add an asterisk (*) and then times
| | 03:36 | 5, so basically, now we have the sine
wave, that's being generated by the time.
| | 03:42 | So as it progresses in time, it's going
back and forth, and so we multiply it times 5,
| | 03:47 | and then times 100.
| | 03:48 | And now we've our final animation;
oscillating materials, because of the Animation Engine;
| | 03:57 | and with this expression.
| | 04:00 | Pretty cool trick all around.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Fading objects in and out| 00:00 | In this brief tutorial, we are just
going to take a quick look at how to
| | 00:02 | animate object opacity.
| | 00:05 | Now, we know that there's the Force
Opacity option inside of Element. We also
| | 00:09 | know that we could animate
the opacity of the layer.
| | 00:13 | But, that would fade the opacity of all the
objects on the layer; we don't want to do that.
| | 00:18 | I just want to fade the
opacity of this main object in front.
| | 00:22 | So, we could actually do
this using the Animation Engine.
| | 00:25 | If I go to the Scene Setup button to
see what we are working with here, we have
| | 00:30 | a regular box on Group 1, and then we
have the boxes in the background--flat_box.
| | 00:39 | And then, we also have boxes on box 2,
but what I've done for the boxes on box 2,
| | 00:44 | or on Group 2, excuse me, is that I have lowered
the Force Opacity all the way down to 0.
| | 00:51 | So it's basically invisible.
| | 00:53 | And, because the Animation Engine blends
between materials on this same object,
| | 00:59 | if we animate the Animation Engine, or
turn on the Animation Engine, animate
| | 01:03 | between these properties, we
can actually fade things out.
| | 01:08 | I have, like, a little spin on this, and
some different material settings on the
| | 01:15 | disappearing cube as well, which creates, kind of like, a
more of a, a cyan look to them, as they, as they fade out.
| | 01:23 | But if we wanted to, we could take
Smoothness this all the way down, and the
| | 01:26 | objects could fade out
quickly, or at least more quickly.
| | 01:30 | So, this is just something to be aware
of as you're working with Element, and
| | 01:34 | you are trying to figure out how to
fade out objects. Let the Animation Engine
| | 01:38 | work for you and blend between the
materials of the same object and fade them
| | 01:44 | out like that.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Animating text| 00:00 | All right, folks! This is going to be a fun
one, the culmination of everything we've been
| | 00:04 | learning in this chapter.
| | 00:05 | We are going to learn about how to use
the Animation Engine to animate text, and
| | 00:10 | we are also going to learn a lot of
other stuff along the way, and we are going
| | 00:15 | to be creating this cool, little project.
| | 00:17 | (music playing)
| | 00:22 | Now, you will notice with this, that, by
the way, there is this actual 3D car and
| | 00:27 | this is on the Element Car layer.
| | 00:29 | But, just so your computers would not be
totally destroyed, I pre-rendered this.
| | 00:34 | But, for those of you that are
interested, this actual layer is here
| | 00:37 | and available for you.
| | 00:38 | This is a multi-million vertices model,
super high-quality, and Element handles
| | 00:45 | it like a champ, so you
can play around with that.
| | 00:47 | But, what's happening here is that this
text is animating kind of like regular
| | 00:53 | old After Effects text, which is one of
my favorite parts of After Effects, the
| | 00:56 | way it can handle text,
and do cool stuff with that.
[00:00.56.36]
And we miss that, any time we convert the text,
anything else besides just plain, old text.
| | 01:04 | But, we're going to be playing around
with this, and we are going to make this
| | 01:08 | jump up, and sing, and dance.
| | 01:10 | So, let's go over to the Animating Text
START composition where we have our basic
| | 01:14 | text and it's lying down.
| | 01:17 | So, if we go to the Element text layer,
we have Group 1, and here we have this
| | 01:23 | text laying down on the side.
| | 01:25 | We could open up Particle Replicator
and Rotation, and we can play around with
| | 01:29 | the X rotation. We could see that here
is the 3D text just rotated lying down.
| | 01:35 | Now, we also have on Group 2,
the text that is sitting up.
| | 01:40 | And, if we go to the Animation Engine,
enable it, we will increase the Animation
| | 01:44 | value, and now the text stands up.
| | 01:48 | No big deal, right, because we know
that the Animation Engine interpolates
| | 01:52 | between Rotation, Position, Scale,
that type of thing, Basic, Transform, so
| | 01:57 | that's what we are doing here;
we are just tilting it up.
| | 01:59 | So, that's really step one.
| | 02:01 | But, the next step here--and here's a
really cool trick that I discovered while
| | 02:05 | I was playing around with this--is
that if we enable Multi-Object for both
| | 02:11 | groups--so you enable it on
Group 2, open up Group 1, Particle Look, and
| | 02:17 | open up Multi-Object, enable that--
| | 02:19 | then, it will see each
character as its own, little object.
| | 02:24 | So then, as the animation interpolates
between laying down and sitting up, it
| | 02:30 | kind of goes one at a time.
| | 02:33 | And, the Environment Map is such that
it, kind of, catches the light as it comes
| | 02:38 | up, and that just looks
pretty awesome. So, there's that.
| | 02:43 | Now, a couple other
examples, here, in the same composition.
| | 02:47 | We have the Element Core,
this little object here.
| | 02:51 | And, if I open up the Animation Engine,
we can see that this is just a simple
| | 02:54 | little wedge, like a wedge of a
sphere that I made in CINEMA 4D.
| | 02:58 | And, as we animate that, it
increases all of those little objects here.
| | 03:05 | And basically, there is randomized
size, so they are all just kind of at
| | 03:10 | different sizes there, so that comes on.
That's kind of a fun little animation.
| | 03:14 | And then, also, we have the Element Rings.
| | 03:16 | We have another ring of cubes, and
there is another ring of cubes behind it, on
| | 03:21 | Group 1, that's actually invisible, like
we learned about in the last tutorial.
| | 03:27 | So, as this cube comes on, it's
appearing to kind of fade in--the opposite of
| | 03:34 | what we did in the last movie.
| | 03:36 | And it's kind of coming on in a
round way, because I am using the
| | 03:39 | Radial Animation Type.
| | 03:41 | So, it appears like these spheres kind
of, just, animate on in a really cool way.
| | 03:47 | So, what I did, also, was I'll right-click
on the Animation Property, here, and click,
| | 03:51 | no, not Reset. I am going to right-
click and choose Reveal in Timeline. Same
| | 03:56 | thing with Element Core, and
same thing with the Element Text.
| | 04:04 | Okay, that's going to give
me all of those properties.
| | 04:06 | And I'll maximize this;
| | 04:08 | So many properties in
Element. Look at that. That's ridiculous.
| | 04:13 | And what I want to do is I want to
connect the animation of the Element Core and
| | 04:18 | Element Ring layers to the text.
| | 04:21 | So, I am going to hold the Option key
on the Mac, or the Alt key on the PC, and
| | 04:25 | click the Animation stopwatch to set
an expression, drag the pick whip to
| | 04:31 | Animation>Animation Property, and
click in a blank area here to accept that.
| | 04:37 | Now, note that we don't have to hold
the Option or Alt key with the pick whip
| | 04:40 | like we did before, because there is
only one animation property in Element.
| | 04:45 | So, we are safe there.
| | 04:46 | And I will drag this down; link that up.
| | 04:51 | Now, what's really cool, if I minimize
this again, is if I select my Element
| | 04:58 | text layer, this animation property is
now controlling the animation of the ring,
| | 05:04 | and of the core of the logo.
| | 05:06 | So, as I increase this, now all these
things are connected, and they are all
| | 05:11 | animating at the same time,
which creates, again, a very cool look.
| | 05:17 | So, that's how to animate text in Element 3D.
| | 05:20 | It's amazing with this Multi-Object
stuff that you could break up the text into
| | 05:25 | individual characters, allowing you to
create some really cool text animations.
| | 05:29 | I recommend experimenting with this
and seeing what you can come up with.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
10. Adding PolishAdding fog| 00:00 | In this very important chapter, we
are going to look at adding finishing
| | 00:04 | touches to our project.
| | 00:06 | So, first up, we are going to look at
something called fog, which may not seem
| | 00:09 | like it comes in handy, but it really does.
| | 00:11 | In this example, we have red fog in
the back, which creates this illusion that
| | 00:16 | these objects are receding into the distance.
| | 00:18 | If we hop on over to the Fog START
comp, we don't see that, and that really
| | 00:24 | prevents the composite
from being believable here.
| | 00:28 | Now, let's quickly go over to the
landscape comp, where we have a real world
| | 00:31 | photo; we could understand
what this Fog idea means.
| | 00:35 | In the real world--like if I was going to
talk to my mom and say hey mom, "what's fog?"--
| | 00:38 | she would think that it means kind of
like that smokiness. And, it's not really
| | 00:44 | the smokiness that we talked about when
we're working with fog in compositing.
| | 00:48 | It's really this attribute of real-world
environments that creates this blend of
| | 00:54 | the sky tone with tones in the
background, as they get farther away.
| | 00:58 | For example, if we look at the Info
panel here--while I drag my cursor around
| | 01:03 | the sky--we will see that there is
more blue than any other color in the sky.
| | 01:10 | And, as we put our cursor over these green
trees, we can see that the blue level is
| | 01:15 | about maybe 60, 50, 70, depending
on where I am, but that's the average.
| | 01:22 | And, if we go farther back, these same
trees, the blue level is now 80 to 90.
| | 01:28 | And if we go even farther
back, where it's dark, it gets even higher.
| | 01:33 | Now, it's still in the 80 to 90 range, maybe
the high 90s, and that is because that, as
| | 01:37 | these trees go back in the distance,
they are blending more with the sky; hence
| | 01:42 | they are getting more blue.
| | 01:44 | So, even when we aren't dealing with a
motion graphic example like this--where we
| | 01:48 | have actual fog and smoke in the
background that we want to blend with--it still pays
| | 01:54 | to use fog to make objects look like
they are receding back into the distance.
| | 01:58 | So, let's go over to the Fog START comp.
