加入会员，海量资源免费获取：www.cgzyw.com hey what's up Andrew Kramer here for VideoCopilot.net and welcome back to another very exciting tutorial today
we're gonna be taking a look at creating some fantasy style tile effects inside of After Effects without any third party
plugins let's go and take a look at what we're
gonna be creating
[Music]
[Applause]
so lots of cool things happening here in this tutorial we're going to be focusing
on chapter 1 creating this really beautiful bevel effect you can see that
it's very reflective and it interacts with after-effects lights the other cool
thing about it is that we're going to be customizing the bevel profile and we can
just add some really nice details like these edges and we'll be making this
really nice metal reflective material now some other cool things about this
technique is that it's very dynamic so I can take some After Effects lights and
move them around and actually relight the scene I can also change the color of
the lights for example and you can really create some nice results but it's
also procedural so basically I have a logo here with a transparent background
and if I just disable it and turn on a different one it updates automatically
without having to change any extra settings we can even combine this effect
with the free Sabre plugin and create some really cool looks as well now
another cool thing about this technique is that it responds to the background color so I can cycle through and you can
see that the logo responds to the coloring of the background so anyway
it's a really powerful technique maybe not quite as powerful as the ring but
pretty close actually one interesting thing about the original Lord of the
Rings trilogy is that they were filmed back-to-back and to be honest it was a
bit of an inspiration for this tutorial series was to try to create something
that was bigger than just a single tutorial and so in a way the kind of
similar you know the only difference I suppose is that those movies are actually good alright let's go ahead and
get started first thing we want to do is make sure that the project is set to 32
bits per channel if we alt click on that until it gets to 32 then we'll create a new composition
we'll call this bevel title 1920 by 1080 make it ten seconds long and hit OK now the first thing we need is some text so
we'll take the type tool and we'll click in here we'll type out an epic and you
can see I'm using a font called supernatural night but any kind of font
you know Trajan maybe a serif font could be fun but we can change this later on so it doesn't really matter just now so
we'll just scale it up here and then we'll choose layer pre-compose and we'll
call this type zero zero one and hit OK all right so this title has an alpha channel or a transparent background and
I want to keep a copy of it in this comp so I'm gonna choose edit duplicate and then choose layer pre-compose and we're
going to move all the attributes and we're gonna call this bevel profile and
then we're gonna hit okay so if we double click on this bevel profile it'll
open up the comp and what we're gonna do is create a depth map from this Alpha
Channel to do this we'll choose layer layer
style inner glow then we'll go down here to the inner glow settings set the transfer mode to normal for the inner
glow and this is similar to photoshop we're going to set the color to black
and there's a technique called softer we're gonna set that to precise so if I
turn up the size you can see it creates a nice inner glow that aligns to the contours of the Alpha Channel so if I
change it to softer it looks more like a blur precise gives us that chiseled look
that we're gonna need to build our bevel so this looks good and you can see we
have our transparent background but we want to get rid of that so we're gonna
do a new adjustment layer on top we're gonna choose channel solid composite and
we'll set this to black and this is gonna help to keep the edge fringe from
being a problem now another thing we could do on top of this is add a fast
blur and set it down to one iteration and maybe a one pixel blur and turn on
repeat edge pixels so this is the basic set up we're going to come back and
change this a little bit later so we'll click back on our bevel title and we're
going to start creating our 3d text so we'll go over here to the project I've
got a picture here we're going to bring this out this could
be anything we're gonna use any image as our background source and the reason is
that we want our text to seem a little bit reflective and by using a background
image we can use that to influence the lighting and the material so just choose transform fit to comp with make sure it
covers the whole area and then we're gonna pre compose it and we'll call this
environment will do 0 0 1 move all attributes and hit OK so we're actually
going to be applying our 3d effect directly to this environment and I'm
gonna change the color of this layer to red just to make it a little easier to
see as we go through ok to make our 3d text we're going to be using an effect
called CC glass and we'll take this and drop it onto our environment now this is
a really cool effect that creates this great displacement and what we're gonna do is use our bevel profile to displace
the background so we'll go to the bump map and change it to bevel profile and
now you can see what's happening here we're creating this displacement effect
and if I was being lazy I could just change the name to how to create a
predator effect in After Effects advanced predator effect but we'll keep
