- [Instructor] Hello everyone,
this is Evan Abrams,
actually this is a dino head
that adorns one of my walls,
but in this tutorial it doesn't matter
what kind of footage you have.
We're gonna put some lines and points on it in 3D
and this is the most interesting thing in my home.
I'm not even the most interesting thing in my own house.
So here in After Effects we've imported our
footage, we've put it in a composition,
we are ready to go.
And before we really get into it,
I want to let you know,
in this tutorial, we're gonna use a third party plugin
called Plexus.
If you don't have Plexus,
you can check out the trial version of that.
And you'll be able to follow along.
But, bonus, at the end of this tutorial,
I'm gonna talk you through how to do it
without Plexus, ohhh, very fancy stuff.
And, another thing you're gonna need
to start us off,
is your own footage.
I've got this terrible handheld footage,
that I captured around the house,
and I've already gone through
and I have applied the warp stabilize via effects to it.
So it's a pretty automatic procedure,
don't think we need to really talk about it too much,
if you have shaky footage apply this to it.
Use the detailed analysis and get it done
and it will stabilize your stuff.
If you haven't had to stabilize your stuff,
then you're doing better than me.
But if you did,
you're gonna want to pre compose this footage,
so Command + Shift + C,
and pre compose that.
Then you want to make sure that you are
putting all of the attributes and stuff
into that comp.
So that it's not out here in the
place that we're working.
It's all contained.
So, right now, this is taking the place
of good footage and just remember that.
But, the automation doesn't stop here.
The next thing we're gonna automate
is using something called the 3D camera tracker.
This is used to get a 3D solve of a scene,
any time you want to put VFX into a scene,
like it belongs there,
you're gonna want to do a camera solve
or some tracking of some kind.
This is good enough for what we're doing
and we're gonna movie magic to edit to the end
of this having solved.
After we go into the advanced,
we ask it to do a detailed analysis
and we tell it this is a typical solve.
Oh, and look at how quickly that went,
it's amazing.
So, basically what we're doing is we're saying,
do more work and we are telling it that this
is a typical handheld shot.
It's not a tripod pan,
it's not a flat scene.
So, we're giving it as much information as we can
to make it easier on us later.
What I'd like to do now is go in here
and have a look at these little X's.
These X's are points of contrast
that the computer thought were gonna be
interesting for it to try to base the camera solve off of.
And I think it's done a pretty good job.
and we're gonna use these to kind of hijack
them to make little nulls.
So I'm gonna create a null and a camera.
So we've made a null at the end of that tooth.
And we're gonna go in
and we're gonna make a few more.
So I'm gonna go maybe to this one
and create a null on that.
Maybe on this and create a null there.
Good. And these are all in the top row of teeth.
So I might say, this is top one,
this one here is top two,
this one here is top three.
So I'm labeling these nulls
so they're not all like null 25 or whatever.
Now I'm gonna go to the bottom row of teeth
and see if we can identify some,
that's a good one.
That's maybe a good one.
Maybe that's a good one.
And take these, give them a different color.
And we'll call these bottom and same thing here.
Bottom, don't be afraid of using the copy and paste.
Awesome, very good.
So you've got top teeth,
you got bottom teeth.
I think what we also need to do is make a new text layer,
put some 3D text in here.
People are always wanting to put some text
into a scene when they got a bunch of lines on stuff.
It's not necessary, but people like to do it.
So we got a camera that matches the camera we used,
and if we just go ahead and make the dino text 3D,
notice it moves, right?
It goes from over here to over here.
Interesting, why?
Well, it starts off in it's position,
right here at 9.60 whatever.
And if we call up our camera,
it's position starts there too,
that's just a default thing.
But, if we're over here in the timeline,
and we turn this thing to 3D,
it jumps out of the way because it's in 3D
space over here.
The camera has moved away from it.
So just try to be aware of those things,
that when you make text 3D by default,
it might not be where you want it to be.
Just a problem that comes up.
So you might want to just move this to be,
you know, more in line with where you want it.
Not like there, maybe like here.
Mmmm, push it back.
Yeah, that seems to be correct,
it seems to be in the mouth.
That looks close enough for me.
And, what I'm gonna do is now add some null objects
on the dino text here.
So I'm gonna just go new, null object,
make it 3D.
You'll notice it's jumped over there.
We're gonna hold down Shift
and parent it to the dino, alright?
To the little word dino.
And then, I'm going to move it,
beep, beep, beep, beep, beep,
boop, boop, boop, boop, boop,
move it in 3D to be on that I.
And I'll probably duplicate it again.
And boop, boop, boop, boop, boop,
move it to the end of the N.
And, you know, one more.
Duplicate it.
And move it to the top of the N,
sure, why not?
Who really cares.
Or maybe to the top of the O?
I don't know, somewhere, put them somewhere.
And these nulls should be called text.
So we can remember that they are on the text.
Great.
So I think we've got everything set up.
At this point, if you have Plexus or not,
these steps are all the same.
But if you do have Plexus,
it's really easy to finish.
This is the endgame right here.
We're gonna create a new solid layer.
It's a black solid, great.
And we're going to add to it, Plexus.
So go to the effects here.
Plexus.
And what Plexus does and is,
if you've never used it before,
or maybe you're just unfamiliar with it,
Plexus is a very advanced particle system.
It allows you to add geometry
and then link the points and vertices
of that geometry together in very interesting ways.
So you can even bring in,
sort of, 3D objects, OBJ, from things.
But, we're gonna add layers.
Layers that are in After Effects already.
And the layer type we want are 3D layers
and we want nulls.
