Within every After Effects CC project, you have Compositions. And within the Composition settings is an area where you can specify a renderer. A renderer is the part of After Effects CC that analyzes the data contained within a Composition and determines how the scene should look. Things like the shininess of a layer or can a layer even have shininess? Can the layer exist in 3D space? If it does exist in 3D space can it have 3D depth? Different renderers give you different options and in this tutorial, I'll show you how to switch between renderers in After Effects CC. Start by going to the Project panel and double-clicking on the 01_Naturalists - 2D Composition. This should look pretty familiar because it's a bunch of Illustrator CC layers on top of an (Orange Solid 1). Select Layer 1 and press P to open the Position and you'll notice it has X position and Y position which means it exists in 2D space. In order to create 3D space in After Effects CC all you have to do is enable 3D for a Layer. So, go to the right side of the Switches column here and click in this box to enable 3D for that Layer. Once I've enabled 3D now I have X, Y and Z for the position of this Layer. Now if we go down you'll notice I have Material Options. Open the Material Options and you can see there are several different options, Light Transmission, Diffuse, Specular Intensity. Don't worry if you're not familiar with these terms, it's easy enough to figure it out once you start scrubbing with the different parameters. The important thing to understand is there are Material Options and that determines how the material will appear within this renderer. So, collapse the Material Options and then you'll notice the Geometry Options are grayed out. If you look to the right of the Geometry Options click on the text Change Renderer... That will automatically open your Composition Settings directly to the 3D Renderer area. By default, After Effects CC is in the Classic 3D Renderer. This will allow you to position layers in 3D space but they will remain 2D layers. Click on the drop-down and choose CINEMA 4D. Immediately you'll see a list of features that are Enabled like the ability to extrude and bevel text and shapes and then there are features that are Disabled like blending modes and track mattes. If we wanted to change this Composition to the CINEMA 4D Renderer all we'd have to do is go down and press OK. So, go ahead and press OK. Once we do that now we get access to Geometry Options and if I open the Geometry Options since this is an Illustrator CC layer I have the ability to curve that layer. Now I've already set up some compositions with the different renderers, so you can get a general idea as to how the objects would appear within those renderers. Go back to the Project panel and double-click on the 02_Naturalists - Classic 3D Composition. In this comp you'll notice I have three different Lights, I have a Camera and I have a bunch of layers that exist in 3D space. Select the Camera 1 layer, Layer 4 and press P on your keyboard to open the Position. Scrub on the X parameter of the Camera to see the depth of the scene. While these layers are flat they exist in different planes in Z depth, so we get the perception of actual 3D. Go back to the Project panel and double-click on the 03_APEAK - CINEMA 4D Composition and notice this one actually contains an element that has true 3D depth. If we look in the Timeline go to Layer 4 and you can see we have a Shape layer and this Shape layer was created by converting this Illustrator CC layer. So, I'll select Layer 4 and press R to open the Rotation and Orientation Settings. If you click and drag on the Y Rotation you can see this object is a true three-dimensional object and that's only available within the CINEMA 4D Renderer. When you're in the CINEMA 4D Renderer if you go to the upper right corner of the Composition panel you'll see a button that says CINEMA 4D. Go ahead and click on that and you notice this button will take you to the Composition Settings in the 3D Renderer area as well, so you could change the Composition back to a different Renderer. Just understand if you want true 3D depth in your objects you need to be using the CINEMA 4D Renderer.