Here's how this works. We will go to
| | 02:01 | Element, open up the Render settings
area, then open up Fog. And, by the way, the
| | 02:08 | Render Settings area, and also the
Output area, is where most of these final
| | 02:12 | touches that we are going to be
looking at in this chapter are stored.
| | 02:16 | So, we open up Fog, and the first thing we
want to do is enable it. I have already
| | 02:19 | chosen the correct color for you, but
we need to put this in the right spot.
| | 02:24 | We need to change the
Start Distance and the Range.
| | 02:27 | And one of things that's kind of confusing
is that the Range refers to the spread,
| | 02:33 | the feathering of the Fog.
| | 02:36 | So, it's kind of hard to see exactly
where it is, so if I take the Range to
| | 02:40 | 0, then we have a hard-and-fast area of
demarcation between fogged areas and non-fogged areas.
| | 02:48 | So, now we can increase the Start
Distance until we start to see where we
| | 02:54 | want the fog to start.
| | 02:56 | Now, I actually want the fog to
start a little bit earlier--maybe, like a
| | 02:59 | midpoint of some of these balls there--
so little bit on these middle ones.
| | 03:06 | And then I could increase the Range, which
again softens everything, so I don't have
| | 03:13 | as much fog, but that's
exactly what I want here.
| | 03:17 | So, again, we can see the before and
the after. This, again, really helps our
| | 03:22 | composite, especially because there's
actually animation in this, and there is
| | 03:26 | these spheres are circling around at
the y-axis, here, and as they come around,
| | 03:32 | they don't have the fog.
| | 03:33 | As they are closer to the
camera, they come out of that fog.
| | 03:36 | And that's something you just cannot
recreate with masks or any other trickery;
| | 03:41 | we really need this Fog parameter.
| | 03:43 | Now, one more quick example. Let's go
over to the Text Example comp, where we see
| | 03:47 | some text that we made earlier. And
throughout this chapter, we are going to be
| | 03:50 | seeing how some of these properties
also relate to the text. We can see them in
| | 03:53 | multiple situations.
| | 03:55 | So, let's open up Render Settings, and
Fog, and here I have not touched any
| | 03:59 | parameters. So, let's go ahead and
enable the Fog by clicking the checkbox.
| | 04:03 | And, again, one of things I like to do,
just to make sure that I can see where the
| | 04:07 | fog is--because the default range is
3000, which makes it really soft fog--is I
| | 04:12 | like to crank up the Opacity to 100%,
and I also like to take the Range down to
| | 04:18 | zero, just so I can see exactly where my fog is.
| | 04:22 | So, that's pretty awesome there.
| | 04:24 | Now, I am going to increase the Start
Distance that pushed that Fog back a little
| | 04:26 | bit, and that looks
pretty good right about there.
| | 04:31 | And now, we can increase the range, and
if we need to, we can bring the Start
| | 04:35 | Distance back a little bit; take down
the Range to make that a little bit sharper.
| | 04:41 | And now, we have almost like a vignette in
Z space, so we can kind of fade out the
| | 04:47 | background elements, if we want to, and
we can go back here to Opacity, and maybe
| | 04:51 | dial that back a little
bit, so it's not as harsh.
| | 04:54 | But, again, there's the before and
after, and things can look a lot better, and
| | 04:58 | more polished, and composite better by using Fog.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using ambient occlusion (AO)| 00:00 | Several times throughout this training
series, I refer to the fact that Element
| | 00:04 | does not cast shadows, and that is correct.
| | 00:07 | But, it does have a very valuable
substitute in something called Ambient Occlusion.
| | 00:14 | Now, earlier we looked at this example
with this rain that kind of morphs in the
| | 00:18 | snow, and falls on the ground.
| | 00:20 | And, if you look really closely, as these
little snow pellets, these stylized huge
| | 00:26 | snow pellets, come close to the ground,
you can see right here, that it is
| | 00:30 | starting to cast a shadow on the ground.
| | 00:32 | And then, as it lands in the ground,
there is a shadow around these little
| | 00:38 | pellets of snow landing on the ground.
| | 00:39 | It creates a very believable
effect as they land on the ground.
| | 00:44 | These are not really casting shadows.
| | 00:46 | Again, this is using something called
Ambient Occlusion, which is really helpful,
| | 00:50 | and I use Ambient Occlusion on
almost every single Element project ever.
| | 00:55 | So, let's go to Ambient
Occlusion START and see how this works.
| | 00:59 | Now, this does not have Ambient Occlusion on.
| | 01:01 | And, you can see how these snow pellets seem
to just kind of float in the air as they land.
| | 01:07 | That's not, that's not good.
| | 01:09 | So, let's go ahead and select the
Element layer, and open up Render Settings
| | 01:13 | again, and we'll open up Ambient Occlusion.
| | 01:16 | And, what Ambient occlusion does is
it creates shadows where areas come in
| | 01:22 | contact with each other.
| | 01:24 | Now, this only works on 3D objects in Element.
| | 01:28 | It doesn't recognize After
Effects 2D layers for this.
| | 01:32 | But, if I turn on Ambient
Occlusion, we see very faint shadows.
| | 01:37 | These settings are very mild by
default, sometimes hard to see.
| | 01:41 | So, let's take up the
Intensity a lot, like to 10.
| | 01:44 | And now, we can start to see darkness
in all these areas, and it's not just as
| | 01:49 | objects come in contact with other
3D objects, but also in the cracks and
| | 01:54 | crevices of the 3D objects themselves.
| | 01:56 | So, there's actually shadow detail now,
and these crevices like never before.
| | 02:01 | So, if you look, let's say, for example, over here,
we're seeing a little bit of shadow detail.
| | 02:05 | And, if I turn this off, we can see that go
away, and it kind of lights up a little bit more.
| | 02:10 | So, we could see the before and the after.
| | 02:13 | Now, one of the things we could also
do is that we can increase the Radius.
| | 02:19 | And, that's how I was able to
get the fake shadows, because
| | 02:22 | we're basically increasing the
distance, or the size, of the Ambient Occlusion,
| | 02:27 | which creates a bigger shadow area.
| | 02:29 | So, these objects actually don't have
to be exactly touching, in order for
| | 02:35 | the shadow to show up.
| | 02:36 | Of course, this looks ridiculous, but it
demonstrates the point that this is available.
| | 02:40 | If it's not smooth enough, you can
increase the Samples, and if it's also too
| | 02:45 | bright or too dark, we can
adjust that with the Gamma setting.
| | 02:49 | So, let's go over to the text example
and see how this works with the text.
| | 02:53 | I'm going to select the Element 3D layer,
| | 02:55 | open up Render Settings, and we'll close
Fog, and we'll open up Ambient Occlusion.
| | 03:01 | And we'll enable it, and we'll see the
difference that this makes in the text.
| | 03:04 | So, I'm going to zoom in so, we can
actually see this a little more closely.
| | 03:08 | One of the most important areas that
Ambient Occlusion helps is with contact
| | 03:13 | with other objects, as we just saw.
| | 03:15 | So, as I increase the Intensity--
| | 03:17 | let's, again, jack this up
really high, let's say to 10--
| | 03:20 | and, we can see this a little bit more clearly.
| | 03:23 | There is the before and the after.
| | 03:25 | So, you see in all of the areas of
contacts in between these crevices, they all
| | 03:32 | have this Ambient Occlusion.
Before, after. Before, after.
| | 03:38 | And, we could also increase the
Radius, or we could decrease it.
| | 03:41 | So, it's smaller, but just so it's
obvious, I'm going to crank up the Radius
| | 03:46 | a little bit, and again, we have a very high
Intensity value of 10, as high as it goes.
| | 03:51 | And, you'll notice that as we pull out,
and we can see everything, the difference
| | 03:57 | that it makes; that it seems like,
without Ambient Occlusion, that the text is
| | 04:01 | kind of floating on the background.
They really don't seem like they're
| | 04:04 | necessarily touching.
| | 04:06 | But, with Ambient Occlusion, you can
see these contact shadows, that they are.
| | 04:10 | And it also makes the text look more
believable, as well, even though these settings
| | 04:14 | are a little, little on hardcore side; maybe 5
would be a little bit better there.
| | 04:20 | In the real world, as objects touch,
we see this kind of contact shadow.
| | 04:25 | So, you'll probably want to
use this most of the time.