We want those nulls.
And we want nulls that begin with the word bottom.
For one one of them.
And that's going to be group one.
And we don't want it to get the colors from the layers,
we do want it to have 100% opacity.
Big thumbs up for that.
But I'm just gonna duplicate that
to make layers object two.
Which will form group two,
and the name is top.
So it's searching for all the nulls that start with top
and assigning those a coordinate space in Plexus.
And duplicate that one more time
to make group three.
Which are the text nulls.
Okay, so that's good.
We got some geometry in there.
We can't really see it yet, though.
I mean, are you seeing it?
I don't see anything there.
I don't think that's working out.
Something is not happening for us
and it could be a lot of things
that are not happening.
But, one of the things I think is that
the point size is too small.
So you might need to increase your point size
to actually see the points.
And that is because our coordinates
system is a little bit messed up.
These nulls are very far apart in space,
or they can be, they could be for you.
And that might be the reason
you're not seeing the little dots.
So, that's just a heads up that that might be the case.
So we've got dots.
Dots are great, but dots aren't lines, alright.
The client specifically said lines on things,
not dots on things.
So get your head out of your keister
and add a new renderer that is lines.
And these lines, it only draws them within
a certain distance.
So, what is the maximum distance between
two points at which will create a line?
Well let's start increasing that,
more, more, more, more.
And it starts to draw the spider web of points.
As it's connecting them all together
in this wacky network.
So as you can see,
that looks pretty legit.
We're moving through it in 3D,
everything's moving as expected,
one thing that isn't really expected,
let me just fill that opacity over distance,
is that they're all connecting to everything else.
We want a little control over that.
And that's why we made these groups.
So right now, we're drawing lines between every group,
meaning, every point that is,
draw some lines.
But if we said, only draw between things of the same group,
we'll see what happens.
All of these draw between themselves,
these draw, these draw.
That's okay.
What if we said, only draw between different groups.
That means that this will draw to points
that are not its own group.
That could be fun.
And what we could do is kind of reduce the distance
to kind of make, oh yeah, that's a cool look,
kind of like that.
And you could reduce the number of vertices
that it searches out.
Kind of like this.
And you get this kind of look.
That's pretty cool.
Maybe we start increasing this a little bit.
There we go.
Now I think we're on to something.
And that allows you to just kind of fine tune
what's going on.
But, that's pretty much it,
I think we got it locked down.
Maybe increase the thickness of the lines a little bit,
so they're a little bit more noticeable out there.
But I think this is looking pretty cool.
It's a pretty good look.
And when you render this out,
it'll look wonderful.
Now I will say that Plexus can be
a little hardware intensive,
so just keep that in mind,
but, as promised, we will do this without Plexus.
So, let's not even look at it.
Let's make a new solid.
A totally different solid.
But what effect will we use?
There must be an effect to accomplish this.
Well there is.
And you've probably guessed,
it is the beam.
Look at that, doesn't that look exactly the same?
We nailed it.
No work required on this one.
Actually a lot of work required.
First thing, no softness, thanks.
I don't want that.
And change the color here to nice, bright white.
Cool, make it thinner.
Thin, thin, thin, thin is in.
And make the length 100%.
So it's 100% of the way between these two points.
Now all we have to do is make the start point
and end point line up with the things we want to connect.
Right? Pretty easy.
So, hold down Alt and click on these stopwatches
and let's enter expressions that will accomplish this.
That's right, the solution to an easy plugin
is to use a complicated expression.
And it's not very complicated.
What we're trying to do is solve the problem
of linking a two dimensional thing,
this array of type two, X,Y,
to a 3D dimension.
So if I wanted to link it to this text,
for example, it's position is expressed as
three numbers in the world.
But I need it to be expressed as two numbers
relative to the composition.
And there is an expression that does exactly that.
So, what are we gonna type to accomplish that?
Well, we are gonna first say,
L=, and the L needs to equal a layer, right?
And we're setting up a variable,
just to make it easier to write the rest of this thing.
Once we've identified the layer we're interested,
then we say, that layer, .toComp,
and then in brackets,
and then in square brackets inside those brackets, 0, 0, 0.
So what we're saying is look at that layer,
and then take its coordinates
and make them conform to the composition.
And as you can see the starting point
has now moved to right there.
It has worked perfectly.
Now you might use this beam if you want to say,
have the start point and end point,
like one of them on a 3D thing,
and one of them on a 2D thing, that's fine.
But, we can do this and this,
and now have this linked to, I don't know,
top two, there we go, nailed it.
And now these two things are linked together
in a very similar way that you saw with Plexus.
Now maybe you want the starting thickness to be
smaller than the ending thickness.
Oh yeah, got that going on.
We are faking it til we make it out here.
And now we've accomplished pretty much
the same thing but with the beam.
If you want to then start connecting more things though,
you'll have to duplicate the beam,
duplicate, and then go in here,
go into that beam, and change it from say,
not top two, but top one or something like that.
Then you'll have to have them composite
on top of each other in a nice way
to make that happen but,
if you choose to go the beam route,
just know that you have a little bit more work
ahead of you.
If you enjoy the Plexus route,
then you are already done
and you stopped watching a long time ago.
But, this has been Evan Abrams,
I hope you enjoyed putting lines on things,
I've enjoyed talking about it.
If you have any questions about what we did,
please let me know in the comments
and I'll try to talk you through it.
That two comp thing can be a little bit confusing.
If you've enjoyed hearing about VFX, motion graphics,
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And if you want to ask questions about
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If you want to get your hands on the work file
that we just made,
then head over to evanabrams.com.
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