 

Whenever you're working with a 2D layer in After Effects CC there is the possibility of enabling 3D just on that layer. And then when you do that you'll get access to a host of new controls. So, in this tutorial, I'm going to show you not only how to enable 3D for 2D layers but how to maintain control over those layers once they're in 3D space. To start let's go to the Timeline and select Layer 1. Press P on your keyboard to open the Position data and you see it has X and Y for the parameters, meaning it exists in 2D space. Make sure your Switches panel is active. If not toggle between your Switches and Modes to your Switches and make sure that 3D is enabled over here on the right side of Layer 1. Once you enable 3D you should notice that we now have X, Y and Z. We also have Orientation in addition to Rotation and we have Material Options. Now let's go to the Composition panel. Press the Period key on your keyboard to zoom in not once but twice until you get to 200%. It's kind of hard to see but there are control handles here. So, if I hover over this green control handle when I get over that main point you'll see the letter Y meaning I will move this along the Y axis, so click and drag on the green handle to move this layer only along the Y axis. Press W on your keyboard to access the Rotation tool and hover back over the same exact axis. Once you see the letter Y click and drag and now we're rotating that 2D layer in 3D space on the Y axis. The same goes for the X axis and the Z axis. Now I just press Ctrl + Z on Windows or Command + Z on the Mac to undo and press V on my keyboard to grab the Selection tool. Hover over any of the parameters and click and drag to scrub that parameter. As you're dragging if you hold Shift down it will scrub 10 times as fast. I'll press Ctrl + Z on Windows or Command + Z on the Mac to undo. Once you've enabled 3D on a layer it's always wise to look in the upper right corner of the Composition panel. This is where After Effects CC will tell you which Renderer you're currently working in. If you decided you were in the wrong Renderer you can always just click on this button to go to your Composition settings and change Renderers. Now whenever I am enabling and positioning 2D layers in 3D space I have to tell you I scrub the parameters in the Timeline more often than not. Because if your composition has a lot of layers involved sometimes it's hard to make sure that you can click directly on one of these tiny little points when you're repositioning an object. I find sometimes it's much easier just to scrub on the parameters in the Timeline.

 

Enabling 3D on a layer is the first step in trying to create a little more depth in your project but the second step is actually adding lights into the project. Go to the Timeline and you'll notice all of the layers currently exist in 3D space. Start at the bottom, click and drag up over the layers to select them all and press P to open the Position data. I’d like to pay attention to where the layers exist in Z space especially when I'm looking straight on because I really don't have much of a sense of perspective right now. The top two layers are closer to us by 100 pixels. So, press P again to hide the Position data and click at the bottom of the Timeline to deselect all those layers. Let's add a light to the scene to create more perspective. Go up under the Layer menu and choose New, Light... There are four different kinds of lights inside of After Effects CC. So, click on the Light Type drop-down and let's start with the Parallel light. I'll give you a quick rundown of each of the different lights. A Parallel light is an excellent light if you want to cast an even light but have a direction set behind it. It doesn't spread out like light coming from a light bulb. It's more of an even directional light similar to light from the sun. Click on the drop-down and choose Spot light. This behaves very much like a typical stage light where you can control the Angle of the Cone of light and the softness of the Feather. There is Falloff on this light and you can Cast Shadows. Now your Light Settings might be different than mine, that's perfectly fine. Lights have a tendency to remember whatever the previous settings were used the last time that light was created. Go back up under the Light Type drop-down and choose Point light. Point light has no Cone Angle or Feather but I can adjust the Intensity. It throws light in all directions very much like a light bulb without a lampshade. Let me explain Falloff for a quick second. Click on the drop-down for Falloff and you could choose None if you didn't want the light to have Falloff. Nine times out of ten I choose Smooth because it renders the fastest. If you want realistic shadows choose Inverse Square Clamped. Let me explain Smooth. With Smooth selected the Radius of 500 means the light at 100% Intensity is going to go out 500 pixels and then it's going to start falling off in intensity for another 500 pixels until it gets to an intensity of 0. Okay. Go back up under Light Type and let's choose the Ambient light. This is a great way to just add overall brightness to a scene or if you choose a negative value you can darken a scene. Now click on the drop-down and let's choose Spot light. I'll leave the Color set to white and I'll leave all these other settings the same. Intensity 100 %, Cone Angle 90 °, Cone Feather 50 %, Falloff Smooth, Radius 500, Falloff Distance 500. I enabled Casts Shadows and I set my shadows to 75 % Darkness with a Diffusion of 10 px. When I click OK the light has been added to the scene and it's kind of hard to see what's going on. In the Timeline since the Spot Light 1 is selected we can just press T to open the Intensity settings for that Spot Light 1. Click and drag to the right to increase the Intensity of that light. If you press AA rather quickly, you'll get all the Light Options. To try and soften up the edges of this light let's click on the Cone Angle and scrub and see if that makes much of a difference. And it really doesn't. I have a sneaking suspicion the issue is the falloff Radius. So, I'm going to go down to the Radius setting for the falloff and click and drag to increase the Radius of the falloff and sure enough the light wasn't getting far enough to actually reach our background. Let's go ahead and crank up the Radius to 1160.0. Now we can also increase the Cone Angle to a value of about 141.0° So, I have a Radius of 1160.0, Cone Angle of 141.0° and I'll bring the Intensity back down to a normal level around 112%. Maybe not that little, let's do 125%. There we go. Now we have a really nice highlight on this area. In order to fill in the edges let's add another light. I'll go up to the Layer menu and choose New, Light... and this time instead of a Spot Light let's click on the drop-down and just add an Ambient light. We'll bring the Intensity for that Ambient Light 1 down to around 42 % and click OK. And that should definitely brighten up the scene there a little bit. Now that the background is under control let's see if we can add more dimension by having the logo and the word cast a shadow. Collapse Layer 2 and select both Layers 3 and 4. Click on one, hold down Shift and click on the other. Press AA rather quickly on your keyboard to open the Material Options. Then enable Casts Shadows. Select Layer 2 and press P to open the Position. Let's scrub on the X parameter and bring it over to the side just a little bit so the shadow kind of pops off the side. Now the logo is definitely popping off the background. And remember if you want to adjust how light interacts in the scene it's a balancing act between the Light Settings and the Material Options of the layers that the light is illuminating.

