hey what's up andrew kramer here for video co pilot
net and welcome back to another very exciting tutorial
today we're going to take a look at some cool
new features of our new plugging element
3d version 2
and hopefully show you what is possible
so originally element was designed as a way to import
3d objects into after effects and in version 2
we've taken it to a whole new level
we've added things like shadows
better ambient occlusion
we've added dynamic reflection maps
so if you're working with a client
and they want to change the
color of the background
you can just come over here to group two
set the color to blue
you know they don't like that
maybe white or gray or black
and they're like
hmm I don't like that and then you just say all right
I'll just turn it off and they could just be floating
perfect so speed was definitely a top priority
and that's why we redesigned the ui as well
so inside of the new ui we've made it faster
more organized
we've got group folders
and you can see this is actually output to group one
and I can move things
in and out so I can take
these headphones and drag them out
and you know I can move stuff
inside of the folders and I can have folders
inside of folders so some really cool things for
organizing your files now
we've also got all the navigation
control so we can move things around
we can duplicate things
we can rotate them
hold down shift and you can rotate by angle
all that cool stuff
just to make the 3d scene a lot more productive
we want to make the render quality better as well
so we implemented a brand new physical shader system
so what this is
is a system that allows you to create
more realistic materials
based on real physical property
so if we look at this kind of chrome
material here and I can actually just ctrl click it
and it'll actually select it
in the scene and then I can scroll down
and I can change the setting
so for example I could change the tent color
on the reflectivity
and this will actually
you know I could do like a gold color
and you know I could do blue
I could do any kind of a metallic color
and I instantly create that sort of a material
but what really makes the physical shader powerful
is the glossiness slider
what this allows you to do is create
sort of a blurred version
of the reflection
oh another really cool feature of the ui
is you can actually drag materials
onto surfaces and change them
so it's just a handy way to be able to
swap materials in and out
we really put a lot of work into this
and frankly it almost killed us
but we didn't stop there
let me show you some of the other
cool new features in element 3d version 2
one of my favorite new features is the 3d
model deform tools
so what you can do is inside of each group
in the particle look
is a deform roll out
what this allows you to do
is bend and twist and add noise to your 3d geometry
so in this case
I can turn up the intensity of this noise
I can create some really cool looks
I can animate it
I can add a third dimensional distortion
there's a couple of different
noise types that will just create
you know some various looks
and plus inside of the advanced settings
there's a lot of cool controls for clamping
the effect essentially and you can invert it
you know
I'm just playing around here but you can really create
some fun very
cool effects
you have the scale of the fractal
so it could be really
bubbly or it could be really high frequency
now in this other example
you can actually control the xyz intensity
for the noise amount
so what that will do
is stretch it in a specific axis so you can see here
stretch that way or stretched vertically
and so you can really create some fun looks
now I have another example here
I'm going to shut the depth of field off but
basically have some blobs with some
subsurface scattering
that's creating this sort of translucent look here
I have a sphere fairly low resolution but look at this
whoa
start to create some pretty wild
looks here
so this is just another cool example and again
you can use it with the replicator so you can
set the particle amount and create
random replications if I scroll down here
there's an option called randomize so if that's off
all of the noise particles will be the same
but if you turn that on
it'll create a random seed for each of the particles
in your object replicator
here's just another look with a slightly different
color scheme here but
same idea we can even go to the twist amount and
twist it up as we do the model noise so
it's a very you know fun thing to be able to
animate and modify your renders in real time
using element 3d so very cool
all right so let's go and take a look at this example
so if I go into the scene setup
what we can see is
I have a bunch of primitives that are just sort of
stretched out
all right so let's go ahead and hit okay
and what I'm going to do is
I'm going to go to the particle look
go down to the deformed settings
and I have the bend enabled
so what I'm going to do is
I'm going to turn up the bend
angle so watch this
like that
so if it's 360 or negative 360
it'll actually come together in a perfect circle
all right so we've got a nice band going on