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| Using AO with invisible objects| 00:00 | Back when we talked about materials,
we looked at something called a Matte
| | 00:03 | Shadow object, or a material that we place on
an object to, essentially, make it invisible.
| | 00:09 | And, we hadn't talked about Ambient
Occlusion yet, so it didn't make too
| | 00:11 | much sense, but this was one of the biggest
reasons why we have that Matte Shadow material.
| | 00:16 | Here, in Element--I'm just going to go ahead
and turn off this plane that I have on Group 2--
| | 00:23 | We have this telephone pole. I'll zoom in here.
| | 00:26 | And, we don't have any of those
contact shadows on the ground.
| | 00:29 | Ofcourse, for ultimate believability,
we want to have it caste a shadow, but we
| | 00:32 | know that Element can't do that.
| | 00:33 | But, we still can create more realism by
having a little bit of a contact shadow
| | 00:37 | on the ground, regardless of where we place it.
| | 00:40 | And this Matte Shadow object
is going to help us to do that.
| | 00:44 | So, we have kind of like a floor
ground plane that is connected also with the
| | 00:49 | background; it kind of matches the dirt floor.
| | 00:53 | And then, what we could do is go into Scene
Setup, and we'll go ahead and go to our
| | 00:58 | plane, and we'll go to the material of our plane,
| | 01:02 | scroll all the way down, and
we'll enable Matte Shadow.
| | 01:06 | So, we'll check Matte
Shadow there, and I'll click OK.
| | 01:09 | And, now the plane is gone.
| | 01:12 | But, as we go into our Render Settings,
open up Ambient Occlusion, and enable
| | 01:17 | Ambient Occlusion . . . Now, I'll crank that
up quite a bit. That's ridiculous, but . . .
| | 01:22 | Maybe take down the Radius a little bit. But,
atleast you could see what's going on here.
| | 01:26 | But, we now have this contact
shadow from the plane object.
| | 01:32 | Now, if we didn't have the Matte Shadow
object, there wouldn't be a shadow here
| | 01:36 | because, remember Ambient
Occlusion is only cast between 3D objects.
| | 01:41 | So now, we can go in here, and again,
we'll take down this Radius a little bit, and
| | 01:47 | add just a little bit of contact shadow, there.
| | 01:49 | And, we have a more believable
composite, because of Ambient Occlusion.
| | 01:53 | It's just slight shadows.
| | 01:55 | You're also seeing, here, the shadows
added to the actual telephone pole, because
| | 01:59 | we've enabled Ambient Occlusion, as well.
| | 02:02 | And again, everything looks
just too illuminated here.
| | 02:05 | There's just no shadows where the
objects are laying on themselves. And, then we
| | 02:10 | enable that, and that just
looks so much more realistic.
| | 02:15 | Another cool thing with these Matte
Shadow objects is we can kind of play with
| | 02:19 | modeling a little bit, in some cases.
| | 02:21 | So, if I wanted to go back up to Group
1, I could actually lower the telephone
| | 02:25 | pole, because it does seem it's a little tall.
| | 02:28 | And, we could actually lower that into
the Matte Shadow object, and play with the
| | 02:32 | size of that a little bit, too.
| | 02:34 | So, you could see the value of these
Matte Shadow objects, especially when used
| | 02:38 | in conjunction with the Ambient Occlusion.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Enabling motion blur| 00:00 | In this brief tutorial, we're going to
look at adding Motion Blur to quickly
| | 00:04 | moving objects. And, Element makes this very
easy for you, which is why it's going to
| | 00:09 | be a brief tutorial.
| | 00:10 | So, we looked before at this shattering glass
object, and we saw this steel ball coming in.
| | 00:17 | And, what adds a lot to the
realism is this Motion Blur.
| | 00:21 | And, we could see, if we go over to the
Motion Blur composition, that it does not
| | 00:25 | have that motion blur.
| | 00:26 | Now, especially if this were at 24
frames per second, which is actually how I
| | 00:30 | usually work, this would
be really unrealistic.
| | 00:33 | There would be some strobing in
that, and it would not look very good.
| | 00:37 | In this example, we might get away with
that, just because it's like a really kind of
| | 00:41 | a hyper-real example anyways.
| | 00:43 | But, let's look at how to add Motion Blur.
| | 00:44 | There is only two ways.
| | 00:45 | If we select Element and go into
Render Settings, we can open up Motion Blur.
| | 00:50 | And, by default, the settings are Comp settings.
| | 00:53 | So, if we just enable Motion Blur for
the layer that Element is on, and for the
| | 00:57 | composition, we'll have that Motion Blur.
| | 01:00 | Now, if I wanted to make this even simpler,
I can just turn Motion Blur on in Element.
| | 01:08 | And, I don't have to enable it
for the comp or the layer, and it
| | 01:11 | automatically turns it on for me.
| | 01:12 | It also gives me access, very quickly,
to the two most important attributes of
| | 01:17 | Motion Blur: Samples and Shutter Angle.
| | 01:21 | So, if I wanted more samples here, I
could bump this up to, let's say, 20.
| | 01:26 | And now, we don't have that stutter
that we did before; we have a much
| | 01:29 | smoother Motion Blur.
| | 01:30 | If we didn't want to adjust Samples, or
Shutter Angle, from this section here, we
| | 01:36 | have to go over to the right-hand
side of the screen here. Go to the
| | 01:41 | Composition Settings>go to Advanced.
And then, adjust Samples Per Frame and
| | 01:46 | Shutter Angle, here.
| | 01:48 | And then, every time we want to make
any kind of tweak to these settings, we
| | 01:51 | have to go back in the Composition
Settings dialog box, go back to the Advanced
| | 01:55 | tab, blah, blah, blah. And, it's just
not a very efficient way to work.
| | 01:59 | So, Element removes all that for us, and
allows us to adjust these key parameters,
| | 02:03 | right here, from in the Element interface.
| | 02:06 | So, whether you wanted to just use the
Composition settings or force it to be on or
| | 02:10 | turn it off entirely, the choice
is right here inside of Element.
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| Enhancing with supersampling| 00:00 | In this tutorial, we are going to look at
Supersampling, which is such a lifesaver.
| | 00:05 | Now, one of the things that's really
important, here, is that you have the latest
| | 00:09 | version of Element. The first version
of Element did not have this feature. So,
| | 00:15 | it's a free update. Just go to
videocopilot.net, and get that upgrade, and
| | 00:20 | you'll have this feature.
| | 00:21 | Now, unlike many of the parameters that
we have been looking at in this chapter, this
| | 00:25 | is not found in the Render settings.
| | 00:27 | To get this, you need to go to Output,
and then open up Sampling & Aliasing, and
| | 00:33 | then you'll find
Multisampling and Supersampling.
| | 00:36 | Now, all the sampling business refers
to these jagged lines that you see when
| | 00:41 | you open up a model, a lot of times.
| | 00:43 | It's just a lot faster way to work; it
doesn't look great for rendering, but it
| | 00:47 | looks good enough to get your work done.
And then, before rendering, you want to
| | 00:51 | come here to the Output>Sampling
and Aliasing and adjust these settings.
| | 00:56 | Now, Multisampling, the default is 8.
And when I change this, I want you to
| | 01:00 | keep an eye on these really jagged
edges. Right here, right along here.
| | 01:06 | That are very distracting and look
terrible. And watch what happens when we
| | 01:09 | change this to 8, the default.
| | 01:12 | You can see that these lines
smooth out incredibly. The tire looks much
| | 01:16 | better. The top of the front of
the car, here, looks much smoother.
| | 01:20 | This isn't really cleaned up;
everything just looks a lot better. But it's not
| | 01:24 | perfect, and so we have Supersampling.
| | 01:27 | This is what's really going to help
your models look amazing when it comes
| | 01:31 | to those jagged lines.
| | 01:32 | I'll take this up to just 2. And
look at that; it's already sharper.
| | 01:38 | But, with huge models like this,
oftentimes there are still a little bit in the
| | 01:43 | way of jagged edges that might not be perfect.
| | 01:45 | So, if we need to, we can just crank
this up; we crank it up to 4.
| | 01:49 | Now, at this point, things are looking amazing.
| | 01:52 | We have smooth edges everywhere.
The edges should be smooth. And,
| | 01:55 | everything looks better.
| | 01:57 | It's a very simple parameter to
change, but it makes a huge difference.
| | 02:01 | I can't think of a single time
when you'd ever not want to increase
| | 02:06 | Supersampling before rendering. It's
just such a helpful parameter to make
| | 02:11 | things look more polished.
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| Working with World Transform| 00:00 | In this tutorial, we are going to be
looking at another awesome feature that
| | 00:02 | doesn't, maybe, sound like an awesome
feature, and that is World Transform.
| | 00:08 | This basically allows you to move
objects, which sounds kind of lame, but it's
| | 00:13 | extremely important.
| | 00:14 | Let's look at our shattering example again.
| | 00:17 | We have this steel ball that comes in,
and if you remember, we actually had three
| | 00:21 | different wineglasses set up in the
exact same spot here, and a steel ball comes
| | 00:26 | in, and hits it, and it shatters. And
then, we also have this table, full of cube,
| | 00:32 | basically a 3-D grid.
| | 00:34 | So, we have got all kinds of keyframes,
here, especially the steel ball, the
| | 00:37 | position of X, Y, Z. It's all
being animated and everything.
| | 00:42 | If I open up World Transform, I can
move this. Let's say I want to move this on
| | 00:47 | the X axis, scoot this over. I could
scoot everything over without messing up
| | 00:51 | the keyframes, or adjusting the
keyframes of this steel ball in any way. And also,
| | 00:56 | critical to the importance of this
trick is the fact that these three
| | 01:00 | wineglasses are in the exact same spot.
| | 01:03 | So, moving them would be
highly detrimental to this project.
| | 01:07 | But, with World Transform,
they can all move together.
| | 01:10 | Now, let's say I want to resize the
wineglasses and steel ball; World
| | 01:15 | Transform helps with that.
| | 01:17 | It's not just Position and Anchor Point in X,
Y and Z, but it's also Scale and Rotation.
| | 01:23 | So, let's say, again, I wanted to scale
down these wineglasses, and the steel ball,
| | 01:27 | and maybe move them in the center of this grid.
| | 01:30 | But, what if I don't want to move the table?
| | 01:32 | That's why there is this
amazing Exclude Groups feature.
| | 01:36 | So, you could actually exclude Group 4,
which is where the grid is. I could exclude
| | 01:40 | Group 4. So now all of the changes that
I make--let's say I want to move this
| | 01:45 | back in Z space, and maybe scale this
down, and maybe scale it up, since I moved
| | 01:50 | it back a little bit. Move it back up in
Y, so it's still resting there--I could
| | 01:56 | do all of this stuff without
adjusting Group 4 (the table).
| | 02:01 | This is brilliant. This Exclude
Groups feature makes this World Transform so
| | 02:05 | valuable and so helpful. Imagine having
to change the Position, or the Scale, or
| | 02:10 | Rotation of any one of these things
after they set up. Especially when you use
| | 02:14 | the Animation Engine, you copy and paste
groups and they have to be in the exact
| | 02:17 | same spot. It would really mess
everything up without this World Transform, with
| | 02:22 | the Exclude Groups option.
| | 02:24 | It's not something that you will use
on every project, but when you need it,
| | 02:28 | you need it.