going so what's cool is that it creates displacement it does lighting and this
is gonna help us create our 3d text alright so this is a good start we could
go over here to the effects & presets type inset mat drop that onto our
effects change the mat from the environment down to the type layer which
has an alpha Channel and now we've cut out the background but the only problem
is that the CC glass effect on its own doesn't have the realistic properties
that we want so in order to simulate a metal material we need to think about it
in a more realistic way now before we move on I'm gonna do a little bit of
cleanup I'm just gonna disable these layers and I'm gonna duplicate the
environment and take the bottom copy and then just delete the effects and that
way we have our title and then we have our background underneath it so we'll take this will make the background say
blue I don't call that background so if we jump back to the sea
see glass effect there's a light set up and when we rotate the lighting but it
just doesn't look realistic because the material is too smooth we want to add
some roughness and some grunge to our metal so we'll go over here to the
project file and I've got just a texture here of some grunge and we'll bring this
out into the comp and we're gonna pre-compose it just to keep it inside of
a container so we'll choose pre-compose we'll type grunge move all attributes
and hit OK and you can use any texture for this well turn that off drop it down
to the bottom well take our top layer go back and I want to apply some grunge so
the way we're gonna add grunge to our title is using the effect blur compound
blur and if we put this before the set matte what we can do is select the
grunge layer and if we get close we can start to see this sort of metal looking
grunge but if you look closely there's a problem
as we turn this up it gets rid of that nice lighting edge from the CC glass
effect okay so what if we put this before the glass effect well then the displacement from the glass effect
stretches out the grunge and it doesn't quite look right so this is the problem
that I ran into so I'll disable the compound blur and what we're going to do
is solve this is turn all of the lighting effects off for the CC glass
effect so to do that we'll set the ambient to 100 and the rest to zero and
then if we set the height down to zero and turn the background back on you can
see that there's no change in the image unless I turn to height up so then if i
displace the image first then take the compound blur apply it after and if I
turn off the set matte effect here you can see that we have this nice metal
grunge effect we can click invert looks nice and then turn on the set matte so
now we've created the metal look now we need to add the 3d lighting so to do
that we're gonna add another copy of CC glass and we're gonna drop it right
above the set effect will set the surface to the same
bevel profile and this time or set the softness to zero we're going to set the
height to 100 and the displacement to zero so we're just placing it in the top
copy where we add our blur and then we're only using the second copy for our
interactive lighting so if we turn off the background here we can create a new
3d light and we'll make an ambient light at 50% and then we'll make another point
light maybe 250 percent and we'll move this over here now to get the 3d lighting we go down to the second copy
of CC glass and we're gonna set the light to after-effects lights so now we
are halfway there now some of you might be thinking hey
this is a lot of work for something that doesn't look that much different well
the reason we set it up this way is so that we can have a more realistic
reflection so I'll turn a background back on just for a moment and what I'm
gonna do is go over here to the effects and presets we're gonna type in motion
tile and we'll take the motion tile effect and drop it before the CC glass
effect at the top and another effect I want to add is a curves effect
we'll put that after the motion tile now if we just turn this all off the motion
tile is going to stretch out our footage and what I want to do is just turn on
the mirror edges and then we can turn the rest of the effect back on now if we
look at the motion tile width and we lower the value down you can start to
see some of the reflectivity show up on the lettering and this is the key to
creating that metallic look let's also set up the lighting a little bit better
so we take this light we're gonna hit P maybe you'll move it up so this is the
z-axis here so as we move this forward and back
we can create a nice sort of like highlight now we'll duplicate that and
maybe put one over on the side and maybe lower the value down to say 200 now
we're playing with a lighting we also have to play around with the material
settings so if we go into the environment map effect we'll scroll down to the second copy of CC glass I'll open
that up and there's some shading options so what I want to do is bring the
diffuse down a bit and what that's gonna do is make the specular pop a little bit
more and maybe I'll turn up the ambient just a touch we could also go up here to
the curves adjustment and flatten the color out a little bit and this will
just help it blend a little bit more and maybe we could even play around with the
tile settings just a bit to get a few more highlights on the material and just
to remind you the compound blur effect is adding the grunge so if we turn it up we can see the grunge a bit more and it
