No more games. These are all the secrets you need to create the most powerful motion graphics with just After Effects, baby. [music] By using these new native tricks, your arsenal of cinematic eye candy becomes limitless. So, let’s become the best and get started. All right. Making scenes like this are actually fairly easy to create. And the big secret is just a single color choice, [music] texturing, and a great hairstyle. Hm. I don’t think I have that last one. So, the first order of action is to always start with a background. And we can use the new 2026 mesh tools to create a plane, not an airplane, unfortunately, which gives us the ability to rotate this by 90° and lower it down by a touch, giving us a floor to work from because everything gets built on [music] top of this layer. And building things can be quite fun. For instance, we can be creative by using say the cone tool here. And by adjusting the radius values and the height under the mesh options, we can go ahead and build out somewhat of a tree here. And to finalize the low poly nature of what we’re going for, we can adjust the bevel options to refine [music] the curvature of the tree, which is now only missing a stump. From here, we can use say the cylinder mesh to add a trunk by adjusting the radius and height right here in the middle of our scene to complete the overall tree. But the master takeaway here is that you can combine shapes [music] to put together a lot of different master overall designs. But of course, a model is only good as its texture or material. Now, you can mess around with the material options here in the properties panel with your layer selected, but instead I find that there are some amazing materials on the Adobe community assets page, [music] like this metallic substar. And when you connect your texture to your object under material assignment, this gives you the option to edit the color and other essential values like resolution, all right here inside the properties panel. Keep in mind this ability is only available to some textures. And if you want to use the same texture on another object like the trunk, just click unlink to create a new instance and then change the color. And specifically, I like to use this material for regular colors as it just provides this beautiful metallic shine and is very easy to work with, just like it’s easy to watch my videos at half speed. Other than the fast-paced nature of my videos, I love organization. So, I would pre-ompose any model that has multiple shapes together and then click [music] this cog icon. And don’t forget to add that 3D cube right here in the 3D box. But absolutely perfect. We’re off to a great start to finish off this beautifully visual scene and easily produce beautiful 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, allowing you to 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 [music] very much. All right, before like populating a scene with incredible details, I highly suggest laying out your master object first. While it’s great to model your own designs, you could easily get free complex models with a quick search. Remember, After Effects will accept 3D models that are OBJ, GB, GLTF, and FBX. And when you’re ready, just place it into your scene. Now, I like to come here to the top view after selecting two views to ensure that this master object is in the direct center of the scene. Also, this is a good time to lower the Y position of any model so that it sits directly on top of the floor. And as a pro tip, don’t forget to adjust the anchor point of your models so that when we key frame later, everything will animate from the correct location and you’ll thank me later. Also, feel free to scale the floor to maximize its size. Okay, so now that we’re all set up for cess, this is where I would duplicate your detail models like this tree that we’ve made. And we can use the top view to help reposition everything around the scene so that we’re not like clipping these objects right into each other. However, the Z position is your friend for creating depth, which will come in handy for that cinematic out of focus look later. Then don’t forget to scale your trees to create some, you know, hierarchy. After you’ve time-lapse your way to become the king of details, let’s become the agent of light and shadow. For this scene, we’ll keep it simple and we’ll just use an environment light with shadows ready to go. This does make a massive massive difference in the visual quality of the scene, but you should always try images and HDRs connected to the light source to essentially relight the scene and check how everything updates and get the right look. Also, before we jump out of our seats, adjust the lights rotation [music] and intensity to see how a single image or HDR can dramatically shift your scene. And for the most dramatic change, think about setting your floor airplane layer to have accept shadows to only with cast shadows turned to off because this will allow you to use a gradient ramp on your solid layer background to create more or less a seamless look throughout the entire scene. Just absolutely perfect. Now, before we finalize the overall scene, always think about the finishing details that you might need. for example, like importing additional 3D assets. With some 3D models, [music] you can change their textures to, you know, match your existing materials that are being used, which is just another reason why I like using substars to keep the overall color palette consistent. For these low poly clouds, I used a sphere and set the slice start to 180° to cut them in half. Then rotated and duplicated to make a larger cloud setup like this. And obviously we can use the half sphere concept even further by throwing it on the ground. [laughter] Anyway, camera movement and overall animation is the easiest part. Though quietly do yourself a favor and click draft 3D to prevent your baby from melting. I I mean computer. Anyway, for most objects you could just key frame the scale to have them animate into your scene. And if you place your anchor points at the bottom, the trees will just animate in from the floor. You know, I told you you would thank me later. And most importantly, create a camera layer. Use the camera tools here at the top to angle and reposition to have the right perspective. But for any master scene rotation, create a 3D null object and parent the camera to it. Then just key frame the Y rotation on the null object to have your camera orbit around the scene. Just beautiful. Now for the final master touches, go ahead and select everything and pre-ompose it. Call it whatever you like, but immediately we’ll use the 3D channel extract effect [music] and use these two values to make what you want to be in focus black while making everything else [music] white. Then when you’re ready, use the depth to field effect to blend the overall depth map with maximum radius. I don’t think I [music] said death. Duplicate this comp and then delete everything as fast as possible. Then just use the epic camera lens blur effect. [music] Set the drop down to the bottom comp and then select effect and mask. Beautiful. Now just dial in the blur radius. And this is going to be great. Now the best method I have for a tilt shift look if you will, which is just blurring the foreground, is to create an adjustment layer and use that camera lens blur effect again. Then use the regular rectangle tool to create a mask. And just don’t forget to feather it out like crazy to introduce some of that foreground blur. Okay, for the last touch, we can use the curves effect again on a final adjustment layer to dial in [music] the correct tonality of your scene, which looks really good at this point. And for the final time, I’ll say finally, go to your renderer options and your original composition to dial in the shadow resolution. And no, I I don’t think you always need to max out the shadow quality. As you can see that my settings here are just fine. And just for [music] a recap, think about creating your own landscapes with just using, say, the cube meshes. Then this will [music] allow you to use textures like dirt and gravel along with some actual grass models to expand your [music] arsenal of possibilities. Subscribe to be the best and always be creating.