Hey there.
Welcome back.
So in this video we're going to start looking at 3D in After Effects.
And you may notice that my interface has changed just a bit okay.
Things are more darker here.
And it just changed a bit.
And that's because I updated my After Effects to 2025.
And you don't have to worry about updating at this point.
I just did that and it coincided with this recording.
Okay, so you don't have to worry.
All features are the same.
Okay, just a few updates here and there.
You don't have to worry.
This this workflow still works in at least most older versions.
Okay, especially the new 3D.
Maybe say 2024 version.
2023 version.
Yeah.
So you don't have to worry about this update.
Okay.
Or the fact that I updated.
Yeah.
So we're going to be looking at 3D in After Effects.
And yeah.
So just create a new composition here.
Now in your new composition let's just name this 3D first of all so 3D here.
Now we have our composition settings.
We have the basic, we have the advanced.
Now if you come here you're going to see 3D renderer okay.
Now this is the section where you are able to select your 3D renderer for your 3D.
Okay.
And now under renderers we can click here to see that we have different rendering engines here.
In After Effects we have the classic 3D, we have the advanced 3D and we have the cinema 4D 3D.
Okay.
So all these renderers can be used for different purposes.
Okay.
So the classic 3D is basically the default 3D rendering engine in After Effects.
It's been here for a long time.
It's suitable for turning 2D layers into 3D and just rotating them in 3D space.
It supports custom cameras, depth of field.
It supports lighting.
It supports basic shadows, it supports effects, blending modes and layer styles and yeah, and track
matte and so on and so forth.
Okay, so that's the classic 3D, and I'm listing all these features it supports because these other
renderers don't support some of these features.
Okay.
Like for example, we have the the advanced 3D and this advanced 3D is a newer renderer for After Effects.
It was just brought in I think in After Effects 2023 or 2024.
Okay.
So it's a quite new renderer and the features are being updated or being added.
So there are lots of things you can't do here, but there are a lot of really cool things you can still
do here.
Okay, so with the advanced 3D renderer you get more realistic renderings as compared to the classic
3D okay.
It provides improved performance and enhanced 3D capabilities, especially when compared to the cinema
4D renderer.
So it performs faster than this renderer.
Okay.
And these are some of the things that have been enabled with this feature.
With this renderer and disabled with this render, we can see that with this renderer we can get effects,
we can add effects, we can add blending modes.
We can add layer styles.
Track mattes, masks and so on and so forth.
And don't worry, there is always a workaround to all of these things.
Okay?
But just know that you don't get all of these for now, okay?
You don't get all of these for now, but it supports extrusions of text of shape layers.
It supports materials.
More realistic materials okay.
It supports, uh, reflections, shininess specularity crazy realistic shadows.
Okay.
It supports, uh, environmental lights.
And we're going to look at all of these things.
All of these things.
It's faster than the cinema 4D renderer.
And the cinema 4D renderer is basically a cinema 4D renderer.
It's basically a link between After Effects and Cinema 4D.
Cinema 4D is a classic, uh, native 3D software.
So this, uh, bridges the gap between After Effects and Cinema 4D.
Okay.
It supports extrusions as well of text and shapes.
okay.
It supports reflections as well.
It doesn't support some kinds of lights.
It doesn't support, uh, environmental light.
It doesn't support, uh, physically based rendering of 3D layers.
It doesn't support effects, blending modes, layer styles and so on and so forth.
So that's enough for the speech on the types of cameras right now.
Let's go in and see how to actually use them.
So I'm going to select either of them.
We're going to look at all of them actually.
So let's start with the classic.
So just hit okay.
And you get your new composition.
And now I'm just going to select my text tool and type some text.
So I'm going to type 3D.
Yeah.
And just align my paragraph to the middle okay.
And then align my text to the center of my composition.
Make this bigger and do control alt home or command option.
Home.
To align or to bring our anchor points to the middle of our text.
Or scale this up even further, maybe change my text font.
So let's look for thick font.
Let's see this guy.
Okay, not bad, but I think I will go with something else.
So just get the thick font.
You mustn't be using the font I am using or I will use.
Do you want something with the bold?
And I won't spend all day looking for a font.
I'll just go with something.
Let's just go with this.
Good.
So I'll make this bigger.
Let me change my color.
Yeah.
And then now for me to turn my layer to a 3D layer, All we need to do is click here to turn it to a
3D layer, and immediately you see these 3D gizmos, which we can use to rotate and to manipulate our
3D object in 3D space.
And if we open our properties, our layer properties, we can now see that under our transform properties,
we now have three properties.
For scale we have x, y and z position x, y and z anchor point x, y and z.
Okay, no longer x and y as we will have it under 2D.
As you can see here.
So we have new options.