kind of looks like the letters are a little more worn out but uh maybe we
just turn that down a little bit but we can play with that and we can also play with the CC glass displacement number so
right now it's set to about 50 but if we turn this up really high we can really
start to create some of those edges and reflections that are pinging off of the
different areas of the background image and by tweaking the color correction you
can create a little bit more contrast in the different letters now to illustrate
why this is important what I'm going to do is just add a quick color correction
to the background and I'm gonna take the environment map and I'm gonna keyframe
the tile Center move forward to seconds and I'm gonna shift it over and you can see this is just sliding over
so now if I hit in I can play this back and now we can see the environment
shimmer across the title as if it was actually three-dimensional now if you
remember we have the first copy of CC glass is adding the displacement without lighting well if we turn that off and
let's watch it now and let's see if we can spot the
difference all right so it still looks pretty good but if you look closely say right here it looks like it's shifting
straight across the surface as if there's no indentation if this was
really metal then the reflection would be different on this side and then on
this side but if we turn the displacement back on we can see that it
looks like it's running at a different speed and this becomes even more
important in the next step when we look at the bevel profile again so what I'm
gonna do is create a new viewer and double click on our bevel profile and
now what we can do is look at both of these in context so what I'll do is
click over here go to the adjustment layer and I'm gonna add a curves
adjustment now the way to think about this is that this is now the
representation of this curve so if I bring it down you can see that we're
creating one of those sort of inward chiseled bevels so that looks really
nice there you can kind of see how that looks now one thing I notice is our
inner glow 75 let's set that to about 90 and that'll help to make the effect
tighter up to the end of each of the edges now that we've tweaked the curve
of our bevel and we watched the reflection of this again you'll see that
the reflection really bends around the contours of our text alright so that looks really nice now just to point out
a couple of things if you feel like some of the aliasing is getting a little
strong you can turn up the blur amount to maybe 1.2 and you know you can play
around with this bevel profile you can do sort of more bubbly looking letters
by opening it up and that can actually look really nice
and depending on the type of font you're using you're gonna want to play with all
of these settings together now if you're really feeling lucky what you could
actually do is create a little indentation in the grooves and so if you look at say this area right here that's
like the shadow so this is the shadow of the curves adjustment what we could do
it's a little bit tedious maybe we can take this pen and draw it so that's the
idea we're basically trying to draw on a little indentation in the curves but
it's probably better to do it with the curve so that it's a little smoother but
uh there's definitely some possibilities there all right so that's looking pretty
good we could just turn maybe what we'll do is just duplicate this reset it and
just to sort of an inward and again you can actually do a combination of the two
and it does kind of create a cool look but I'll turn off this other copy we'll
just kind of keep this inward chisel and then we'll close that all right so we're really getting somewhere now next what I
want to do is create a little bit of an extrusion what I'm gonna do is take this
top copy and we'll just call this bevel and I'm gonna duplicate it edit duplicate put that to the bottom and
maybe I'll turn off the motion tile and turn off the glass and curves adjustment
any kind of reduction in the rendering will speed this process up a bit so then we'll choose effect blur CC radial blur
and we'll set it to say fading zoom and we'll turn up the amount to like I don't
know you can see it just kind of creates like a
it's like a light effect but maybe like negative 10 and it's a bit faded you can
see right there it's a bit faded so we'll just crank up the alpha channel so to do that use a curves adjustment go to
the alpha Channel and then just click in the middle and just drag it all the way
up until up until we get a nice tight edge so it's kind of soft and that's
pretty good so this looks pretty nice right away and we can just tweak the
depth of the radial blur and it'll just kind of change the distance of the
effect now if we go to the CC glass effect just to point this out you can
tweak the height setting and it'll just change where the highlight hits you know
and maybe you just want a little bit of reflectivity maybe just a touch that'll
give you that control the other thing I think is important is just to darken it
down a bit and the reason for two reasons one you
don't want it to be clear that it's a kind of a weird trick but also you want
to make sure that the front faces of your title are clear so in fact I'm
going to add a curves adjustment to the top layer brighten those up a bit this
is also a good time to add a little contrast into the lettering we don't
want to influence that too much because we do like the background being the
colour influencer now I probably want to play around with the lighting a bit more
