Environment and reflection - After Effects Tutorial

- [Instructor] This is what we have so far, the light and the contact shadows on the water are helping to make this monster look much more believable. But if we look at other parts of this swamp, we can see that all the surrounding objects are reflecting here in the water. So let's work on those reflections as well as give our object the same environment features based upon this clip. So, to make this happen, I'm going to go to the beginning and for now I'm going to switch off the visibility of the monster null as well as the trucking data null just so they won't distract us when we are working on this. And obviously those null objects won't render anyway. All right, so apparently, this video was captured in full 4K resolution. We are working with the HD version, but if you're going to pull down the footage folder, I already prepared for you a 4K image of the first frame. And this is going to be a great source to be used as an environment layer inside Element 3D. So I'm going to just drag it underneath the other layers over here. And just so you see it over here, this is a much larger version of the same comp. You can also see the dimensions written in the project part, so if you have access to a 4K version of your footage, you can pull out better reflection in terms of quality. And the way to define it inside Element is to switch to the Element interface over here, under the effect controls, and then go to the custom layers options. And then pull down the custom texture mask. And here we can set Layer 1 to be our mini-lake.png, which is the version that we've just imported. So just one frame should work in this case. And now to tell Element to use this on this model, we need to click on the Scene Setup, and then click where it says environment, and then use this pull-down arrow to define our Custom Layer 1 to be used as the reflection for this model. And this means that it will take it and project the features on top of this model. Now it won't be 100% physically correct, but it will really work well. And you can see now that our monster really looks like he is part of the scene due to this environment treatment. But now what you want to do is also add a reflection for the entire model underneath. So to do so, I'm going to jump back to the Scene Setup over here, and then I'm going to start by selecting the Plain Model. And I'm going to click on this little Reflect Mode box. This will allow me to define the reflection mode. I'm going to use Mirror Surface, and I need to make sure that I'm going to select the material itself, go once again to the last options over here, the Advanced options, scroll down, and also tick the matte reflection. And this means that we can see now the reflection underneath this guy. So I can already see that we'll have a problem with the floor. It's not big enough. So if I'm here, I'm going to select the Plain Model once again, and then I'm going to scale it to 700% and click enter. And this will extend the floor and show us the reflection that we need across the entire frame. So we can see how this looks and compare it to the other reflections that we have in the scene. So it looks okay, but I think that if we'll separate the reflection we can control it separately. And then we will be able to make it more realistic, and match it so it'll look more similar to what we are seeing over here. So, to do so, what I'm going to do is select the Element there, and then press Control or Command+D to duplicate another copy. I'm going to select the lower one, and then I'm going to rename it "Element Reflection." Now we want to make sure that the upper copy doesn't show the reflection over here, so I'm going to make sure it is selected and then go under its Render Settings and then under the reflection, I'm just going to switch off the reflection completely. So if you're going to just take a look at this guy over here, this is what we have so far. Now I need to select the reflection, I'm going to switch off the visibility of the upper layer, and make sure that Element is only going to render it for this layer. So to do so, I'm going to jump once again into the Scene Setup. This time, I'm going to select the monster itself, making sure that the material is selected, because we need to click on the Advanced option and check off the Visible to Camera as well as Cast Shadow. This is going to leave us only with the mirrored reflection on this layer. So I'm going to say, okay over here, and in it this is what I'm seeing. We can see barely his feet. So let's just bring him back, and I'm going to set a different blending mode for the reflection layer. This is why we did all of this madness, and now we can see that by using the screen blending mode, we actually managed to match this reflection to the same appearance of other elements that we have over here. So this it! This is how you can add an environment projection as well as control their reflection using two copies of Element 3D, one for the object itself and the other one just for the reflection. All of this to create better integration between nature and 3D objects.