Light, shadow, color, boom. These are all the elements that will unlock your new hidden power inside of After Effects.
Creating cinematic and studio motion graphics is as easy as throwing down a few lights and buffoonery effects to make a work of art. Let’s get started. All right, let’s turn on the lights, get dizzy for our camera movement, and listen to my terrible jokes. But I have a gray beard and you know I work hard on that thing. So give me some credit. As a consequence of all my recent tutorials, let’s start with the plane tool, which apparently doesn’t have an airplane symbol next to it. But create a very large shape. Then rotate the X rotation by exactly 90°. Lower it by a touch and scale it up. Then finally create a very dark solid background layer to start off your scene. Now, before we do any lighting and make the big box, import a mass 3D object into your scene like this buck. Uh, but obviously if you need a specific 3D object, you know, I’ve had no problem finding free 3D models with a quick search. Remember, FBX, OBJ, GB, and GLTF are all accepted 3D formats for After Effects. So, just scale and ensure your 3D object is in the center of your scene and sitting nicely on your floor like this. You may want to adjust the Y rotation of your object so that it’s not under the influence. That didn’t make any sense and I told you these jokes were terrible. But okay, here’s some real talk. Lighting. Real lighting from a practical source. For example, let’s create a stroke only white circle. Make it a 3D layer and push it back into Zosition space by a touch and then place it somewhere. Just get off to the side. Also, think about rotating this for a creative angle if it’s off to the side. Now, it’s actually time to create a real light for the scene. and let’s go with a spotlight with shadows enabled. Also, let’s create a 3D null object and parent the spotlight to it. For me, I just find it easier to move and rotate spotlights around with a null object instead of using the regular light controls on that spotlight. But obviously, let’s use the null’s position and rotation values to align the spotlight to where the circle is at. And for me, I want some better visualization. So I would go ahead and create a camera now. Then use the dolly towards cursor tool to essentially zoom out of the scene to fully see that beautiful tone of light which we need to control. So firstly let’s go into that shape layer and turn off accepts lights to ensure that you can see its original white color. Then let’s dial in on the spotlight by increasing the intensity and setting the fall-off to smooth. This will then allow us to adjust our radius to dial in the length of the spotlight, creating this powerful backlight effect. But now we have officially set up the groundworks for building a cinematic scene and easily produce cinematic visuals and save time with my free After Effects and Premiere Pro templates, drag and drop transitions, animation presets, and cinematic motion graphics that you can customize with a few clicks. You can access thousands of templates directly in After Effects and Premiere Pro where you can edit them to fit your vision in seconds. So, build cinematic masterpieces in no time with the link below. And if you do pick up anything, you will be supporting my channel. So, thank you very much. All right, we still have to expand on our lighting, but I like to visualize the final look of our scene before judging the final light. So, let’s talk about textures. With a 3D model selected, you can click get substance community assets within the properties panel. From here, you can get like rock textures or any texture of your choice for your scene. And when those are imported into After Effects, you can set the material to those substars. And great though, I suggest lowering the scale right here to maximize the quality. And if you can set the resolution to max and essentially you can do this for any 3D object that you have in your scene. But for now, let’s finalize that lighting baby as you know, this scene might just be too dark. So firstly to fill in the shadows a bit let’s create an environment light and then dial down the intensity to slightly reveal the shadows and to hide our dark nature. Additionally to fill in the front of our model let’s go ahead and create a point light and then position it to the front of the model or off to the side like so. But most importantly I would position this up by a little bit and enable smooth falloff. Then dial in that radius and position it again to ensure that this only lights the front of your object and not the floor. But this looks great. Now, at this time, I want to go ahead and make things pop with glows by creating an adjustment layer. And first, let’s use the noise effect at around, you know, 10% and uncheck color noise. And now, let’s go ahead and throw in that glorious glow effect. Though, we primarily want the glow effect to only affect the circle. So, let’s go ahead and increase the glow threshold and set the radius to around 100. And, you know, everything should look good with these settings. Then to see how strong your scene can get, duplicate the glow and increase the radius by much more. Absolutely perfect. And since I’m actually a maniac for practical light sources, you know, these lights that we can actually see like the stroke circle that we’ve created this time, let’s just create a small filled out circle and align it to the exact middle of the comp. Then make it 3D and turn off except lights once again. From here, let’s create a point light that has the fall-off set to smooth and copy the position of the shape layer to the new light. Then parent the shape to the light. Then let’s adjust the Z position the light to move this away from the center from a 3D depth perspective. Finally, let’s create a 3D null object and parent the light to it. Then alt click the stopwatch for Y rotation and use something like time asterric 100. And this should spin the light around the scene perfectly from the center. The only problem is that the you know that shape turns away. So to remedy the situation, select a shape, go to layer, transform, autoor orient, then select orient towards camera. Boom. Crisis averted. Time to sign some autographs, which will come after we dial in the actual camera movement camera. Man, there’s a lot of movement potential that you can do with the camera tools. However, I’m not joking when I really want to spin things around instead. So, let’s go ahead and create a 3D null object. And this time, let’s parent the camera to it. Feel free to key frame the Y rotation on the null object to have this start from a side view like this. Then make that last key frame easy ease with F9 on your keyboard. Go to the graph editor and pull this handle all the way across like this. Absolutely fantastic. But before we win any cinematography awards, let’s create another 3D null object and parent that previous null to it. Now create an overall slow Y rotation animation that will continue the camera movement past that initial movement. At this point, this is some form of nullception, but this prevents my brain from exploding. Now, with the camera movement set up, we can now enhance the lighting experience even further. For instance, we can come here to the spotlight and key frame the color to change from white to any color of your choice. And you know, this is looks great, right? except we need to go to that ring shape layer and key frame the fill color to match the timing of the lights color change. But you know, no problem. Can be easily done. We can also key frame the intensity of the spotlight to have the scene start from dark and then you can essentially turn it on. You can also add the wiggle expression to the intensity to have the light flicker. And don’t forget to add some sort of wiggle expression to the first glow radius on your adjustment layer to finalize the perfect flicker. Another great element to add is particles. You know, we all love particles, right? So, all we need is a white solid layer, hopes and dreams, and the CC ball action effect. Just lower the ball size and max out the scatter. And since this is a 3D effect, the camera will just fly through the particles. Okay, congratulations. We’re ready for the finishing effects. So pre-ompose everything except for that adjustment layer with all the effects and add the 3D channel extract effect and set the black and white points to create a depth map. Whatever you want to be in focus needs to essentially be black and everything else should be white. Then add the depth of field effect and increase the maximum radius. Finally, duplicate the layer, delete the damage, I mean the effects, and add the camera lens blur. Set the blur map to the bottom layer. Select effects and masks and dial in your blur amount and the roundness to complete your overall scene. So take these concepts to create your own scenes and combine them together. Describe to be the best and always be creative.