why would anyone waste their time making a video about long shadows from a technical standpoint
the long shadow is actually really interesting to break down and it can be created in multiple
different ways so today we're looking at the best free way to create the long shadow effect
hi i'm james wiffen and today we're talking about long shadows so to start us off let's look at the
most naive and simplest way to create a long shadow effect start with the shape layer and
add the repeater essentially this effect allows you to generate copies of the layer and then
offset them with a certain transform so with that transform we can offset them on the x and the y
but when thinking about a shadow this isn't a very intuitive way to control the direction of the
shadow for this purpose an angle slider is a lot better so if we add the angle expression control
and then we add some simple trigonometry to the x and y we can control the distance with the
slider and there we have it this is perfect for demonstrating the technical challenge that we have
with the long shadow so for example this looks fine but what if the layer has a lot of really
fine detail now we need to dramatically increase the amount of samples that we have and this brings
in another problem if you have too many samples then you're going to get aliasing all the crunchy
edges stacking up on top of each other not to mention we also have the problem that it's really
slow because we have so many samples going on now we'll look at a more efficient way to create the
long shadow effect essentially what we need is a video filter that grows the bounds of the layer
and most of the presets out there are using the minimax effect thankfully the minimax effect
recently got a gpu acceleration any users who used the previous version will know how slow it could
get when you increase the radius but now it's really really fast so we increase the radius on
the horizontal axis only and you can see that this is growing the layer you could also use say a blur
a directional blur and a levels adjustment on the alpha to achieve a similar result but we'll
just stick with the minimax effect now what we do is sandwich the minimax effect in between two
transform effects the first transform effect offsets it so that the position looks correct
in our scene and then we apply rotation with the first transform with the second transform that is
beneath the minimax effect we remove the rotation of the first transform essentially it's the
rotation of the first transform times negative one and what this allows us to do is use the rotation
of the first transform offset to basically set our angle or direction of the long shadow
we then add a fill effect to fill the entire shadow with a solid colour
and then we add cc composite to the end if we want the original sample composited in front
and that's basically it there's a few variations of this effect online some with different bells
and whistles some have stripes some have gradients but unfortunately the gradients don't move with
the direction of the shadow you have to manually keyframe them or you have to add an expression
so mikey bora from cinema spice he has a tutorial on this technique instead of using the transform
effect to position and rotate the layer he actually uses the layer transformations themselves
in after effects however this technique is not as convenient because it requires you to pre-compose
so it means you can't just drag and drop your preset or effect onto a layer you know you've
got to have pre-composition and then applied expressions and so on and so forth so that's
not as convenient but it does work there's a paid long shadow plug-in on a-scripts and this works
in a completely different way which allows you to get a proper gradient with your long shadow
however the method that this plugin uses completely breaks when you apply it to a
layer with fine detail as you can see here and you get some really disgusting artifacts that i'm just
waiting for another 10 years when this trend comes back into fashion and so that i can be
trendy again with my long shadow effect because yeah we we also have a long shadow plug-in but
it's not a big deal and it actually does more than just long shadows so link in the description
for that one so thanks for watching i hope this helps you understand how long shadows are working
and make sure you hit the subscribe button for more content next week