what else could we do well we could go to the twist
turn that on
and say twist it on the y axis so check this out
and again if we set this to 360
it's going to twist perfectly together
as well as you know
polygons can in this kind of a situation
now I could increase the segments and
smooth that out a bit
but you get the idea we're creating this really cool
you know creating this really cool result
and it's all very interactive
let's let's go back here just a second
so let's go back to this point right
I'll go to the replicator
set it to a plane
and I can increase the particle account
you know and now you can create some
really cool wild stuff I don't even know what this is
looks like some kind of like
obstacle course for hamsters
or something okay
alright so I have another example here
I've got the sony logo and I can bend it
now notice I have a bend
direction so I can
change the direction so I can bend it up
or I can bend it down
depending on what you want and of course
on all of the other axis
so if you feel like
it starts doing some weird thing
try the try one of the other axis modes
so let's go set this back
and so I can bend this and I can bend it into a circle
right but one problem is
what if I want to rotate this
in a circle
so I come up to the particle rotation start rotating it
but it's kind of off kilter it's kind of off axis right
well there's an option
that we've added called center what
this does re centers the particle
so that when you rotate it
it rotates it perfectly centered so
I can only imagine that someone from
sony is like saying hey
stop you there's not a logo
I'm like hey
look at all ben out of shape man
all right I've got one more example here
and this is sort of this
simulated water surface so
just kind of a cool little surface
let me turn off the depth of field
all right so if we look closely at the surface
we can actually see
a little bit of deformation we can see some layers
sliding and actually see the bump map
sliding along the surface
so this is actually a really cool setup
so it's not the perfect looking ocean
but what's really cool about it
is I'm using the auxiliary animation
to offset the uv
alright so in order to create this water
surface what I've done is I've taken a texture
and I've blended it with three
separate planes so if I hide these real quick
you can see
I have a base plane here with just kind of a
wet looking bump map on it
and then I've got another
layer which kind of a little bit of like a whitewash
and then I have another layer on top of that which
is just a little bit more
so all three layers together kind of create
a nice ocean surface
so what's really interesting
is that I'm using the auxiliary animation
to output each of these planes to a separate channel
so channel 3 channel 1 channel 2
so if I hit ok
and I go to the particle auxiliary channels
one two and three
what I can actually do
is I can offset
the uv value so the uv values are the texture values
so if you're using a tile texture
like from pro shader 1 or pro shader 2
you can actually slide that around
and create some secondary types of animation
alright so another really cool feature
is the per material wireframe
so if I click on our motorcycle green material
I can go down to the wireframe
and turn it on
so now I have a wireframe that's only on this one
material so this just gives you a lot of options
for creating you know
sort of high tech looks or even just
having a quick effect go by
we can actually play around with the bernelle effect
on the wireframe
and it's all real time so I can
come up with some cool looks
so there's a lot of cool options here
specifically
there's a fill mode so I can set this to lines only
and then I can see the
wireframe lines by themselves and actually
replace the actual mesh
or I can change the color of the line to be
from the material
so whatever the material settings
are are now going to be transferred over
so let's say I wanted to
change this to something else
I would actually be seeing the material
so that is the wireframe per material feature
so you can do some fun stuff with the wire frame
now another thing we've done is
we've made our text extrusion tool
even better
so what we've done is added an outline bevel option
so if I go into the element setup
I have an extrusion model here
and you can see there is a bevel outline
and if I just turn off the inside
you can see what that looks like
so it works exactly the same
if we click on the
bevel we have our bevel and our bevel outline settings
so what I can do is I go down to the bevel outline
if I turn it off
here we just have a standard looking bevel
but if I turn it on
now I can control the outline with
and the other thing about this is all the other
bevel settings work the same
so if I go to the bevel I can go
and play around with the bevel size
and I can play with a curve so I can make the curve
in or out
depending on what I want it to look like
so that's definitely a very
cool feature that you can combine
with all of the normal
bevel options
now
here's another example using the bevel outline feature
I've sort of extruded
some various circles
using a
simple shape a mask and after effects basically