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| Creating a shallow depth of field| 00:00 | One of the most beautiful effects you
can achieve when you're working with 3D
| | 00:05 | is a shallow depth-of-field effect. And,
that's what we are going to be looking
| | 00:07 | at in this tutorial.
| | 00:09 | Depth of Field refers to the area in focus.
| | 00:13 | So, if we have a regular After Effects 3D
scene here--and we haven't done anything to
| | 00:19 | our camera settings, our Depth of Field--
we have a deep depth of field, which
| | 00:22 | means everything is in focus, all
the bubbles, the texts, everything.
| | 00:27 | So, we get more realism by creating a
Shallow Depth of Field and having only a
| | 00:32 | little bit of our scene in focus.
| | 00:34 | So, I am going to select the Element
layer, open up Render Settings, open up
| | 00:38 | Depth of Field and here we
have our Depth of Field settings.
| | 00:42 | Now, this is something you need to work with
in conjunction with the camera in your scene.
| | 00:47 | So, if you don't have a camera in your scene,
you are not going to be able to get this result.
| | 00:53 | So, what we need to do first
is turn on Depth of Field.
| | 00:55 | Now, sometimes you might not notice
anything, and sometimes that might ruin your
| | 00:59 | entire scene. That's okay. We have to
actually set this up to get it to work.
| | 01:03 | So, what I am going to do first is
actually go to Element, and I am going to
| | 01:07 | change--in the Depth of Field area--
change Mode from Pixel Blur, which is
| | 01:10 | basically like the type of blur that
After Effects cameras normally have. I
| | 01:15 | am going to take this to Focus Indicator,
which is something that's not in After Effects.
| | 01:19 | And then, I am going to go ahead and
adjust the Focus Distance parameter on
| | 01:23 | the camera, until the stuff that I want in
focus is red, and that indicates what is in focus.
| | 01:31 | That looks pretty good, right there.
| | 01:33 | We'll try that; it's not precise.
| | 01:35 | We'll go back to Element, change the
Mode back to Pixel Blur, and I could see
| | 01:39 | that we have some out-of-focus stuff in
the foreground, here, and the background.
| | 01:45 | Our text is kind of in focus;
it's not super-sharp though.
| | 01:48 | So, this is what I typically have to do.
I'll go back to the Camera, and I'll
| | 01:51 | fiddle with the Focus Distance, until we
get a really sharp subject. And that looks
| | 01:58 | pretty good, right there.
| | 01:59 | One of things that I'll also do to
help me is I'll increase the Aperture.
| | 02:03 | In real-world cameras and in After
Effects cameras, increasing the Aperture
| | 02:07 | value basically increases the blur in
the out-of-focus areas, which really calls
| | 02:12 | attention to the in-focus areas.
| | 02:15 | So, with that kind of ridiculously high
setting, I'll then fine-tune my focus. And,
| | 02:23 | that looks about right, right there.
| | 02:26 | Once I have my focus, I can now dial
back the Aperture setting, until we get a
| | 02:31 | little bit more stuff in focus. And this
is all subjective; it's all to taste, so
| | 02:35 | you could do whatever setting you want there.
| | 02:38 | And, that looks pretty good to me. We
have a really out-of-focus background, and
| | 02:42 | we have some bubbles in the foreground
that we can see that are sharp. But most
| | 02:45 | everything is really just soft, and hazy,
and beautiful, and that really works for
| | 02:50 | this particular piece.
| | 02:51 | So, I could see the before and after by
going to the Depth of Field parameter and
| | 02:55 | turning it off and on. Off and on.
What a difference that makes.
| | 03:01 | Now a couple cool things about
Element here. If I select the Element layer,
| | 03:04 | open up Depth of Field again, under
the Mode drop-down, we have a couple lower-
| | 03:09 | quality blurs that we don't have in
After Effects. We have a Preview Blur, which
| | 03:14 | looks really terrible, and we also
have a Continuous blur, which doesn't look
| | 03:17 | that great, but it renders a lot faster.
Both of these render much quicker than
| | 03:22 | the default pixel blur.
| | 03:23 | Also, we have Multi Pass,
which is not in After Effects.
| | 03:27 | So, if we want an even more high-quality
blur for our Depth of Field than we are
| | 03:31 | used to, we can crank that up to Multi
Pass, which just looks incredible, but it
| | 03:36 | does take awhile to render.
| | 03:37 | Now, let's go over to our text
example--where we have Ambient Occlusion, and,
| | 03:41 | we have some fog, and we have the
Supersampling--and we can see now how Depth
| | 03:46 | of Field affects this.
| | 03:47 | So, again, go to Element 3D, and let's
go ahead and go to Depth of Field in the
| | 03:52 | Render Settings, change the Mode to
Focus Indicator. And, we'll open up the Camera
| | 03:58 | Settings, open up Camera Options, turn
on Depth of Field, and we could adjust the
| | 04:04 | Focus Distance here.
| | 04:06 | Now, because of the angle of the shot, we
can't get everything perfectly in focus.
| | 04:13 | So, we could take down the Aperture, so
that the areas that are out of focus are
| | 04:17 | less blurry. But, I actually kind of
think it's going to look cool if we have
| | 04:21 | those really blurry.
| | 04:22 | So, I'm going to adjust the Focus
Indicator, so the beginning of the text is
| | 04:26 | in focus. And then what we can do is
go back to Element, and we'll change the
| | 04:32 | Mode under Depth of Field from Focus
Indicator back to Pixel Blur, and now we
| | 04:37 | have just this little strip in focus, and all
the stuff kind of out of focus, and it looks awesome.
| | 04:44 | The text is still legible, but it does have
this really cool cinematic look to it. I love it.
| | 04:49 | Again, we could go back to our Camera,
here, and open up the Camera Options and
| | 04:54 | adjust the Aperture. So if we want to
make those more blurry--this is more of like
| | 04:58 | a really stylized piece--we can do that.
We can also take this down to maybe 20,
| | 05:03 | so it's not very noticeable, but still
a little softer on the edges. But the
| | 05:07 | point is, is that this Shallow Depth
of Field effect really makes for some
| | 05:12 | beautiful results when you're
working with Element. It's a trick that you
| | 05:15 | absolutely have to master.
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|
|
11. Final Project: Building a Space SceneSurveying the project| 00:00 | In this chapter, we are going to be
looking at this big project that I created,
| | 00:05 | almost entirely in Element.
| | 00:07 | Let's go ahead and take a look at that project.
| | 00:10 | (video playing)
| | 00:36 | Okay, so there is that little project,
and it took me many hours to create.
| | 00:41 | So, we are not going to be going
through it step-by-step, and also, this isn't
| | 00:46 | exactly production quality, even
though it's a pretty fun, little project. And, I
| | 00:51 | also use separate After Effects
projects for each scene. And, because of that, I'm
| | 00:57 | not really happy with the way that I
didn't really do a good job of unifying
| | 01:00 | the color palettes of each shot. So, they kind
of look like they're from separate movies.
| | 01:05 | Here, we have kind of, like, a green and red
color palette. And here, there is kind of,
| | 01:09 | like, blue and orange, and
it's just, it's just kind of a mess.
| | 01:12 | So, it's not perfect.
| | 01:14 | And so, what we are going to do is go
through in this chapter, and look at a few of
| | 01:17 | the things that we have talked about
throughout this training series. And I want
| | 01:21 | to show you how I use them, and also as
we go through this, we are going to learn
| | 01:24 | a few extra tips on top of
what we have already learned.
[00:01:.71]
Note that we are also going
to go in order of the workflow.
| | 01:31 | So first, we are going to add the
models, and then, we're going to replicate the
| | 01:36 | objects, and then, we are going to make
them look better with adding materials, and
| | 01:40 | lighting, and animating them. And that's
kind of the workflow that you want to
| | 01:44 | follow in real life to make
sure you don't get bogged down.
| | 01:48 | So, let's look at how we made this project.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Looking at the models| 00:00 | Let's first take a look at our models,
here. We have two main spaceships here;
| | 00:04 | our main good guys spaceship, and then
we are attacked by a fleet of bad guys
| | 00:12 | spaceships, here. And, both of these
phenomenal models were created by the artist,
| | 00:17 | Christopher Kuhn. And, he's extremely
talented. He actually has this little e-book
| | 00:23 | on Amazon about Building Your Own
Rocket Bike in Blender, and if you are just
| | 00:27 | interested, it's pretty cool.
| | 00:29 | Extremely talented guy, so I thank you
for providing those models for us, here.
| | 00:32 | Now, I could have easily done all of
this on one layer of Element; initially,
| | 00:38 | that's how I set it up.
| | 00:39 | But then I started realizing that I
really want to be able to control the
| | 00:44 | aliasing, and a lot of other properties
of these layers, independently, so I did
| | 00:50 | separate the planet, which is an
Element object, and these two different ships
| | 00:58 | into each of their own 3D layers.
| | 01:00 | Now, that's presented a few challenges.
Let's go ahead and select the Element
| | 01:03 | good guys layer, then go ahead
and click the Scene Setup button.
| | 01:06 | And you'll notice that I actually have two
different copies of this transport
| | 01:10 | spaceship (the good guys, essentially).
| | 01:12 | I have one that has no materials, and
then I have one that has all the materials.
| | 01:19 | I highly recommend, while you're animating,
and working with these models in
| | 01:24 | After Effects, that you work on a
version that doesn't have any materials
| | 01:29 | applied. This will really slow
Element down to have a bunch of reflective
| | 01:33 | materials, and textures, and other
things on your object that you're just much
| | 01:37 | more snappy when they don't
have any textures applied.
| | 01:40 | So, what I do is I get all my textures
good. And then, once I'm ready, and once I've
| | 01:45 | animated everything, and I'm ready to
actually see the good version, then I'll
| | 01:49 | just turn it off by disabling the
group. And then, I'll turn on the real one.
| | 01:54 | So, all of the animation will stay the
same; nothing changes, because we put it
| | 01:58 | on the same group. And, the keyframes
actually exist in After Effects, not in the
| | 02:01 | Scene Setup interface. So, we could just
change out things really easily that way.
| | 02:07 | Now, of course, we know that we can
go to the Model Browser in the upper
| | 02:10 | right-hand corner, and import 3D Objects.