so let's take this and duplicate this light and maybe we'll make it like blue
if you're tweaking the lighting we could just go to half resolution maybe even
disable the background copy and hit P I'll just move these around and also to point out that all of the lighting types
work so you can use parallel lights or you can even use spotlights in fact
maybe I'll just show you that really quick if we created a new spotlight
that's good this is a really great way so hit AAA to bring up the light options
and lower the cone angle and this is a cool way to sort of animate on your
title in a more dramatic way so if we turn off the background and maybe just
turned off the ambient light or the other cool thing about the ambient light
is you can use it to fade the title in so again this is what this effect is all
about is creating those slow dramatic titles like not everything needs to be a
crazy glitch like if you watched Lord of the Rings and it started with this epic
intro and then all of a sudden it was some crazy motion graphics thing that
would feel a little bit out of place I think maybe but what you could do is you
could fade these in so spotlight you could animate the cone angle opening up
you know turn up the feathering a bit you can even move the light through
space so as you kind of movie you're revealing it so there's really a lot of fun options there so just turn this back
on and the ambient light back up a bit now the other thing I'm noticing is our
light is it I think it's a little bit too much diffusion on the material so
let's bring the roughness down a bit and I think the trick is to keep the brightness down and color correct it
back up and so far so good got a nice shimmer now before we move on to animation I want to show you a couple of
other cool tricks that'll really make it pop now the reflection looks nice but
what if we wanted to add more reflection what I could do is take the top copy
choose edit duplicate and we'll go ahead collapse this and we're gonna go down to the second glass
copy go to the shading and set the diffuse and specular down to zero and
what that will do is get rid of the lighting from the 3d lights and basically what I want to do is go to the
curves adjustment reset it and just add some contrast to this top reflection so
here's what it looks like now instead of using the same animation as the below copy I'm gonna hit you and now we can
see the motion tile keyframes go to the end and instead of going left to right
I'm gonna go say up and to the left and
I can even go into the glass settings change you know change the displacement
really just try something different maybe even tweak the motion tile
settings so that see the lower it is the more shimmery it is and then turn that
off transfer mode to additive and it's a little bit bright we could darken it
down in touch so now we're seeing a much more shimmery effect because the
reflections are going in the opposite direction now you might be thinking why
would that be happening well maybe the title is in some kind of a tornado and
all of the light is you know flying around and the title is wearing a GoPro
camera that's the way to think about it other cool things that you could do on
the subject of doing cool things is you could add a little bit of color so you
could add a little red maybe drop the blue down a little bit you could start
to create a bit of a gold looking title yeah so that's really cool maybe I'll
get rid of the gold just for now and show you this one other cool trick if you do a null object make it 3d we could
take the lights the point lights and parent it to that and then hit R and then rotate on the z axis so watch this
maybe I'll turn off our second reflection and if we rotate this
and I think this is a great way to find a good lighting point you know maybe
this blue light is just too perpendicular you just want to have a
little halo you know maybe turn it up brighter maybe we want to try something
other than blue maybe try like a warmer color so this is a great way to test out
lighting but it's also a great way to animate your lights so for example if
you move this null object around you can actually move the position of all of the
lights I mean that's some serious shimmering soon it's going to be the
Lucasfilm logo another big way that we can customize this effect is to change
the environment so if we open up any one of the environments of the background in
depth it over here to the side here we can change out the background picture so let's just set this to half go over here
to some photos and I'll just take a few photos here drop it in here shrink them
down to just being one frame long and then right click and choose keyframe
assistant sequence and hit OK and then they just shift over now I'll probably
add an adjustment layer on top of all this with a curves adjustment and I'm
just going to dim down some of the brighter areas now I can just tab
through the frames and maybe for fun I'll just turn the background off as we
look at it
and now we can see the effects of all of these different pictures on the
reflection and so you might see one that you like like for example this has a lot
of contrast and so we're getting a lot more of this sort of foggy almost ice
look and in fact we could change the color to more of a cooler color and this
effect could very easily pass for an iced effect you know you can just
customize the look of it just by changing out the background image so
again just kind of cycling through a few of them here
