Welcome back to Adobe's Learn From the Pros tutorial series.
In the first episode of this series, I showed you how to shape layers
to set up a basic animated map route with some markers.
In the second episode,
we got everything rigged and set up ready for animation inside of 3D space.
In this video, we're working with lights.
OK, so I've animated the map path and the map markers.
Everything is rigged up in 3D space. The camera is in a good position.
However, everything's looking
pretty flat still, so I want to start to add some depth to the scene.
So I'm going to go over to my path controller and I'm going to start
to pull the path away from the map, so looks a little bit more dynamic.
So I'm going to pull this up just straight off the map like this.
Now there's a problem right away, and it looks like you can't really tell
that I moved it at all.
And that's because there's there's no lighting, there's no shadows,
there's no falloff.
So by adding lighting and shadows, we're going to be able to increase
the quality of the visuals here and show the depth.
So to do that, I'm going to right
click in my timeline here and I'm going to go to new light.
Now there are four different
types of lights, and they can get pretty complex, pretty quickly.
So one way I like to work is just keep things simple and only use
as few lights as possible.
And here we're only going to be using two lights.
So I'm going to grab a spotlight, and I'll be using a spotlight
to not only add some shadows here from this path on the map,
but also to give the map a little bit of like a vignette look.
I want to make sure that I go down here and click on the Cast
Shadows checkbox here.
And don't worry too much about these parameters
because you can always go back, simply
double click on the light and change any of these parameters later on.
I'm going to click OK,
and now my light is added, and you can see now it's suddenly dark.
To get a better view of what's going on, I'm going to switch my view to top view.
Now you can see what's going on here. We have the cone of my spotlight.
You can see the wireframe of the light
here, and I have this spotlight layer here in the timeline.
Now, great way to work with lights is in the comp panel.
Make sure you don't have this selected, so deselect it and then grab it here.
And then you can kind of freeform move it
without having to mess with the widget too much.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to come over here
and I'm going to move this light so that it's directly over top of the map here.
It's nowhere near
how I want to look here, so I'm going to switch this to two views.
So do the right one as a top view.
And this left side here, we're going to do it as a left view.
I'm going to grab the light.
I'm going to start to pull it directly off of the map like that.
And again, get rid of that
gizmo by deselecting and then grab it again for free form look.
We'll pull it to about somewhere right about here
and then I'll come over to this left angle and I'm just going to offset
this light ever so slightly this way.
Now, when I'm animating the camera flying in, I kind of would like it to fly
in from a bit of darkness.
And I want to see this fall off here from this light.
And as I said before, if I want to make any changes,
I can simply double click on the spotlight layer.
And now I can come in here and I can play with the cone angle.
And as long as I have this preview selected, any changes
I make here are going to automatically show up.
I can change the intensity so maybe we can bump up the intensity
over 100 and I'm going to click OK, and I'm going to go back to one view
and I'm going to switch the view
to active camera to now see what I've got going on.
Now we can definitely see the falloff here, but there's a problem.
I still don't see the shadows from my path and from my map markers.
When you're working with lights in After Effects,
you actually have to go into the layer and make sure that it is accepting shadows.
Each layer has its own
settings and parameters when it comes to how it deals with lights,
and you can see that by double clicking on the light right here.
It says Note: shadows are only cast from layers with cast shadows enabled,
and then you even have to have a parameter called Accept Shadows enabled,
which I would have to have my map accepting shadows.
And then I would have to have my path and my markers casting shadows.
So you find those parameters down here in the layer, you go to material options
and right here, it says Cast Shadows is currently set to off.
So I'm going to turn that on.
You also have accept shadows, accept lights.
And then there's
a handful of other options here, which I'm not going to worry too much about.
So to quickly change all of these, I'm going to grab all these layers
and I'm going to type in the keyword cast so that it just brings up cast shadows.
And then with all of these layers selected, I'll toggle one on
and it should toggle all of them on.
And now you can see we have shadows. They're looking pretty terrible.
They're much too dark.
So I need to go back into my light here, and I'm going to go over
to shadow diffusion and we're going to crank that way up
and I'll make the shadow darkness like 75.
OK, now these shadows look good, and it turns out that our map layer
must have automatically, by default, had accept shadows set to on.
Now it's still looking pretty dark, so I'm going to add another light.
I'm going to right click new light, and we're just going to add an ambient light.
This is just going to wash a bunch of light in here,
so I'm just going to go ahead with the default here.
All right. It's way, way, way too bright.
I'm going to double click
this and we're going to bring this down from like 115 down to like 35.
OK, now we've got something here.
I can't see a little bit of a falloff here.
We're coming out of darkness into the bright spot here. All right.
Starting to look really cool with the lighting.
Stick around because in the next episode, we're actually going to be animating
this scene and one of the most fun parts of the process, adding
some depth of field.