Just how I brought these models in.
| | 02:14 | One of the problems and challenges I
encountered, and this is actually a very
| | 02:18 | frequent problem that I have with
bringing models into Element 3D, is that the
| | 02:22 | surface normals are often mixed up.
| | 02:25 | You see, each polygon in a model is only
visible on one side, and that's the side
| | 02:30 | with the normals, the surface
normals, pointing out in that direction.
| | 02:34 | So if it's flipped, you can't see it.
| | 02:36 | Let me show you what I am talking about, here.
| | 02:37 | I'll just go ahead and drag and drop the
main material onto the second slot here.
| | 02:43 | And, let's go ahead and
keep adding this main texture.
| | 02:47 | And so, we see, here, that there is this kind
of band that goes around in the center.
| | 02:52 | And initially, I wanted that to be
illuminated, like it was, like, this red band.
| | 02:57 | Probably because of my love of Knight
Rider, I wanted a little red band there.
| | 03:01 | And, it kind of didn't end up really matching
with the color scheme anyway, so I am
| | 03:05 | glad it didn't work out.
| | 03:06 | But this didn't really work out, because
the surface normals are not really aligned.
| | 03:10 | And so, again, this happens all the time when
you bring in models into Element 3D.
| | 03:14 | And, I'm not really sure where the problem
lies, so you'd have to go back into your
| | 03:19 | 3D program, and flip these normals
around, in order to have them show u, here in
| | 03:24 | Element, the right way.
| | 03:26 | Now, one other thing, here. I am just
going to click this little x, and say "Yes."
| | 03:30 | And, I am going to choose the Element
bad guys layer, and click Scene Setup. And
| | 03:35 | we'll click on the fighter
spaceship, here, with the textures.
| | 03:40 | And, we can see that we have this glass
texture. And, I'll just rearrange that. You
| | 03:47 | can see how slow this is moving now
that the, all of the textures are applied.
| | 03:51 | But I have this separately, here, for the
glass. And, I could take it off. And, I set
| | 03:55 | that up in CINEMA 4D, so that way, when
I brought it in here, I could put the
| | 04:00 | robot into the cockpit for the scene
with the close-up on the robot. And, I could
| | 04:05 | actually put him in the
environment that he is sitting in.
| | 04:08 | Now, one of the things that's kind of
cool, if you go down to the Starter_Pack,
| | 04:11 | there is actually this dead_planet model.
| | 04:14 | I click on that once to add that to my
scene, and we have this dead_planet. And it,
| | 04:20 | again, comes with Element. You have it
if you have Element installed. And
| | 04:24 | basically, what it does is it's just a
planet with this really cool texture.
| | 04:29 | It looks fantastic, even though it's
not really showing up, right now, in my
| | 04:33 | window for some reason. Now, I am
zoomed in pretty close. There we go.
| | 04:36 | And, it looks great, but it
wasn't the right color that I wanted.
| | 04:40 | So, what we'll do is we'll talk about,
later on, when we get into materials
| | 04:43 | in this chapter, I'll show you how I
changed this from a red planet to a blue planet.
| | 04:47 | It's really easy. I didn't have to go
into Photoshop. I did it right here from
| | 04:50 | Element. It's amazing how it
works, and I just used that planet.
| | 04:54 | And, if I click the x out of here, and
click yes, you could see that that is
| | 04:57 | actually the dead_planet, except it's
tinted more of a cyan color than a red color.
| | 05:01 | Next, we'll look at a few ways I used
the Particle Replicator in this project.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Replicating the objects| 00:00 | The Particle Replicator in Element
really came in handy when I was working on
| | 00:04 | this project, and in kind of different
ways that I didn't plan on. For example,
| | 00:09 | when I got this robot model, it didn't
really have any eyes; there was just kind
| | 00:13 | of, like, these empty cavities.
| | 00:15 | As a matter of fact, if we go into the
Scene Setup of Element, and click on the
| | 00:19 | Element layer, this is very simple project.
| | 00:21 | There is really just basically this
one instance of Element, and then lights,
| | 00:26 | cameras, color correction. That's it.
| | 00:29 | So, click on the Scene Setup button, and
we can scroll down here, click on the
| | 00:34 | humanoid character, and I'll
zoom out with my wheel here.
| | 00:39 | Now, we could see that really, it's
an armless torso; that's all it is.
| | 00:43 | There are some cool spikes that I
really wanted to use, but just really just
| | 00:46 | didn't fit for this project.
| | 00:48 | But really cool model,
but nothing on the insides.
| | 00:52 | So, you see the eyes are hollow there.
I could turn on the Environment, so you
| | 00:56 | could see a little bit more clearly. Just
hollow eyes, which didn't really work for this.
| | 01:00 | I am just going to close that without saving.
| | 01:03 | So, what I did is I created a sphere,
and added an illuminated texture to it.
| | 01:09 | And then, if I open up Group 2 here, I
used a 3D Grid Particle Replicator, and I
| | 01:15 | used two spheres in X, and only one
in Y and Z. I basically just made two
| | 01:20 | spheres that I then was able to put
into the eyes. Just kind of moving them
| | 01:26 | into the eyes. And then, I didn't
animate or move the head at all. I just
| | 01:31 | animated the camera.
| | 01:33 | So, of course, the spheres go along
with wherever the head is going.
| | 01:37 | I just had to make sure that the spheres
were set up in all the right spots, and then
| | 01:42 | once I move the camera, the
spheres just kind of go with it.
| | 01:46 | I also added some glow. And, when that
glow goes away, you can kind of see the
| | 01:51 | spheres a little bit more. This is a
little bit more what the original layer
| | 01:55 | looked like. And, actually, we could turn off
the lights to see, actually, what it looked like.
| | 02:00 | So, it's not super-impressive when you
look at just these spheres inside of the
| | 02:06 | head. They don't look super-
believable. They don't composite very well.
| | 02:09 | But when you add color correction and
the glow, then they really do mesh pretty
| | 02:13 | good. And, of course, the light that
matches the color of the eyes really helps
| | 02:18 | sell this shot as well.
| | 02:20 | Now, if we go to File>Open Project--I
don't want to save changes there--I can go
| | 02:26 | over to the Establishing Shot clip
again. And, we have these fighter jets, here,
| | 02:34 | that we saw in the last movie. And, of
course, I am not going to make a separate
| | 02:38 | instance of Element for every single
one of these planes. That's just a waste.
| | 02:43 | So, what I did, instead, was I went to--if
you go to the Element bad guys layer--I
| | 02:49 | made another 3D Grid.
| | 02:50 | I created eight of these jets, here, and
we have two in each X, Y and Z. So, it's
| | 02:56 | basically two cubed, which is eight.
| | 02:59 | And, I was able to go into the
Particle Look, and add a little bit of
| | 03:05 | randomization to the X, Y, and Z Rotation.
| | 03:10 | And, I definitely didn't want to use
Rotation Random. I tried that at first,
| | 03:14 | but then they start kind of going
forwards, and backwards, and all kinds of crazy
| | 03:18 | ways. So we didn't want any Forrest Gump space
fighters here; it didn't look too intimidating.
| | 03:24 | So, I want to manually control what axis
they were randomly rotating on, and I was
| | 03:29 | able to do that. It's just
amazing the tools, here, and this plug-in.
| | 03:34 | But anyways, because of that array, I
was able to animate this big group of
| | 03:38 | fighters, and add the randomness that
made them look like they were kind of, like,
| | 03:41 | a fleet, but not exactly perfect,
which is exactly what I was going for.
| | 03:47 | Now, the next step after you've
created your models, and then added some
| | 03:51 | replication, if that's what your
project calls for, is to add animation.
| | 03:58 | And, the reason why we don't add
materials yet--I know it's hard because these
| | 04:01 | don't look super great--it's
because they'll just be too slow.
| | 04:04 | So, next we're going to talk about
adding animation, still while these objects
| | 04:09 | don't look all that great.
| | 04:11 | Now, I chose to replicate the
objects after I created them.
| | 04:15 | You might want to replicate them
after animating them. But for me, when I
| | 04:22 | replicated them, and I created an
array of them, it was kind of hard to see
| | 04:27 | where they were going to go. It really
changed the layout and the design of the
| | 04:32 | look of the project.
| | 04:34 | So, I really kind of wanted to replicate
the shapes before I started animating,
| | 04:38 | so I could see where everything was going to go.
| | 04:41 | But again, you may choose to add
replication after you animate. All depends on
| | 04:46 | your workflow and your preferences.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding animation| 00:00 | So, once you've got your models all set up,
it's time to bring them to life and to animate.
| | 00:05 | One of the most interesting animation
components I had in this project was
| | 00:10 | creating this shot, which is a
combination of a live action shot.
| | 00:15 | For this, I actually used footage from
a Red Scarlet camera. This is what the
| | 00:20 | original footage looked like;
| | 00:21 | this is the clip that I used.
| | 00:23 | Meow, there she goes, and as you could
tell, here, this is a really quick and
| | 00:28 | simple set up. This is in my
basement. And there she goes.
| | 00:33 | So then, what I had to do was I actually
had to track this footage as is, before I
| | 00:39 | keyed it out, and all that kind of stuff.