it's like entirely changing the mood I think that one's really cool so maybe
I'll just delete all of these other ones and maybe I'll keep this one around so
one thing about this technique is it takes a little longer to set up but once
it's set up you can actually do a whole bunch of different things with it for
example what if I want to add a little bit of dents in the metal well what we
can do is open up the bevel profile we'll drop this over here to the side
we'll make a new solid I'll call this dense and then we'll add a fractal noise
and drop that on the solid let's invert it set the transfer mode to darken and
that will allow it to blend with our depth information so if you look closely
the fractal cuts off at the brightest spots which makes it look like it's
being dented at just the top corners which is really cool actually so we
could bring the brightness up maybe scale this effect down just a bit and
then hit T and then we'll just lower the opacity and so now we have a bunch of
dents we could maybe set this to 30 I think that looks pretty nice
and again this is all procedural so these dents are going to affect the
displacement they're going to affect the bump the reflection we don't have to do
any special things it's all automatic in fact now what we could do is open up
the type comp and now we can customize what this says so we could even scale
this down a bit we could try few different fonts here I think this is
kind of a cool font maybe if we go into the bevel profile we could turn some of
this this dip off yeah because I think this font kind of looks nice maybe just
a lighter dip yeah that looks nice the other fun thing you can do is if you have some of these like flourish fonts I
just have a few in here
turn off the bolding if you're using a
let's just look at this real quick I
mean it you're gonna have a ton of fun just playing around with the different
things that you can play around with you could throw some numbers in here alright
so this looks pretty cool so now let's take a look at animating something like
this opening title where everything kind of flies together what's the best way to
go about doing this all right well first let's switch out this 25 with the VC logo you can use
your own logo any logo this one happens to have a black background so I do want
to fill it with white since we're using depth information so a tint effect will
do the trick I'll turn on the continuous rasterization switch
because it is an illustrator file and just gonna scale up the emblem here mask
it out and then hit s and scale it up so yeah this is good this is introducing
some issues that we need to solve so we've got the logo and we'll close that
what's happening to the bevel well so open up the bevel profile move this over
the side here all right so we have a little bit of a problem with our bevel
because our bevel was set up for really thin text and now we have this emblem so
what we'll do let's just turn off the dents so we can see our bevel a little
bit better and we'll go down to the bottom here which is our type now a
couple of things first if we go to the inner glow we can turn up this size and
what we're looking to do is to bring these points closer together so now we
have a complete edge now one thing creatively I didn't really like the way
that this interior part looked so what I could do is take the pen tool and on the depth information draw a shape around
the interior polygon then duplicate the layer hit M subtract the mask and then
on the bottom copy of just the polygon hit you you quickly and then we can look
at the size and then bring this down and if we bring it down to say like five now
we just have a nice tight bevel and it looks flat logo looks intact and we're
in business now before we go on we could play around with the curve of this
that adds some nice dimension but of course we're gonna want to play around
with the lighting now before we close it maybe we'll turn the dents back on and
it's kind of a lot maybe I'll turn up the contrast let's set this overflow to
clip yeah that looks nice we might have to just mask out the interior and do our
own separate one so it M subtract and we could do a copy of this I mean I'll just
do it just because it's quick and so this way have a separate one because
this is at a lower elevation and then I can just increase that way there's a few
dents on there this logo has seen some stuff okay
alright so close that go back into our bevel title comp let's create a more
dramatic lighting so I want to create lighting from above so just we're gonna start with like one light at a time turn
on this top light maybe you turn the ambient down just a bit I want this to
be nice and dark okay so we've got this light up here and I want to just maybe
move it around until it it's a little bit more prominent yeah I think that looks cool maybe move it a little to the
left so it's ping all of the edges a little
bit and I think that's good I mean we could add another light a really kind of
low-key kind of dramatic lighting setup can actually look better than having too many lights in fact it's almost always
the case but if we do have a fill light we'll just kind of dim it down and we
could add a little color to just a bit of alright so everything's looking good
and it's a good time to point out earlier remember the CC glass
displacement well if I turn that off you can see that looks very
two-dimensional looks like a cheap 2d effect but when we turn the displacement
back on now it looks like a cheap 3d effect and that's one dimension better