 

So, you've gone through the process of positioning layers in 3D space, you've added some lights, you've adjusted the Material Options and now to create your final animation all we have to do is add a camera into the scene. So, to start let's look at our Timeline. And sure enough we have three different lights that are in the scene and we have several layers with 3D enabled. So, to add a camera let's go up to the Layer menu and choose New, Camera... There are two different kinds of cameras we can choose from. Click on the camera Type and let's select the One-Node Camera first. Go to the Preset drop-down click on that and you'll notice we have a bunch of different Focal Lengths and these are designed to function like DSLR lenses. So, I'll choose the 50 mm lens and come down to the bottom and click OK. The camera has been added into the scene and just to keep things organized I'll place it above all of my lights. Press P to open the Position data of that Camera 1. And then in order to see the scene more clearly, I want to change the view in the Composition panel. So, go to the lower right area of the Composition panel and click on the drop-down where it says 1 View, switch it to 2 Views - Horizontal and then click on the left side here to make this view active. Press the Comma key to zoom out. I pressed it twice then press and hold the Spacebar down to get your Hand tool and click and drag up so we can actually see the camera in the scene. Now with a One-Node Camera if I scrub on the X axis it's going to move perfectly parallel to what it's looking at in the scene. But I don't necessarily want that. So, I'm going to go ahead and disable the Visibility for Camera 1. Go back up under the Layer menu and choose New, Camera... This time under the Type change it to a Two-Node Camera and click OK. Press P to open the Position and with the Two-Node Camera scrub on the X-axis and you'll notice this camera will continually point to the middle of the scene. Now hold down Shift on your keyboard and click and drag on the X until we get way far over to the side, something like this. Click on the Stopwatch to add your first keyframe. Move 3 seconds down the Timeline and let's hover over the X parameter and click and drag and then hold Shift after you start to drag and that will give us a nice motion to the camera. Notice, once we've actually set two positions with the camera the motion path has handles. So, here I'll click on this handle and I'll just drag it out a little bit and I can do the same thing on this left handle. And now we can give a little arc to our camera as it rotates around. In order to view this, let's click on the right side of our Viewport here to make the Active Camera side active and then change our views from 2 Views to 1 View and then press the Spacebar. It may take a second to load up in RAM and cache everything so you can actually see it. Through the magic of editing I will just show you what this looks like in a second. Now that probably took a little while to render but there were a lot of lights in the scene with a lot of different settings. And that's something you should just be aware of when you're animating objects in 3D space but when it comes to flying cameras through a 3D scene you have two choices a One-Node Camera or a Two-Node Camera. It's the Two-Node Camera that has a point of interest. So, if you would like to orbit around something like we just did in our scene make sure you use the Two-Node Camera.