So, that way, the tracker could get the
| | 00:44 | information from the shot, because we're
using a wide lens, here. So, as the camera
| | 00:48 | gets closer to her, her facial features distort.
| | 00:52 | And so, I needed the After Effects
camera to distort things in the same way.
| | 00:57 | So, that was a little bit tricky. I tried
to use the After Effects camera tracker
| | 01:01 | to look for the movement in the shot, and
it couldn't get it. So, I had to use the
| | 01:06 | CAMERATRACKER plugin by the Foundry,
and that was able to understand what was
| | 01:12 | going on in this shot. And, I was
able to bring in the sci-fi hallway.
| | 01:16 | I actually didn't have to set any keyframes;
the tracker did all of that work for me.
| | 01:20 | So, once I put the hallway in, and then
I keyed the footage, and brought this
| | 01:24 | back in, as an image sequence with an alpha
channel, everything just kind of worked out nicely.
| | 01:31 | Now, one of my favorite parts about
this shot is the way that her really
| | 01:35 | reflective metallic suit--which was
kind of challenging to pull a key on,
| | 01:40 | actually--how it seems to kind of
reflect in the walls and the hallway.
| | 01:46 | Now, if you remember, Element can't
really do ray-traced reflections, but it
| | 01:51 | looks like she's really getting reflected in
this panel, and these panels all around her.
| | 01:56 | So, I'll show you how we did
that later on in this chapter.
| | 02:00 | But first I want to show you
another way that I animated this project.
| | 02:04 | If we go to File>Open, and we go to
Chapter 11, open up the Fighter Ship Shot,
| | 02:09 | and click Open, we'll have this shot where
we have a side view of these different ships.
| | 02:16 | Now, you will note that I also used the
Replicator for this, so I had a bunch
| | 02:21 | of ships flying, and the camera kind
of moves past them as they are kind of
| | 02:28 | zooming through. And, I kind of wanted
to give the illusion that these cameras
| | 02:33 | or these jet fighters are flying
through space, and that the camera was maybe,
| | 02:38 | like, on another jet fighter that was
running alongside them, and then going a
| | 02:42 | little bit faster than they were, and
kind of sped up ahead of them, and that
| | 02:47 | was really challenging to do.
| | 02:49 | And I actually didn't want to animate the
jet fighters moving at all; I just wanted to
| | 02:54 | make it seem like they are going really fast.
| | 02:56 | So, I actually animated the camera and
the stars to move around to make it have
| | 03:02 | the Motion Blur, there, and I just let
the fighters just kind of stay there.
| | 03:07 | So, I actually didn't move the fighters.
Just, again, the camera zooms in front of
| | 03:13 | them, and then it kind of zooms around.
And then, the stars give the impression
| | 03:19 | that both the camera and the fighters
are going through space very quickly.
| | 03:23 | I determined that that was
the easiest way to do it.
| | 03:26 | I could have animated both the camera
and the jet fighter in a very real way to
| | 03:30 | move really fast, and just left the
stars where they were, but that would have
| | 03:34 | been a lot of work making the camera
and the star fighters kind of move at the
| | 03:40 | same rate of speed for so long, and
then have the additional movement of the
| | 03:44 | camera. That would have been a mess.
| | 03:46 | Now, the hardest time that I had animating,
if we go to File>Open Project back to
| | 03:50 | the Chapter 11 folder, here,
is in the establishing shot.
| | 03:53 | Boy, this was a mess; this took me forever.
| | 03:56 | What I have, here, is I have the camera
tracking from left at the beginning of the
| | 04:01 | shot, here, and then, later in the shot,
it's tracking right the whole time.
| | 04:06 | And then, I have the
movement of all of the ships.
| | 04:09 | The big ship moves towards the camera
here; starts back, and that kind of moves
| | 04:15 | towards the camera, and then it rotates
a little bit. Seems like spaceships do
| | 04:19 | that that. Adds a lot of realness
to just, kind of, spin things sideways.
| | 04:23 | I am not sure why that adds so much
realism, because it seems like in real life--
| | 04:28 | like if you are flying a jet plane or a
commercial airliner--you wouldn't want
| | 04:31 | it to just kind of tilt
on its side for no reason.
| | 04:34 | But for some reason, when we look at
spaceships flying through space, they have
| | 04:37 | to do a cool tilt like that to
seem more realistic, for some reason.
| | 04:41 | And then we have these ships kind of flying
through space towards the camera, and the
| | 04:45 | camera kind of goes in
the middle of these ships.
| | 04:48 | And so, it was really hard. And, probably 90%
of all of the work of this entire project,
| | 04:53 | we're just getting all of these things
to work out. The camera movement, and the
| | 04:57 | planet even, kind of rotates, and moves a
little bit. And, to get all these things
| | 05:01 | worked out--so that we're looking at
the top of, and the gear on this good guys'
| | 05:07 | spaceship, and it kind of reveals the bad
guys right at the right time, like that--
| | 05:11 | was really challenging.
| | 05:13 | And unfortunately, because it took me forever,
I don't have any great pointers for you.
| | 05:17 | It just took a long time.
| | 05:20 | There's not 3D motion paths when we're
working in After Effects. And, even if we
| | 05:25 | use null objects as controllers and
whatnot, it's really hard to pilot those
| | 05:30 | null controllers right where you want
them to be, when you want them to be there.
| | 05:34 | So, it was just a tough thing to do.
| | 05:38 | But I will say that the best workflow
for that is to set up the camera movement
| | 05:42 | first, and then move the pieces.
| | 05:45 | So, I knew that the planet is really not
going to animate that much; it's going
| | 05:48 | to rotate a little bit, but it's not
going to be bouncing up and down or anything like
| | 05:51 | that. It's a planet.
| | 05:53 | So, I started with the camera moving from
left to right, because I knew that's the
| | 05:56 | basic motion that I wanted to have, and
it was much easier to put the spaceships
| | 06:01 | where I wanted them to be.
| | 06:03 | If you tried just to do everything at
the same time, then you're constantly going
| | 06:06 | to be adjusting one after another,
and it's going to get really messy.
| | 06:10 | Next, we'll look at a few cool tricks
that I used when adding materials to
| | 06:15 | these models.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating the materials| 00:00 | In this movie, we're going to look at
a few cool material tricks that I used.
| | 00:04 | I have this problem. To be honest with you,
I put materials on too early. I know
| | 00:08 | I've been saying this whole chapter
about how you should wait to put materials
| | 00:12 | on, but I get so annoyed by looking at
these ugly, white objects, or just plain,
| | 00:20 | boring objects. I know it slows me down,
but I usually put materials on too early,
| | 00:24 | because I'm really
influenced by the way things look.
| | 00:27 | So, if the things are really ugly, then
I am just kind of, like, not inspired, and
| | 00:30 | it changes the framing, and how I lay
things out. So, you really should wait until
| | 00:37 | later to put on materials,
because, again, it does slow things down.
| | 00:40 | I always wish there was like a rehab for
people that put materials on too early.
| | 00:44 | Now, let's first look at this planet,
here, this hunka, hunka burning love, here.
| | 00:49 | Let's go ahead and select the Element
planet layer, and we'll go ahead and open
| | 00:54 | up the Element Effect, and click Scene Setup.
| | 00:57 | As I mentioned before, this is just
the planet that comes with Element. But I
| | 01:02 | changed the material a little bit. So,
let's go ahead and just do that from scratch.
| | 01:05 | If we go to the Model Browser, click
on Starter_Pack. We'll scroll down and
| | 01:09 | click on dead_planet, which,
again, is this really dead planet.
| | 01:14 | We want to use this texture. And another
thing, too. If we click on this material,
| | 01:18 | there is a Diffuse Map and Specular Map
that look really good. And, also, there is
| | 01:22 | a normal Bump Map. And so, if you
actually zoom in pretty close--and, actually, it
| | 01:28 | works better when you're actually in
After Effects looking at it--but you could
| | 01:31 | see that there is actual texture here,
because of this Bump Map, and that's kind of
| | 01:36 | hard to replicate, so I wanted to use this.
| | 01:38 | Now, if we go back to our dead_planet--
click on this red texture here--all we
| | 01:42 | have to do is click on the Diffuse
Color swatch, which is kind of like this
| | 01:46 | brownish color, this rust color, and
we'll go down to more of a cyan color, which
| | 01:51 | matches our project, and maybe
saturate that a little bit more, and click OK.
| | 01:57 | And, if we want to, we could increase the
diffuse value, and that makes our planet brighter.
| | 02:04 | Now, this looks like it's made of rock,
and kind of, more, dead things, just by its
| | 02:09 | very nature of the texture, so
don't want it to be too bright.
| | 02:14 | We could also change the Diffuse Color
to make that brighter if we wanted to
| | 02:17 | brighten it, but I think somewhere on
there, or it still looks kind of
| | 02:22 | dead. That looks pretty good.
| | 02:23 | Now, I am just going to go ahead and
click on the x, here, and go ahead and hit Yes.
| | 02:28 | And then, I want to go to the good guys
layer, and click the Scene Setup button. And,
| | 02:36 | click on transport spaceship, here. And,
give it just a minute, because it is a
| | 02:40 | pretty beefy model there.
| | 02:42 | Now, one of the things that really
helps with the believability of this model
| | 02:47 | is the fact that I used a Fractal Noise
texture on this regular white surface.
| | 02:54 | It just looks too clean. And, that's one
of the biggest problems with 3D models.
| | 02:58 | They're just so sharp, and perfect, and clean.