and so you can use it to build some elaborate effects
in addition to using the built in primitives as well
so here's my project file here we can
collapse all the materials
so I've got some tubes
but then I've also got some extrusions
and it's just a mixture of different objects
to create this fun shape
now here's another example of
some good looking bevels
using the bevel outline feature
you can see it's kind of got the glass look to it
and just gives it a little bit of depth
without just being a simple bevel like you're
used to seeing
now lastly this feature is
really really helpful so I've got this car logo here
and the one thing about this
is that it can sometimes be hard to line things up
so if I turn the camera off
and I turn on my text layer that I've created
and what you can see is that my extrusion is the same
size
and that's because we've added a new feature called
bevel world scale
so what that will do is automatically keep
the size of the text
the same as the size of the text that you create
so if I were to take this text here
hit s
scale it up to 200
my 3d tax is going to be recreated at the same size
so it doesn't use the same position
because it has its own coordinate system
but the size of the font is exactly the same
and what's nice about that
is that in the case of like a shield or
something like this
what you can do
is you could create multiple parts of your design
using separate layers and they'll all work together
in the same relative scale
and of course don't forget about the possibilities
once you start using the bend and deform tools
for your 3d tax and 3d shapes
another really useful feature is the per material
transfer mode
and this is the ability to have transfer modes inside
of your objects
to create some really cool effects for
hud displays or ui designs and stuff like that
so
let me just kind of run you through this project here
so
we have real 3d objects
combined with various layers
of additive modes we've got wireframe mixed in here
and just some you know cool mixtures
of some various effects
let me jump into the scene setup I'll take a look
so it looks pretty crazy here
so if we just grab one of these objects and alt click
we can kind of move it around you see
basically it's a texture
on a plane and what I could do
is if I go to the advanced setting
I can set the transfer mode to normal
and that's what it looks like
but we can now set it to add or screen
and it'll blend with the rest of the scene
with transparency
another thing we could do
is we could go to the illumination and we could change
the color and we could
this is a really really cool feature
and you don't just have to do ui stuff you could do
smoke or fire
other type of additive
effects that you want to blend inside of your 3d scenes
here's another
example using the additive mode I created
sort of like an energy
galaxy kind of effect
and if we go into the setup
you can see we have some
various planes with some textures on them
so these textures are
being emitted
on various groups so I get group one and two and three
and essentially
so on group 4 here
I can scale up the particle
and you can see that I've kind of creates like a
swirl effect
I'm using the ring so I could even
decrease this to say eight
and because of the additive mode
we're actually getting some
volumetric type of properties
this is actually some of the same techniques we did
on the star trek
title sequence as well
alright
so when you import an object into element 3d that has
multiple sub meshes
so if we come over here
there's a mesh view and we open up the car
we can see that the car
is broken up into tons of little pieces
and in fact I can control click on them
hold down shift and I can grab these
parts and move them around so essentially
there's a lot of little pieces
now if I hit ok
one of the cool things that you can do with element 3d
is use the multi object system
so if we go to the particle look
there's a feature called multi objects
so if we enable that
it's off by default if we enable it
what we can do is we can scatter the pieces
of this model around so I can go to scatter and I can
do some really nice looking animations but
one thing that's happening here is that
the floor is flying all over the place
and it's not quite doing what I want
so here's some solution
so one thing I could do is I could put the floor
onto a separate group like group two
and that way it wouldn't move around
but let's say instead of a floor it was a warehouse or
something that was
specific to my scene
well what you can do now in the new version of element
is that you can exclude objects
from the multi object system
so I can take the plane
click on advanced
and it says enable multi object will just unchecked that
hit ok
so now if I scatter the pieces around the plane
will stay put
that's cool but
what about wanting to kind of create a very specific
look or creating very specific animation
that isn't so random
let's say I want to have the shell of the vehicle
separate so let's control click
and you can see here there's sort of a shell on top
well what I'll do is I'll take that sub mesh
so remember we have to be in mesh view
click on auxiliary animation
and set it to channel one