 

While positioning layers in 3D space can be fun and exciting, it's a lot more interesting when you actually start creating true 3D geometry. So, that's what we're going to do in this tutorial. And what makes that possible is the CINEMA 4D Renderer. Go to the Timeline and select Layer 1 and if you look on the right side in the Switches panel you'll notice 3D has been enabled. Go ahead and press P to open Position and notice it's moved 90 Pixels closer to us on the Z axis. Now if you collapse Layer 1 and open up its Options, we have Transform options and if we collapse the Transform options we have Material Options but we don't have any Geometry Options. So, let's click on the words Change Renderer... That'll open the Composition Settings to the 3D Renderer tab. If you click on the drop-down you could choose CINEMA 4D. Go ahead and do that and then click OK to set CINEMA 4D as the Renderer. Now we have full access to our Geometry Options. Go ahead and open the Geometry Options and since this was an Illustrator CC layer I have an option for Curvature. Click on that Percentage parameter and drag it to the right and let go and you notice it's created a curve to the layer. If you increase the number of Segments it will smooth out that curve. In order to more clearly see this, select Layer 1 and press R to open the Rotation Orientation settings and scrub on the Y Rotation parameter and here you can see the layer is bent in a curve. Go ahead and press Ctrl + Z a few times until you get back to the original flat layer. Let's convert this so we can extrude true 3D data. With Layer 1 selected go up to the Layer menu and choose Create Shapes from Vector Layer. That will give me a Shape layer and while we're at it let's do the same for Layer 3. Select Layer 3 and instead of going up to the Layer menu just right-click or Ctrl + click on the layer and choose the same option, Create Shapes from Vector Layer. Move the newly created shape layer up underneath Layer 1 so they're both together. With Layer 2 selected hold down Shift and click on Layer 1 so both layers are selected and press AA very quickly to open the Geometry Options and the Material settings and I'll scroll up in my Timeline so I can get to my Geometry Options. Since both layers are selected when I make this change they'll both change. So, set an Extrusion Depth of 40.0 and press Enter on your keyboard. That has created depth to our object but we can't really see it yet. So, press R to open Rotation Orientation settings and click and drag on the Y Rotation. I'll drag it to around +29.0. That's giving me a good view of my 3D object but I really can't see it until I add a light into the scene. So, go up under the Layer menu and choose New, Light... For the light, I'll just move the Light settings out of the way here, click on the Light Type drop-down and let's choose a Point light. Set the Intensity to 100%, we can leave the Falloff and Casts Shadows settings selected and then click OK. Now with the light in the scene you can see I actually have true 3D Geometry. Press P to open up the Light settings and scrub on the Z axis to move the light either further away or closer to the geometry. Now whenever you're working in the CINEMA 4D Renderer there's one thing to really pay attention to and that's the final render settings. So, go to the upper right corner of the Composition panel and click on the Wrench icon. Here under the CINEMA 4D Renderer Options mine was set just to the right of Typical, yours could be set down at Draft, I typically work at Draft settings as I'm creating animation and then just before I go to render out my Composition I change this up to just above the middle section here until I see the Anti-Aliasing switch to Best and I click OK. So, there are a lot more settings you could go through within the Material Options of a CINEMA 4D layer but you understand the basics of creating 3D geometry in CINEMA 4D. Illustrator CC layers can be converted to Shape layers and Shape layers can have true depth and any Text layers can also have true 3D created out of there as well.