And, in the real world, it's just not that way.
| | 03:03 | And, we're used to film, which is a little
bit rougher, and more grainy, and a little bit
| | 03:08 | softer on the edges, sometimes. And CG
is just so harsh and ugly. Perfect
| | 03:14 | almost, in a bad way.
| | 03:17 | And so, dirtying it up is really one of those
things that's really going to go a long way.
| | 03:20 | So, if you look at the main color here,
which I take this on and off, you could
| | 03:24 | see . . . And, actually, maybe
it's over here. There we go.
| | 03:29 | So, there is the before and the after
of this texture that I'm looking at.
| | 03:32 | And we have this custom layer set up--
and it's kind of harder to see here in
| | 03:37 | this window for some reason--but if I
go ahead and Cancel that. And actually,
| | 03:40 | before I do that, I'm going to turn off
the spaceship by clicking the 2 here
| | 03:46 | (the second spaceship with no textures on it).
| | 03:48 | And enable Group 2 for the spaceship
with the textures on it; click OK.
| | 03:53 | And, that will take a minute to render,
but now that it's here--even though this
| | 03:57 | is really low quality, so it renders a
little bit faster--you could see that
| | 03:59 | there is kind of, like, a cloudy
texture here, which makes it look dirty.
| | 04:03 | And so, it's using this pre-comp
dirty texture layer as a custom layer.
| | 04:07 | So this is, again, just plain, old
Fractal Noise. Nothing really great here. I
| | 04:12 | notice that the Subscale Fractal Type
works really well for materials, because
| | 04:16 | there is patches of lower detail than
patches of higher detail in the same noise
| | 04:22 | pattern, which is kind of hard to find,
and kind of hard to replicate on your own
| | 04:25 | if you don't use Subscale.
So, I like using that one.
| | 04:28 | And I also take down the contrast, so it's
pretty low, and that makes it so it's kind
| | 04:33 | of more even and believable. If there
were these huge dark patches, and then
| | 04:37 | really bright patches, it wouldn't look
super-believable. This way, it just kind
| | 04:41 | of looks dinged up and old.
| | 04:43 | I kind of want to put our heroes, and
kind of a Millennium Falcon-type ship--
| | 04:46 | that's really huge, and hulky, and dirty,
and old--and in contrast with the fighter
| | 04:52 | ships and the robots that are
all sleek and perfect-looking.
| | 04:55 | So, that's a little bit about the materials.
| | 04:57 | Next, we'll look at some of the
interesting things I did with the lighting in
| | 05:01 | some of these shots.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Examining the lighting| 00:00 | Let's look at a couple of fun
lighting things going on in this project.
| | 00:03 | First, let's look at this shot with the robot.
| | 00:06 | We have this side of him that we are
looking at--or side of it, I should say--and
| | 00:11 | then, it kind of, the camera kind of
pans around his face a little bit, and then
| | 00:15 | we see the other side.
| | 00:18 | Now, I really wanted this shot of
the villain to be very intimidating.
| | 00:23 | I wanted a very limited color palette. I
wanted it to feel very mechanical and dangerous.
| | 00:29 | I wanted the edges to be hard. And, it
to be, kind of, very intimidating, and
| | 00:34 | ruthless, and mechanical,
almost like it's just without mercy.
| | 00:37 | So, one of the things that I did is I
had this color palette, which is basically
| | 00:41 | black and white with red, and then I
sucked a little bit of the red out of the
| | 00:47 | black-and-whiteness. So, that kind of
gives it this little bit of cyan tint. So,
| | 00:52 | on the surface, it kind of looks, like,
just black, and white, and red. But it's
| | 00:55 | actually a little bit more diabolical
than that, because I pulled a little bit of
| | 00:59 | the red out, which actually makes a
great contrast with the red here.
| | 01:03 | And, one of the things that was pretty
fun that I did is that I used a white
| | 01:07 | light, here, as kind of, like, an edge
light, on this side. And, I used red as kind
| | 01:13 | of, like, my key light, here, which
creates this really interesting patch of red
| | 01:16 | that goes with the eyes.
| | 01:18 | And then, what's also cool about that
is that as we pan the camera around, the
| | 01:22 | jobs of the lights reverse. So, now
our key light is this white light on the
| | 01:28 | face, and the red light becomes this
cool edged-light, which makes this contour
| | 01:34 | even more menacing.
| | 01:36 | Now, for most of the lights of this project,
I just basically did really simple stuff.
| | 01:42 | But one other thing that really helped--
I am going to open up the Establishing
| | 01:46 | Shot--I went to File>Open>Project--and I
am in Chapter 11, here--and I am going to
| | 01:50 | open up the Establishing Shot
project we've been looking at.
| | 01:53 | And, one of the things that really helped,
let's say, for this planet, for example. . . And, I'll just
| | 01:58 | turn off the good guys layer and the
bad guys layer, so that doesn't slow us
| | 02:01 | down. And, I am going to turn on a few
of these helper layers. So, I am going to
| | 02:07 | turn on the key light, which looks
pretty awesome, there. And then, there is the
| | 02:12 | fill light. And then,
there is the other backlight.
| | 02:16 | So, I wanted to really add real After
Effects lights to light up this planet. So
| | 02:22 | that way, if I decided to move the
camera somewhere else, it would actually be a
| | 02:27 | legitimate light on the planet. And, this
also really helps bring out the details
| | 02:31 | in this normal map, here, that we're
seeing, which adds again so much texture to
| | 02:38 | this model and the lights. And having
the lights just kind of, just beyond this
| | 02:41 | crest of it, really brings that out.
| | 02:44 | But even still, as much as I really like
the lighting on this planet, I've found
| | 02:47 | that it wasn't quite enough. So, I kind
of supplemented that with a few other
| | 02:52 | layers. I added a planet atmosphere
layer, which is a shape layer that I just
| | 02:57 | blurred, essentially. And that kind of
creates this really interesting haze, which
| | 03:01 | you always see when you are looking at
planet footage. I've never personally
| | 03:05 | been to space, so I only know what
people tell me, and what they show me on
| | 03:09 | science fiction shows. And what I see
there is that they have like, kind of, like
| | 03:13 | this haze around the edge when there is
light being reflected off of the edges.
| | 03:18 | And, I added an additional sun
glow back here for this flare.
| | 03:23 | I added another glow and some
background stuff, here, going on.
| | 03:28 | Also, to kind of help things pop a
little bit, on the Element planet layer,
| | 03:32 | itself, I added a glow effect, which
kind of creates this ethereal, kind of
| | 03:36 | otherworldly glow in the
planet, itself. I kind of like that.
| | 03:41 | But again, sometimes, I find it
necessary to supplement After Effects lighting
| | 03:46 | with other bells and whistles, like glows,
or blurred shape layers, or whatever it is.
| | 03:52 | But again, if you don't use actual
After Effects lights, no matter what tricks
| | 03:56 | you're using, you're not going to get
the light hitting those bump maps, if
| | 04:01 | you have a bump map.
| | 04:01 | So you actually do need real 3D lights to
get that effect, which is really important.
| | 04:08 | Next, we'll look a little bit
at some fun with the camera.
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| Telling a story with the camera| 00:00 | In this project, I didn't do anything
super innovative or interesting with the
| | 00:04 | camera. But one of the things I did
that was kind of fun is that I wanted to
| | 00:08 | make the bad guy seem kind of
mysterious, like, you know, it just doesn't care.
| | 00:14 | It's merciless. And part of, or one way to do
that, I should say, is to create mystery.
| | 00:22 | And so, most of the time that we see
this robot, it's out of focus, which
| | 00:26 | intrigues us. When we see something we
can't quite wrap our brain around, it's
| | 00:31 | like a mystery, and we want to figure it out.
| | 00:34 | So, the fact that this guy, or this
creature, is mostly out of focus, I think that
| | 00:41 | makes it kind of interesting. It was
definitely a creative choice. You might
| | 00:44 | not prefer that. And, even when you see
it clearly--at the beginning and at the
| | 00:49 | end of the animation--it still has a
very shallow depth of field, which, I think,
| | 00:54 | looks really beautiful.
| | 00:55 | If I take off the Depth of Field, and
we can see everything and the ship, it
| | 01:00 | doesn't look very good at all.
| | 01:02 | So, again, the shallow depth of the
field adds a lot of beauty and makes things
| | 01:06 | very interesting. Even when the face
comes toward the camera, I actually
| | 01:12 | animated the focus distance, so that it
would stay intentionally out of focus.
| | 01:18 | So, it wasn't like, "oh, well we'll just
wait till it goes back into focus."
| | 01:22 | I intentionally made it so that it
went out of focus very quickly, and stayed
| | 01:26 | out of focus. And then, as it ended this camera
turn, it slowly kind of entered into focus.
| | 01:35 | And again, that was an intentional
creative choice, because we really just can't
| | 01:40 | know our antagonist very good; it
makes him a little bit more scary.
| | 01:45 | Now, you might not like that; you might
not choose to do it, but that was just one
| | 01:48 | option that you can do with the camera is
play around with that shallow depth of
| | 01:52 | field that not only makes things
really beautiful, but it can aid in
| | 01:56 | storytelling as well.
| | 01:57 | Now, in the next movie we are going to
wrap up our look at this project, by
| | 02:01 | learning a few extra
really cool tips and tricks.
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| Adding the final polish| 00:00 | In this chapter, we saved the best for
last. We've got a couple of really cool
| | 00:03 | tricks for you, things that I played
around with while I was doing this project.
| | 00:06 | Here is this fighter ship shot project.
And, what we're going to do is we're going
| | 00:10 | to go to the Solo column of the element
bad guys layers, just so we can solo this
| | 00:16 | ship, and get rid of all
the junk in the background.
