dark, moody power. I don’t know about you, but After Effects has really never felt this powerful before. Because now we can build entire motion graphic worlds, build atmosphere, and tell stories in a way that feels cinematic. So, let’s harness this new power of After Effects, and get started. All right. There’s a lot of ways to approach a big epic scene like this. So, here’s my most organic approach without having to smash your keyboard in half. First, I like to start with a primary object that will be a repetitive object for later use, like a cube. And we can size it with the controls to make any design, like this rectangle. How creative, I know. But here’s the beauty of building scenes like this. Ideas will just come to you as you go. So, the next thing that I like to do is texture this beautiful piece of work. We can either add our own textures in the latest version of After Effects beta or you can still grab and attach free materials from the community asset site from Adobe uh like you know maybe this concrete texture as I really want that brutalistic feel. And we can also scale that texture down for that crisp detail and that’s going to make everything look good my fellow comrade duck. Now that we have a shape ready we need to attach it to a floor. So, use the plane tool to draw out a, you know, 15,000 x 15,000 plane and and no, not an airplane, of course. Set the X rotation to 90° and set its Y position to exactly 1080 as I like to have like a standard where everything kind of sits on the floor nowadays. Then, we can move our 3D object until it clips onto that floor. Though, at this time, I like to make a camera layer. And when it’s ready, we’ll use the pan under cursor tool to reposition the view. And don’t forget, we can also texture that floor as well and scale it as needed. And finally, to complete this starting build, let’s go ahead and create a background solid and add a gradient ramp. Choose your colors and use a radial style, which will quote unquote emulate the sun, so to speak. And you’ll see that later on. Now, to get the repeated scene going, we can duplicate your magnificent masterpiece rectangle or, you know, shape, whatever you’re using, you know, a handful of times. Then select everything, go to position, and you’re going to hold alt and control on your keyboard or command and option if you’re on a Mac to proportionally push these back into zspace. Easy enough. But for another idea that just came to me, we can manually vary the X and Y position of every layer for some great variation. Cool. But hear me out. Pre-ompose all these shapes here. And hear me out again. Click continuously rasterize and make the layer 3D. And now we can move this over to the side. duplicate it and move it over to the other side. So, basically, it’s 40 shapes in just two layers. I don’t know about you, but that’s just great organization. And next, we’ll go ahead and make this scene actually cinematic and easily produce cinematic work by After Effects and Premiere Pro templates, drag and drop transitions, animation presets, and powerful 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 client ready masterpieces in no time, the link below. And if you do pick up anything, you will be supporting my channel as you know, I don’t do any sponsorships here. So, thank you very much. But, okay, are you ready for the good stuff? And I mean the good stuff. At this step, I will go ahead and create a parallel light with shadows enabled to start visualizing that final look of the scene. This way, I’m not wasting my time if this idea is just a dud. Now, because we have a diffused sun here in the sky, move the light back in Z position space and over to where that hypothetical sun is going to be sitting at. And of course, increase the light intensity. And now we’re going to be able to see those crisp crisp sharp shadows. And that’s awesome, except the scene might just be too dark for you. So to augment the scene, go ahead and create an environment light with shadows as well. And first, we’re going to match the lights rotation to get that same shadow angle that we got from that parallel light. From here, you can easily adjust the intensity to feel your inner light or darkness. though to match your inner darkness. Make sure you go to renderer options and click fit the scene so that your shadows will spread out correctly. Awesome stuff. We now got the core principle for scene building out of the way because it’s now all about expansion. So for easy camera movement, go ahead and create a 3D null object and parent the camera to it. From here, we can just add key frames for position and push this all the way forward in Zpace to reveal the full scope of the scene. Now to create more variety, you can duplicate the composition here in the project panel and select one of the existing pre-MPs in your timeline and alt drag this over to replace. Then in that composition, we can rev the rectangles however you like. And back in the main comp, everything will update. This means you can duplicate these and move them around the composition to really start building this all out really quick. The idea is to populate everything. And one thing you’ll notice is that I’m using two views with Draft 3D selected here to help see exactly what I’m doing without melting my computer. But have fun creating duplicates and variations. You really don’t need too many unique compositions as you know there’s already so much detail in here just with one single rectangle. Now, if you’re itching for extra design details, keep in mind you can use this cube mesh and lengthen it out to create like a really long pathway. And of course, you can use this concept to create many other shapes for your scene. For example, if we use three slightly different variations of like a long rectangle, you can easily combine these together to create like a floating catwalk, if you will, and then populate the scene with this type of design as well. But to really, you know, really make the scene come to life, right, let’s talk about cinematic light. Firstly, for these moving particles that will emit light, create a point light with a smooth fall-off that has, I don’t know, a radius and fall-off distance of like a 200 or so with shadows turned off. That’s important. Then straight away lower this point light into your scene until you kind of see it affecting the environment around it. And of course you can change it colors. And I would also consider alt clicking the stopwatch for position to add the wiggle.5, 50 expression to, you know, have this animated. Now we can duplicate this light a bunch of times and move it around the scenes to, you know, light things up. And finally, to actually like see this light source, we can create a small matching circle with the ellipse tool, make it 3D, and then place it near the point lights. Then, of course, turn off except lights and shadows as well. Then, we can use the wiggle expression once again on its position. And finally, we can duplicate this a bunch of times and reposition each particle shape to really sell that creative light. Once again, awesome stuff. But to make this even awesomemer, let’s enable depth of field on your camera layer and then take a second to cry with joy because this is great. And pre-ompose everything here for some upcoming effects. Now, the first effect here to try is fog 3D. This is kind of a tricky effect to use, so just bear with me here. By selecting your background color and setting the depth here, you can help tie the entire scene with a slight fog and then maybe use the other settings to help dial that final fog look. Now, one of my favorite effects is light rays. So, with an adjustment layer, we can use the CC radial fast blur effect and set the amount to 95 and then move the center point to the, you know, bright area in your sky. Now, to dial this down, let’s set the blend mode to screen and use the curves effect to help fine-tune all these beautiful rays. with a top adjustment layer. Let’s dial in your look with the curves effect or maybe the lummetry color effect to get the right look. But ultimately do whatever you think looks best and subscribe to be the best and always be creating.