We have new rotation property for our x and y and z.
Okay.
We can zoom in.
We can rotate our shape or our text rather.
And you can see that this is just a flat 3D text okay.
Just a flat 3D text.
No extrusion.
And we don't have the ability to create extrusions in here.
Yeah.
Now let's look at some of the options we get here.
Now with my selection tool selected and In my 3D layer selected, we can see that right here we have
this guy which is the universal is the universal tool 3D tool which which gives us the ability to move
our 3D object and rescale our 3D object.
Okay.
And also rotate our 3D object all at once.
Okay.
And we then have the move or the position, which gives us the ability to only move the position of
our 3D object.
Next we have the rotation.
Sorry, the scale which gives us the ability to scale our 3D object up or down.
Okay.
By using these gizmos of course.
Okay.
And then we have the rotation which gives us the ability to only rotate our 3D object.
You can rotate our 3D object with our 3D with our rotation tool.
Perfect.
We can snap using this.
And we have these three things here, these three options here.
If you hover on it.
The first one you're going to see local axis mode.
Now this local axis mode when you have it selected the properties of your layers.
That's the rotation the scaling and the orientation and the positioning.
Right.
The axis are aligned to the layer itself okay.
The axis of these properties are aligned to the layer itself.
We have the next guy which is the world axis mode.
If you select the world axis mode, your axis will be aligned to the composition.
Okay.
That's the native axis of the composition okay.
Then we have the view axis mode which aligns the axis of our properties to the view okay.
Which is the camera okay.
Which is the default camera in this case.
Yeah.
So that's what we get with this.
Now we have some other properties or some other options like these ones.
These are the camera tools.
So we have this as the orbit tool.
We can use this to orbit around our 3D object like this as you can see freely.
So if you if you select this tool you're going to have three options.
You're going to have the free form which allows you to orbit freely around your 3D object.
Okay.
As I'm doing right here, you also have the uh, the horizontal constraint, which only gives you the
ability to hover or to orbit horizontally like I'm doing right now.
Okay.
Then we have the vertical constraint, which gives you the ability to orbit only vertically okay.
Only vertically.
Just undo a couple of times.
Yeah.
It gives you the ability to orbit only vertically.
Perfect.
And then we have the pan tool which gives you the ability to pan around your scene.
So you're just panning around your scene.
You're not really moving Your 3D object?
Yeah.
We're panning around your scene, around your 3D scene.
Okay.
And then we have the dolly towards cursor tool, which gives you the ability to zoom in and zoom out
of your scene just like this.
Okay, perfect.
Go back to my selection tool.
Yeah.
And then, uh, let me just make more room here.
If I make more room here, you're going to see that we have more options here.
These are the options you're used to.
But we have this new option.
We have this draft 3D, which gives us a draft version of our 3D, which is easier to work with.
Okay.
Because the draft of course contains or requires less performance.
But under this draft we have our 3D environment also enabled.
So you can see our 3D environment.
We can just off this by clicking here.
So we can off the 3D environment grid by clicking here.
And and we have the 3D extended view.
This is the 3D extended view which shows our composition in relation to our 3D environment.
So we can click here to close the 3D extended view.
Okay.
Yeah.
So that's what you get with the draft.
And now here you get the renderers.
Currently we are using the classic 3D renderer.
We have the advanced.
We have the cinema 4D and we have the rendering options.
If you click here you'll be able to to select rendering options.
That's to edit the rendering options.
Let's see.
We have our advanced 3D selected.
When we come to the rendering options we're going to see that we have options for the render quality
okay.
The higher the quality the longer it takes to render of course.
And then we have the resolution of our shadows okay.
The better the higher the better.
But of course the higher the longer it takes to render.
And then we have the casting box or box size.
So that's the the box size of the shadow.
Okay.
That's the the kind of bounding box of the shadow.
So the bigger, uh, the bigger it is, the more our shadows will be extended or the bigger it is,
the more objects in our scene will be, uh, kind of included in the calculations of the the shadows.
Okay, so we can reduce this or fit it to our scene.
If we fit it to our scene, you're going to see that the box is just within our scene.
Okay?
So it means the shadows will only be casted here.
So anything outside here, you won't see any shadow.
But of course, you are not seeing shadows here because we've not, uh, added light and started repositioning
things to enable shadows.
So.
But that's the camera options for you if you right click and come to to view to switch view layer view
layout.
Rather you're going to see that we can switch between one view and two views.
So now we are seeing two views.
And we can click here.
And you're going to see this blue bounding boxes around our layout.
And with this we can now select the camera.
Now, if I just make more room here, you're going to see that if we select this we can click here to
select the camera.
We want this to show.
Okay.
Either left the front the top okay.
Or even the custom camera okay.
Just like this.