[00:00:1.18]
Now, one of the things I did
is I have this cool exhaust.
| | 00:22 | The fire is kind of coming out of the
back of the plane. Actually, let me back
| | 00:26 | up a little bit, there, so we could see
it a little bit more clearly. And, it looks
| | 00:30 | pretty cool. And, one of the things
that I did to make this is I went to the
| | 00:35 | Element bad guys. And, we'll just go
ahead and click on that layer, and go to the
| | 00:38 | Scene Setup in the Element layer.
| | 00:41 | And, you'll notice that there is this
EngineLight. This is a really beefy model,
| | 00:44 | so it's going to take a second to load.
| | 00:46 | But what happens is that there is
this EngineLight texture that goes on the
| | 00:52 | back of the engine. If I go ahead and
turn that on, we can see what that
| | 00:56 | looks like. So, it kind of looks like
there is fire, something like that, on the
| | 00:59 | engines, but because, again, it's a
separate material, we could isolate it, and
| | 01:04 | make it its own object.
| | 01:06 | So, I'm going to go ahead and click
Close on this. And, I'll go to bad guys
| | 01:11 | exhaust; go to that layer. And then, we'll
open up the Element layer, and click Scene Setup.
| | 01:17 | And, what I did on this layer is I turned off
everything, except for just the EngineLight.
| | 01:25 | And so, we have just that glowing
orange material. There it is. And so, it's the
| | 01:30 | same thing that we saw in the last
model, but it's just that orange texture.
| | 01:36 | So then, what I could do, because I've
isolated it, is I could add all these blurs,
| | 01:41 | and glows, and all that kind of stuff. I
stretched it out, so, if I actually turn
| | 01:46 | this off. And, maybe I'll unsolo the
Element bad guys layer, so you could see
| | 01:50 | just this Glow here.
| | 01:54 | I added some Blur, some Curves and
Levels, some Glow. And then, I added Turbulent
| | 02:00 | Displace, and animated that going from
left to right, so it looks like it's kind
| | 02:04 | of moving quickly. I added a lot,
blurred everything a little bit, some more
| | 02:09 | Hue/Saturation, some Transform to
squish it down a little bit. And then, I
| | 02:14 | duplicated the layer, and used the Add
Blend Mode to make it look like it's all
| | 02:18 | cool and fiery there.
| | 02:20 | So, you can't really see it. And again,
this goes back to the problem that I had
| | 02:24 | where I didn't really work on the
color palette before I started as much as I
| | 02:27 | should have. So, this really needed to
be, like, a fiery orange. And that really didn't
| | 02:31 | go very well with the purple
cyan background that I had, so, wah, wah . . .
| | 02:35 | It wasn't as great as I would've wanted.
| | 02:37 | But I did like the fire effect.
I think it does look pretty cool.
| | 02:41 | So, it's kind of a unique little trick, there.
| | 02:43 | Now, one last thing that I totally
loved. If I go File>Open Project--I'm not
| | 02:47 | going to save this--and I go to the Hero
Zoom project, and open that bad boy up,
| | 02:52 | we have this interesting reflection,
again, where it seems like her arms are
| | 02:57 | being reflected inside of this hallway,
here. And I really wanted this metallic
| | 03:05 | texture, because I really like the way
that it kind of, like, frames her, and the
| | 03:09 | way the light hits everything. And her
suit is metallic. It just felt like it
| | 03:13 | really needed to be metallic.
| | 03:15 | But then, as I was compositing this,
I realized that, if she has a super-
| | 03:17 | reflective suit on, and everything is
super reflective in the hallway, then
| | 03:23 | they'll kind of see each other. At
least we'll see her, the light reflecting
| | 03:27 | off of her suit onto the hallway.
And, it looked really dull without that.
| | 03:32 | But, of course, again, Element doesn't
have real reflection, so what to do?
| | 03:37 | Well, what I decided to do was--and I
am going to go to Hero Zoom project, here.
| | 03:41 | And, I'm going to go to the Element layer--
and, what I actually did was I--if you
| | 03:46 | open up Render Settings, you can see
the Environment here, or we have access to
| | 03:51 | control the environment--and what I did
is I rotated the environment. I added the
| | 03:58 | texture in the background to be really
reflective, so we could really see the
| | 04:02 | environment in this material.
| | 04:05 | And then, I adjusted the environment.
So, if I adjust the rotation of the Y
| | 04:09 | environment, you could see what's going on there.
| | 04:12 | So, now we could really
clearly see hot spots in the Environment
| | 04:16 | map in our texture.
| | 04:18 | So, what I did is I just played around
with the different Environment settings
| | 04:22 | until I got to the point where it
looks like this is reflecting the light
| | 04:27 | bouncing off of her metal clothes, there.
| | 04:31 | And then, I animated the Z Rotation
of the environment map to kind of
| | 04:37 | coincide with her movements.
| | 04:41 | So, it's kind of timed well with her movements.
| | 04:43 | You can see that if I just move this
Z Rotation, it kind of looks like it
| | 04:48 | follows her movements.
| | 04:50 | So, I just had to time those up, and
then we get some realistic reflections.
| | 04:57 | It's quite an interesting hack, but
again, as we're looking for alternatives to
| | 05:01 | real reflections, that's one that
definitely worked for me in this case.
| | 05:05 | So again, the project is far from
perfect, but it was a really fun learning
| | 05:09 | experience, and it shows the
potential power of creating an entire world
| | 05:13 | using Element 3D.
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12. ConclusionFinal tips and tricks| 00:00 | Before we close up this training series,
I have a few closing tips and tricks for
| | 00:03 | you that we didn't get to
in the rest of the training.
| | 00:06 | The first one is this Animated Textures
project. We can actually, instead of just
| | 00:11 | using a simple image for a texture for
an object, we could actually use a movie.
| | 00:17 | And, that can create some interesting results.
| | 00:18 | We have a very simple billboard setup here.
| | 00:22 | I also have the SciFi
Project from the last chapter.
| | 00:26 | And so, what we're going to do is go
to Element. And, I'm going to open up my
| | 00:29 | Custom Layers, Custom Texture Maps. And
for Layer 1, I'm going to change it to the
| | 00:34 | SciFi Project Final.
| | 00:36 | Now, you don't have to necessarily use
a precomp, but what I've found is that
| | 00:40 | the way I set up the UVs--with this
billboard, and the image here, the movie--
| | 00:47 | they were not set right.
| | 00:49 | So, what I had to do is pre-compose
this and rotate it, so that it would look
| | 00:54 | correct when it was applied to the billboard.
| | 00:56 | So, going back to the Element, we can
go to Scene Setup. And, I'll go ahead and
| | 01:00 | maximize this by clicking the plus
(+) icon. And, what we could do is, on the
| | 01:05 | billboard, we'll click on the material
for the Diffuse Texture. We'll click on
| | 01:10 | the None Set button there. We'll use
Custom Layer 1. Click OK, click OK, and
| | 01:17 | there is our billboard.
| | 01:19 | As we scrub through the timeline here,
we'll see the movie playing on the billboard.
| | 01:24 | We'll also see that this movie, now, in
this billboard, responds to lights. And, it
| | 01:29 | responds to cameras as we move around here.
| | 01:34 | So, the possibilities for this are endless.
| | 01:35 | If you had something going on in a
background--maybe you wanted a fire in a
| | 01:40 | background, and you wanted it to be 3D to
respond to cameras, but you didn't really
| | 01:44 | need it to be super 3D, like it could be
just on flat image--you could just put
| | 01:49 | it on a flat plane, and put it far in
the distant background, and that will work
| | 01:53 | for you, something like a
display on a camera, or a tablet.
| | 01:57 | This is great for that.
| | 01:59 | Now, one another thing here. If I go to
Element, click on Scene Setup, we can, of
| | 02:03 | course, customize our scene interface.
| | 02:05 | We can move it around, as, like this. And,
we could also click on a corner of one
| | 02:11 | of the panels, here, and really get
ourselves into a heap of trouble as we are
| | 02:18 | shifting these things around.
| | 02:20 | It's very similar to the way After
Effects works with panels, where we can kind
| | 02:23 | of drag them around by
the corners, and reset them.
| | 02:26 | But one of the problems is, again, is that
we can get ourselves into a heap of trouble.
| | 02:31 | So, what we can do is hold the Shift key
down. As we hold the Shift key, and click
| | 02:35 | the Scene Setup button, it
resets the Scene Setup for us.
| | 02:39 | So, that's a helpful tip.
| | 02:40 | Another thing that we can do is that when
we're playing an element, often there is a glitch.
| | 02:46 | We might make a change, and not see it
updated, and it can get really frustrating.
| | 02:50 | We know that we're doing the right
thing, and Element just doesn't seem to be working.
| | 02:53 | Well, as is the case with a lot of plug
-ins and effects in After Effects, the
| | 02:58 | image cache gets messed up.
| | 03:00 | So, in other words, After Effects has
cached the image before you changed it, and
| | 03:05 | that's what you're seeing.
| | 03:06 | So, what you need to do is go to
Edit>Purge>Image Cache Memory.
| | 03:11 | Sometimes, even All
Memory doesn't fix it for me.
| | 03:13 | You got to go to Image Cache Memory,
and that will clear the slate for you.
| | 03:18 | Now, one last tip, here. As we go to
videocopilot.net--and the blog part of that,
| | 03:25 | and it's videocopillot.net/blog--oftentimes
they will give away tons of really high-
| | 03:31 | quality models, and materials, and
other freebies to use for Element.
| | 03:35 | For example, there is this really cool
Halloween 3D pack, and there is also phones
| | 03:41 | like the Galaxy S3, and the iPhone5.
It's just a free model for Element. And also,
| | 03:47 | there is this really cool planet Earth
that was used in the opening for the TV
| | 03:52 | show, Revolution. And, it also animates.
There is these lights on it and stuff. So,
| | 03:56 | really high-quality stuff that they
give away, like crazy, on videocopilot.net.
| | 04:01 | So, it's definitely a resource that
you want to be aware of as you go
| | 04:05 | forward with Element.
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| Goodbye| 00:00 | Well, folks, that is the training series.
| | 00:02 | I want to thank you so much for
watching. I have had an absolute blast
| | 00:06 | creating this training for you. And, I'm just so
amazed at this amazing tool for After Effects.
| | 00:12 | On behalf of lynda.com, I am Chad Perkins.
| | 00:15 | Again, thank you so much for watching.
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