Playing with a layer's material options - After Effects Tutorial

- Real-world objects absorb and interact with lights in different ways. This is mimicked in After Effects by material options available on our layers. In this movie, we're going to explore how we can change a layer's material options to dramatically affect how light interacts with it. So I'm here in my chapter 2_5 composition. And so far when we've added lights to our scene, the layers that we've had have, of course, absorbed some of that light, as well as transmittance of that light outwards. And that's based on the Layers Material option. To best see this in the example in front of us, I'm going to just show you the background here, the background outline, so I've soloed that item. I'm going to press a + a, and we've seen some of these material options in the last movie, specifically, as we had to deal with shadows. What we're really interested in this particular case are the below-properties, and one of these has extreme impact on how much light is absorbed, which is kind of like how much is this layer like metal. In real life, things are either metal or they're not, but we can have sort of in-between values. And you'll notice that, as I lower this, what happens is more light is absorbed by that specific layer. So right now all the lights in the scene are now illuminating this quite differently, giving it a different type of material. If I unsolo this, you can see that impact of now this being less like metal by lowering its percentage. Other things we can do is each of these lights in particular, are shining on a particular area of this logo, depending on where it's located. Even the point lights, based on where they're located, there's going to be a brighter spot on the image versus other areas. And in some cases, this is known as a specular. Its intensity, by default, is set to 50, and to best see this, I'm going to turn off everything except this one point light we can see there where it's shining on our logo. If I come here to the specular intensity, and start to play around with that value, do you see how the area where this light is predominantly shining changes based on the specular intensity. And also, what happens when I increase the shininess, that spot becomes a lot more evident and smaller around the graphic, the mixture of the two. Notice the effect of diffusion of your light, specifically with the point light and how that would change, even if you had a spotlight in your scene, as well as the impact ambient has, in this particular case, which is not much. But these values, and particularly these material options, do come into play with lights and how each of your layers absorbs those lights. And by changing these values, we can have profound impacts on how lights interact with our layers. They only become expanded when we go over into the ray-traced renderer. In fact, we can intermix them with reflections on layers, we can have reflections on layers, if we have environment layers on our scene, using these same options of the type of material it is. And that is how you access a layer's material options inside of Adobe After Effects.