then go to the advanced
turn on multi object instead of inherit
which will do whatever the object says
we're going to turn it off
so now if I hit ok
scroll down to the scatter here
and all of the pieces are going to scatter
except for the chassis
so
what good is that well
now what I can do
is I can go to the auxiliary animation for channel 1
and I can move that separately
and animated in specifically when I want
so here's an example of
that in action
all right so it's kind of like a drunk
transformer or something so
not too bad
but that's the idea
and you can really do some fun stuff
because
anytime you're using element 3d's new group folder
so that's when you use a whole group
and you output it to a specific channel
it's a virtual particle so this virtual particle
will scatter anything that's inside of it so
watch this let me just go over here to
this project since it's already set up
and let me go down to the starter models
so we have just a couple of basic models
and one of the models happens to be this fractured
ball so let's just
scale it down here
and let me drag it inside of the group folder here
and by the way if you hit z
I'll zoom in on that object you have selected
so this ball by the way if you can't see if I hit f
you can look at the wire frame
the ball is actually fractured
so I can move the pieces of it around
so let's see what happens I'm gonna hit okay
all right so pretty cool
result this is a dangerous thing to do because
I never tried this before and I'm glad it worked
so in addition to developing element 3d version 2
we also created three
new products
that will help you
take advantage of all the new features
and all the new capabilities
backlight is a collection of hdri environment maps
as well as light maps in very high resolution
so I'm actually just going to use the 2k
because that will keep
the memory usage down
and it pretty much gives you a really good result
so basically what you do
is you just click on the environments
and it changes your entire scenes lighting
using the physical shader system so basically
as you click through these
you can see they're all designed to have really cool
really nice looking reflections
you can go into the environment and see it's loaded
you can also play around
with the setting
so you can increase the brightness and you can play
with the gamma to create even more looks
so this is the idea behind backlight its background
lighting or image based lighting
to create
more impressive looking reflections and illumination
now the other side of backlight
are the individual light maps and the light arrays
so those are going to show up in your model browser
so if we come over here
to the backlight we're going to see light arrays
and single lights
the single lights look something like this
and we can click on them and add them into the scene
so I'll click on
this single light and we'll just kind of move it up
and I'll rotate it
and you can actually see that it's affecting
the light here so I can even
scale it a bit
and
it gives a nice bit of reflection
we also have
the light arrays so these are the multi lights
now you can also use the lights as
design elements to create
cool like light arrays
I know in this particular example
I just have the color tinted blue
you can duplicate these
and you can really create some elaborate scenes
so with a little bit of work
you can actually do some really nice stuff
with the reflections and gloss
this texture on the ground is actually from
the pro shader two collection
I think it's one of the concrete maps so
all of the products work really really well together
all right let's go and take a look at pro shader too
we've added some brand new categories
and there's over 300 materials to choose from
so we can go down to some concrete
and basically all you do is you take it
and you drop it onto a surface that you want to
change
so you can see beautiful looking reflectivity and gloss
if you want to
test out the shader sampler
what you could do is go into the
starter model and go down to the
trophy and you can load that and
practice and experiment with different materials
so one of the main
reasons that the materials look so realistic
is that they're based on the physical properties
of the environment
so if I go up to the environment settings
I can actually change stuff like the gamma
and brightness and even the saturation
and change the overall look of all of my shades
so this is helpful
if you want to change the entire look
of all the materials in your entire scene
now you can use some of the built in environments
but we also offer backlight
which is a collection of 58k environment maps
so you can see that they dramatically
change the tone of your scene
and you could create more dramatic looks you can create
more studio lighting looks
so it's important to think about your material settings
but you also want to be thinking about
how your environment is affecting your materials
and finally
let's go and take a look at the 3d motion design
2 model pack
so what is motion design too so
it's a huge collection of all sorts of models so
this time we really focus on industrial technological
high tech robotic
we really