And we can click here to go back to this view.
We can disable our 3D draft if we want.
We can select the view we want which is the default view.
Is it the third custom view we want.
Okay.
We can also click here to select the number of views we want.
Okay.
The number of views we want in our viewport.
We can click here.
We can have four views.
We can look at everything in 3D.
We can manipulate this and we'll see them updating in real time.
Okay.
So that's how to work in 3D.
And yeah so these are just what you need to know about Basically okay or fundamentally.
So just select this guy, take it to the default.
And yeah now I will just select my guy now and make sure I have my 3D or advanced 3D selected and open
here.
Now we get different options when we depending on the uh on the renderer we select.
So for this advanced 3D we have these options.
We have this transform options.
We have this geometry options and we have material options.
But if I change this to the classic 3D we are not going to have geometry options as you can see here.
So that's just for you to know.
So under geometry now we have what we call bevel.
So bevel we have bevel and we have extrusion.
So if I just pushed up my extrusion depth we're going to now see that we are creating an extrusion in
real time.
So we've extruded our 3D.
So this is now an actual 3D shape Okay.
And we have where it says bevel.
If I just zoom in here and just pan around and select a type of bevel bevel style, let's see concave.
We're going to see that we now have a bevel detail around the edge of our 3D.
If I increase the bevel depth we're going to see that the detail increases in size.
Okay.
So this is what a bevel is again.
For now we have just three types.
We have the angular.
We have the convex or concave.
Rather we have the convex okay.
The convex kind of smoothens the edge.
And we can see it in 3D.
Yeah.
In in other softwares we have more more types of bevels or more styles of bevel okay.
So that's the bevel for you.
And we have the materials right now we're not even seeing any shadow right now.
It's using the the natural light or the natural environment light of After Effects to lighten up our
scene.
Okay.
so the next thing I'll do now is just create a new solid.
So I'll make my solid white.
Hit okay and hit okay.
So what I'll do then is just change my solid to a 3D layer.
Bring it below my 3D object, and I will use my x axis and rotate my 3D solid.
Okay so so I'll just make room here and and use my properties panel right here and make sure my rotation
I actually want to rotate it not the orientation.
So the rotation should be 90.
Not 90.
Which let me just make this zero.
And let's look at the rotation.
Yeah the rotation should be 90 degrees on your x axis.
Yeah.
So your rotation should be 90 degrees.
And or let's see -90.
There's two -90 degrees, and now we can move this object down.
Okay.
We can move this object down.
You can select the position tool and just move it down so that it becomes like a plane.
Okay.
Or a background for our 3D object to sit on.
Yeah.
And then we can take the scale and just scale this.
Just make it big so that it covers our scene.
Yeah.
Now we have a 3D object in our scene and we have it sitting on a background.
Right.
Or a platform.
Perfect.
So now we can even see shadows casting for our 3D text object.
So what we need to do is actually create lights.
So we're going to come to layer New and then light.
There are different types of lights.
Uh and we're going to look at the types of lights.
So I'm just going to select a point light okay.
Or a spot light and hit okay.
Now we can see that our scene is being lighted, but we still don't have shadows casting on the ground.
Right.
But the most important thing is our scene has been lighted for now and we can move our light further.
We can see our light here, we can rotate our light.
We can basically manipulate our light just like a normal 3D object.
Okay.
And this light will work also for our cinema 4D renderer.
So if I select my cinema 4D renderer we're going to see that, uh this is it.
Okay.
Looking good with the lights.
Yeah.
So go back to my advanced 3D and open my lights to my lights.
I will just select here an environmental light because I want to cast shadows on my scene.
So I've selected an environmental light, and now it's serving as the environmental light for my scene.
And we have cast Shadows turned off.
I just click here.
You're going to see that it's going to process a bit.
And we should have shadows now casted on our scene okay.
So here we are not seeing shadows.
So let's try to see what the problem is.
Let's look at the transform.
We transform.
We can move around okay.
We can move around our scene.
So we can move our light around.
And still yet I'm not seeing my shadows.
I'll just delete this light and create a new one.
So file or layer new and then light.
And I will just select an environmental light from here and hit okay.
Now let's see if the shadow casts.
So click on shadows.
So my after effects run into a problem.
And I couldn't generate shadows.
So I had to just, uh, restart the whole process and try generating shadows again.
And it worked the second time.
Okay.
So if you experience the same problem, just try restarting and you should be able to generate shadows.
So you need to make sure cast shadows is turned on for your environmental light okay.
Only the environmental light is able to cast shadows for the advanced 3D renderer.
So just take note of that.
So we have the shadow intensity.
We have the shadow darkness.
These are very self-explanatory.
Um, if you just zoom in now, you're going to see that we are casting shadows here, but our shadow
is, uh, noisy.
