Howdy, folks. Welcome back to Adobe's Learn From the Pros tutorial series.
My name is Boone.
In this five part series, I've been showing you
how to create a cool map animation inside of Adobe After Effects.
In the first video, I showed you how to use some basic shape
layer elements to animate a map path and some map markers.
In the second video, I showed you how to get everything
set up in 3D space and the third video we went over how to work with lights.
And then the fourth episode we brought everything together
and animated our camera added some depth of field.
And this fifth and final video
we're going to talk about extruding shapes,
which is going to allow us to achieve a totally different look.
After Effects is tightly integrated with Cinema 4D.
You can actually launch Cinema 4D light from within Adobe After Effects,
and there's also a Cinema 4D renderer that opens up additional features.
And I'm actually going to be using that renderer in this tutorial to show you
how we can create a different map style or look of our map
where basically I'm going to be using the renderer to extrude these shapes here.
So over here in the comp panel, I can switch to 3D render
right here in this dropdown menu,
and you can see right here I can just swap it over to the Cinema 4D.
You can also go over to the composition menu here and open up
composition settings.
There's a 3D render tab right here that shows you gives you
a little bit more detail and right here, it says the selected renderer determines
the features available for 3D layers in a composition
and how they're going to interact with 2D layers.
So as I switch this to Cinema 4D, I can now see that over here
it has enabled all these features, including extruded and beveled text
and shapes, reflections, curved footage layers and a handful of other options.
But it disabled a lot of things like blending modes, layer
styles, big things and even our camera depth of field.
So let's go look at what's going on here.
Right away, I can see the map is looking different.
I can't see the shadows and everything sharp again.
We did, in fact lose our depth of field,
but down here, if I open up one of my shape elements,
there's a new section or a group of parameters.
These geometry options.
So let's go down to the path.
And under geometry options, you have extrusion depth.
So let's just extrude this by ten
and then go set the bevel style to convex and see what happened.
Now you'll also notice just see how long this is taking to process.
This workflow is very system intensive, so you need to work accordingly.
OK, so now you can see we have this extruded path with a beveled edge.
It's looking pretty terrible, so we need to go through and start to fix it up.
So first, I'm going to go back to the contents of my path and the shape
and the stroke elements, and I'm going to go ahead and subtract that dash up there.
I want a solid line.
I'm going to turn this down to third, so it doesn't take so long to update.
OK, so now we have this line. I can't see the shadows either.
So to fix that, I can go over to my spotlight and the shadow diffusion.
If you just bring this down, I'm going to bring it.
I'm just going to get rid of it, actually, and you'll be able to see.
Now you have a shadow there, and actually I'm going to have to
reposition that light to make it look good again.
Now I have a bit of a problem here, and it's the fact that the extrusion works
towards the back and right now it's actually going down.
So if I go to this path controller and I bring up the position
and I just zero this out,
you can see that the extrusion is happening on the other side of the map.
So to better understand this, let's go grab this first map marker
and I'm going to extrude this, so we'll extrude this by 25.
So if I do 25, you can see we can't see it.
You can actually see the bounding box here, but we can't see it.
And it's because it's going underneath this.
And that has to do with the fact that the anchor point is up here.
So we just want to tell it to put the anchor point at the bottom and extrude up.
What you need to do is
you need to create a little rig here, so you need to go grab the anchor points.
I'm going to select the anchor point and then I'm going to control
click extrusion depth and then I'm going to hit the S key twice.
And that solos these two properties.
So the way that we can rig this is we are going to use this property pick
whip here of our extrusion depth, and we're going to attach that to the z
of our anchor point.
Make sure you don't accidentally attach it to just the anchor point.
You want to attach it to the individual z here.
Otherwise, it's not going to work. Now that snapped that back to zero.
Now we can control it using the z of our anchor point parameter.
So if I bring this up to 25 now, you can see it's up
and then we have this little shape of the cooler shadow.
I'm going to go back down to geometry options and change the bevel to convex.
So now I could theoretically just grab the geometry options and copy them
and then go up to all the other mat markers, paste them.
Probably do the same thing with anchor points.
Let's go to anchor point of the first one to copy the anchor point
and then I'll grab all these, paste
the anchor point and I'll zoom out and see if it worked. OK, cool.
It looked like it worked.
Now what I need to do is I need to go back
and I need to get rid of all these scale animations.
And what I need to do is animate the anchor points
to have these essentially shoot up.
Som I'm going to quickly do this, and I'm going to speed it up
for the sake of brevity in this tutorial.
So you don't sit and watch me do 15 minutes here.
And now I'm going to do the same thing with the path here.
I'm going to go down, grab the extrusion and anchor point solo these
and I'm going to parent this here, and then we'll set this to ten.
So this will always be up here.
And now I'm gonna go back to top view and see if I can make adjustments
with this light here, and I want more falloff on the side here.
This map kind of looks better from the top view.
I think it should be like a top view map.
All right, switching back to active view.
And now, once again, I've lost my depth of field,
which was really selling this shot, so to bring that back?
I can fake it. So the way we do that is I'm going to right click here and I'm
going to add a new adjustment layer and I'll call this fake depth of field.
And then I'll go over to the effects and presets panel here.
And I'm going to search camera lens blur,
and I'll drop that right on my fake depth of field adjustment layer.
I'm going to switch my resolution down to third so I can work here,
and this is actually going to blur out kind of my whole frame.
So I need to create a blur map because you can see right down here,
I can add a blur map.
So for that, I can just create a new solid and make sure it's set to comp size.
It really doesn't matter what the color is, and I'll call this blur map.
And what I'm going to do here is use the pen tool to mask it out.
What this is going to do is whatever is an
alpha here is going to be blurry.
So I need to make sure that I that I feather the edges as well.
So I'm going to hit shortcut key F to bring up my mask
and I'm going to really feather this out like maybe by like 1000 pixels.
And I'm also going to set this to subtract.
So actually, the transparency will be sharp focus
now if I go back to my fake depth of field and I set this to blur map
and then I set it to effects and masks,
and I set this to Alpha and then I turn the blur map off
and I'm going to go to blur radius and I'm going to crank this up way
high just so I can see how it looks.
OK, that's looking pretty cool, but I feathered it out too much
and everything is still blurry,
but you can see how it gets blurry or out further out.
So I go back to my blur map
and just start to pivot this around, you know, pull this way back.
OK, this looks really good now.
The only downside is that we're using these blurs.
We have the extruded shapes.
This is in fact going to take a long time to render out.
So be aware of that fact. All right. Let's take a look at this.
OK, so there you have it, I hope you enjoyed the series, if you did.
Be sure to subscribe to Adobe YouTube channel,
and if you'd like to see more map related content.
Be sure to come over and check out my YouTube channel at BooneLovesVideo.
And as always, thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next one.