created some of the most incredible models that
I have ever seen
the detail on these
is absolutely amazing
and this is probably one of the more simple models
so basically
it's a collection of things that you can use to build
other things
one of the things that we created are some really
cool hinges and pistons
and things that you can use to sort of
dress your backgrounds of your sets
you could build
really cool high tech designs and titles
I actually use some of this equipment
for a scene with some
you know some high tech
you know supports for some aircrafts of the future so
just a little bit of detail
I'm actually using the pro shader to
textures to give it a little grunge
but these little things are
essentially holding up these ships
and it just adds a ton of detail to the shot
all right
so let's go and take a look at the collection
so I'm going to jump inside the scene
and we'll come over here to the model browser
and I'll scroll down to the motion
design 2 pack
and there really is just a ton of stuff
so we've got things called beams
so beams were one of my ideas of being able to build
a virtual set
or a title or for like a high tech laboratory
or something like that
or maybe it's a futuristic stove top I don't know
that's what these objects were designed for
is not to be specific things
but so that you could go in and
create interesting things out of it
so they're all set up with multiple materials
so that you can apply materials to specific parts
and really create what you want to create
so I've got another scene here
and I just put some bolts on here
it looks just like a logo
next thing you know it's bolted down
it means it's serious business or something
but once you bring one of these out you can just
hold down alt and drag it
and you can just place it
so they really didn't want this thing to go away
so they bolted it down
pretty good
I would say maybe just one more over here
nice
yeah there's a ton of different styles
and I mean just
look at the insane amount of quality on these
like it really is ridiculous
we could probably have made multiple packs
out of all these models
so we got some really cool hinges
so the hinges are actually set up
to be used with
a multi object auxiliary system
so if I ctrl click I can actually
hit the rotation key
and I can rotate this so
if you were to set up some group folders
you could do a little bit of
you know rigging to create
something that's connected to the back side of this
and actually have it
you know
control it to a certain degree and you can see that
the components have like really nice working parts
you know they're not just designed to look good
they actually do have
some functionality
really high quality liquid meshes these
look at this I already created amazing design
once you add red
the designs done all right so
here's some really cool mac stuff
I mean look at this like literally
it's insane how much stuff is in here
this is the portal where everyone goes to and
something happens
they bring back magnum pi
so there's a bunch of different designs here
there's also some cool badges
and you can see these ribbons down here
that you could use to throw
title on there and
we've got some high tech screens
these are really cool so
you need to put some video up on something
and you need some kind of high tech screen
and the screen should be
spinning out of control
you can completely do that in here
and I know the producers like no no
we need to be spending faster
faster and you just keep spinning that thing
he's gonna love it
moving on
all right let's keep going shields
oh my goodness this pack never ends
Sunday night football
how about some Sunday night knitting for your wife
make her nice little graphics
you love it some lens flares
mind blown all right
see here
by the way if you hit z
after you add an object it will select that object
and think about how cool this would look
with some deform on it as well so you can
you know these models are really really cool
but check this out
I open this up
check that out not too bad
and of course there's some more tech components
I mean you're ready to make a sci fi movie
or some high tech graphics immediately
and then we have an insane collection of
tubes and pipes
so check this out so I've got these
tube systems that you could
you know you could run some pipes along the wall
but look if you all drag these they actually connect
together so you can create
endless kinds of scenes and even ones that don't look
like they connect together
most of them
most of them are designed to connect so see this one
get out of here
pretty cool so
pipes definitely so think about the scene
jurassic park
where they're like looking and like follow the pipes
you could make that scene
so
here's just a quick little scene that I put together
with
a couple of the pipes and I actually use some more
the pro shader
to give it more of a grungier pipe look
alright so this is the motion design 2 pack
alright thank you guys for watching element 3d version
2 will be available individually
and we're also gonna have some great bundles
with all of these packs in it as well
thanks again I hope you guys check it out
I'm andrew kramer and we will see you next time