now let's just double check something we turn on the transparency we should see
through the logo so I see a bevel profile let's turn that off there we go
so then I'm going to hit control a select all choose layer pre-compose move
all attributes we'll call it a logo 3d it's not really 3d and we'll hit OK and we are gonna make it a 3d layer then
we'll create a new camera and really wide like you have 20 millimeter and
then we'll create a new null object make this a 3d layer and then we'll parent
the camera to the null we'll just call this a candle so now we have our logo and we could hit P and basically we just
want to animate it flying in so over here right click on the keyframe and
choose easy ease and then pull it close to the camera and then ctrl click on
that keyframe want to keep that linear alright so we'll go and take a look here I can play around with the spacing of
this and the rendering will be quick because it's precomposed now for the
particle effects we have a free particle effects pack that will be in the
description video copilot on it on the blog and it's basically these cool
particle effects that we filmed for a blog show and we're just going to drag
these out into the scene here and we'll toggle the switches will set it to say
additive right click transform fit to comp width and what I like about these
particles is they're really energetic and I want to have it happen during the
motion so let's see yes this one right here it's like a really
big hit gonna have that be the start of the animation and the other cool thing
that we can do you know maybe put another copy underneath the logo and
maybe just use a curves adjustment and just darken it down a bit just so
there's a little bit more depth and then also the Topkapi I think we should add a
curves adjustment also and just darken them down a bit looking good we can turn
the motion blur on for that layer maybe I'll shorten the animation a bit just
make it a little quicker here I feel like this is just too extreme maybe a
bit faster alright so this looks really cool now - just to give it a little more
motion so it's not stopping is I'll take the camera Knoll hit P keyframe the
加入会员，海量资源免费获取：https://c4dsky.com/vip position all right so that's looking really good I have another element in
the project file it's just this light spot and we could set it to screen scale
it up and if we just want to add a little bit of a halo that looks pretty
cool and in fact just one sort of compositing thing I remembered doing is
if I duplicate this and put it at the bottom and put it right in the middle and what I did was basically animated
the opacity up
so that there would be a little bit of a silhouette and then faded it back down
at the end so sort of it was meant to give your eye the impression of the logo as it comes in now we can add a bit of
color to this we could do an adjustment layer and we could just do a curves
adjustment maybe just just a little bit of blue like this kind of greenish
looking maybe a touch of green even but yeah I definitely like this really kind
of contrast and looking design now you might remember we did that extra
copy of the reflection and now might be a good time to turn that back on
especially with all of the chaos going on the tornado of particles now if we
wanted it to come in piece by piece we would just take the logo cut it out
duplicate it and basically just isolate each part and then offset the position
keyframe so we could shift this one forward just a touch and then it comes
in just a little bit later turn motion blur back on maybe one other idea to share is using our free plugin saber so
this is like a light plug-in creates lightsabers and energy stuff now usually you can use it with a text layer but in
this case I'm just gonna use the polygon and set the core to layer mask there we
go set this to say additive make it a 3d
layer and now I'll go and rotate this to align with the logo a bit maybe set the in
size down to zero now we could parent it to the layer with the polygon by holding
shift and parenting to that layer and it moves it into that position so you can
actually see it's connected but we'll scale the Sabre down hit s scale it down
and we could put it beneath the logo that's kind of cool I mean it's not too
bad this is definitely the part of the tutorial where things start to really
get worse like we have this nice elegant logo now we're turning into something
else but I presume this could be something actually kind of cool like a
kind of a volumetric fog effect actually so it's not too bad but maybe the key is
to just make it more subtle and have it sort of fade out as it touches down
maybe it fades on as it impacts
you
so this is actually pretty cool I should have done this in the tutorial maybe I need to redo the whole tutorial it looks
great it's a nice subtle subtle effect maybe I'll even take a copy of that
saber duplicate it put it above and thin out the core just a bit just so it looks
kind of like a glow on the outside now we'll turn the motion blur back on for
saber take a look so pretty fun we created this entirely inside of After
Effects without any paid third-party plugins and this is what you can do
inside of After Effects so be sure to check back for Chapter two it's gonna be
a lot of fun
[Applause]
we'll keep making tutorials but if you are in the market for a cool 3d plugin check out helmet 3d you need some sound
effects for your trailers and cool stuff check out motion pulls anyways I'll save
the long return of the king ending for the next one
I'm Andrew Kramer and we will see you next time