Right?
Our shadows are noisy, and that's a bit problematic.
What you can do is come here, go into render options, and if we boost the quality of our render,
we're going to see that gradually we eliminate our shadows.
Okay.
All the noise gets eliminated gradually.
But the problem is this increases our render time.
If we hit okay now we're going to see that we have less noise in our shadows.
But this increases render time okay.
That's the only problem with this.
It increases render time as well.
Uh, increase the smoothness of our shadows.
And that will also serve well.
So you just want to keep our render quality fairly low while working in the 3D space.
Okay, maybe 25.
So I think the default is 25.
Okay.
Hit okay.
Yeah.
So that's how to clear the noise in our shadows.
Yeah.
So let's look at some of the options we get with our 3D object to select your 3D objects.
Open this up and under your 3D object of course we've looked at the bevel and the extrusion.
You can close the geometry options.
We open the material options and under Material options we have cast shadows.
We it's turned on.
We can turn it off to see the effect.
Okay.
It's going to not cast shadows on the object under object.
Okay.
And also on the plane.
So you can turn it off or on to cast our shadows back.
We have shadows.
We can turn this off.
And we're going to see that it's not going to accept shadows that's on the object.
Okay.
So this one is just for the object.
You can turn it on to accept shadows.
Back then we have Accept lights, which works just the same thing as shadows, just the same way as
shadows.
We have shadow color.
We can change the shadow color.
If you want, you could make this bit reddish.
Okay, we can see that our shadows are now a bit reddish.
And then we make this more dark.
And then we have the ambient.
We have the diffuse okay.
All these are light settings or how much exposed our object is to light.
We have the specularity intensity or the specular intensity, which has to do with the, uh, with the
shininess and basically, yeah, the shininess and the reflection of our object.
So also with the specular shininess, if we make this 100, we're going to see that our object becomes
very shiny and very reflective okay.
The metallic or the metal is the metallic property of our object.
It makes our object metal or act like metal.
Just like you can see here.
So we have our metallic as 100 or our metal as 100.
Our specular shininess as 100.
Our specular intensity as 100.
And this is the result we get.
Okay.
This is completely amazing.
Yeah.
So that's what we get with this.
Maybe the shininess could be 50 to reduce the intensity.
The the intensity of the effect.
Yeah.
So this is what we get with the shininess at 50.
You can see looking good.
So these are the options you get with your materials or for your materials.
If we change the renderer now see cinema 4D renderer we're going to get different options okay.
We're going to get different options.
We're going to get wicked.
Slowed it down, so let's just wait for it to load.
Yeah.
So we can see that the environment light doesn't work with the cinema 4D.
Totally.
Because it's not casting any shadows.
It's not accepting light.
It's not.
It's just there.
Okay.
Completely diffused.
Yeah.
So but we get other options which will react with other types of lights.
Okay.
So I'll just advise you to go through all these options yourselves.
And for our classic 3D renderer we have other options as well.
Okay.
We have other options as well.
We have the specular.
We have the cast shadows okay.
But we don't have geometric options.
Of course it doesn't accept or it doesn't give us the ability to create or to manipulate geometry.
Okay.
Since we are not extruding anything here.
Okay.
So go back to our advanced 3D renderer And that's basically it for these.
Okay.
We can add cameras come to layer new camera.
There are different types of cameras but we won't look at the types of cameras for now.
But basically when you add the camera you get your camera in your scene and you are able to.
Okay, let's just make this, uh, big.
And you are able to kind of select, uh, the particular camera you want to view things on, and that
camera will now appear.
So let's see for this one.
We are currently selecting the right view.
We can come here and select our camera one.
Okay.
So that we now look or we now see our camera one which is our new camera which we created.
So our camera one was created in the current view.
We were okay.
That was the default view.
So that's the camera one for you.
And you can see your camera here.
It means we could have multiple cameras, so we can even create a new one, see another camera hit okay,
that camera two.
Okay.
It's created it in the same position as camera one.
You can just use this to move our camera.
So now we see we have two cameras here.
We can rotate this one.
Okay.
Rotate it.
Could move it reposition it.
So we could have this as camera one and this as camera two.
Yeah.
So that's basically it guys.
That's basically it.
This camera two.
This camera one.
Yeah.
So we can animate everything here.
We can animate our 3D object.
We can animate our cameras.
We can do all sorts of things.
You can create a keyframe.
See you know for 3D object we have our transform options.
We have uh, uh, transform position rotation or scale and so on and so forth.
Okay.
All these things are animatable.
Yeah.
And that's basically it for an introduction into 3D and the 3D workspace here in After Effects.
In the next video we're going to go further to look at more things we can achieve uh with 3D in After
Effects.
So see you in the next one.
Bye bye.