From clean to cinematic, here are the secrets to creating the most visual motion graphics ever. [music] We’ll be breaking down these two great examples of both dramatic and studio style visuals all right here in After Effects. So, let’s get started. All right. First, let’s start with the dramatic scene where we take a boring rock and make it cinematic. And then we’ll show how to use these techniques for a brighter, clean setup like this one. So, in order to get started, you need your master 3D object, which is usually very easy to find for free with a quick search. And I found this free rock. You can import GB, glTF, FBX, and OBJ’s right into After Effects. And for some objects, if they have no textures, you know, that’s going to be completely okay. Don’t panic because right after we scale up the object and position it somewhere around the center of the comp, we can go to the property panels right here and click this icon next to material to get Substance Community Assets. And for this specific example, all I’m looking for is like a rock-like texture that we can get for free and drop it right into After Effects. Then select that material with the drop down. And this is going to allow [music] us to easily texture objects in no time. Though, as a very important tip, consider scaling the texture downward to pull out stronger details. And if it’s allowed, you can increase the resolution of the material right here. Overall, it’s just amazing how we can control textures all in After Effects. Though, without lighting, this is just going to be a wash, completely flat. and boring like my jokes. But overall, this is nothing for us to be excited about. So to start off, let’s go ahead and create an environment light to easily implement some shadows and to take away that flat look. Now, we can adjust the Y rotation of this light until the front of the rock is dark to really pull out those shadows so we can see them. Now, before we make this cinematic, [music] quickly go ahead and create a camera layer. And then using the camera tools at the top, we can get in nice and close. Specifically where there’s like a lot of jagged edges or details that we can see here, which is going to make this much more interesting, like my hairstyle. I don’t know about that one, but I do promise I get haircuts. Anyways, the secret to great lighting is backlight. So, let’s lower the intensity of the environment light and go ahead and create a new spotlight with shadows enabled. And all we have to do is move the light back in Zosition space. And [music] this will solely light from behind our scene since the position orbits around the point of interest, which is in the center of the scene by default. Now, you can also mess with the X and Y position for the best angle. But finally, let’s go ahead and increase the intensity by a lot since this is a backlight and we really want that to be pushed up. Try setting the falloff to smooth and dial in the radius and fall-off distance to partially like the rock. And this should leave the foreground in the shadow, which is absolutely nice. [music] And absolutely lastly, let’s go ahead and increase the shadow diffusion for some smoother shadows. [music] And that’s the cinematic power of light and shadow and easily produce cinematic work with my After Effects and Premiere Pro templates, drag and drop transitions, animation presets, and powerful motion graphics that you can customize with a few [music] 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 with the link below. And if you do pick up anything, you will be supporting my channel as I don’t do any sponsorships here. So, thank you very much. Okay, to finalize the overall scene, let’s go ahead and create a very dark but not exactly a pure black background solid as I find a dark gray is visually more pleasing than just pure black. Then jump to our depth of field options in the camera layer, which are available in the most recent versions of After Effects. This is where we’ll need to adjust the focus distance. And then from there, we can mess with the aperture and the near far blur level to [music] really pull out that shallow depth of field. Though, consider increasing the focus area width to give you some more actual focus. But once you’re done, you should have a cinematic still graphic. [music] Nice. Let’s try key framing the focus distance to create a rack focus effect. And then let’s also try animating the position of the spotlight ever so slightly to move the actual light source. And finally, maybe key frame animate the rotation of the rock or your master object to further the overall movement. But overall, think about all your movement options as these are your levers as an animator. And the finish finish the scene, right? Create an adjustment layer and use the noise effect at a very low amount. And if you wish to boost the overall contrast, try using the curves effect to help deepen the mood. But overall, with some graphics, tell me in the comment section that this isn’t cool. I swear I can take it. I promise. [laughter] But anyway, let’s go ahead and create a clean, professional scene that banks more on bright white looks. Again, we have a master object, which is just a chair. And this time, the textures came through. But always start by creating a large plain mesh. You can set it X rotation to 90° and lower it under your master object. Or nowadays, I usually try setting the Y position of both layers to 1080, which is the Y composition size, which is 1920 x 1080, right? Makes sense. Then create yourself another camera layer and with the camera tools, specifically the dolly to cursor tool, maybe the pan around cursor and even the orbit tool to get that best angle. And of course, you can revisit moving your camera at any time. But back to that plane that we created, not airplane, scale it up, and under compositing options, set accept shadows to only. And then create a very light gray solid background. And I promise that floor that we just created wasn’t a waste of time because when you create an environment light, the shadows will appear again and your background solid will provide a seamless color throughout the entire composition. Awesome. Now, obviously, we understand lighting is important. Though, when it comes to these studio style [music] graphics, we need a studio HDR. So, again, you can easily find free HDRs and get your hands on a studio image. And when you place it into the timeline, we can set the light source to that HDR or image. And before we get melancholy with our image choice, always mess with the intensity and the light Y rotation to pull out the best look. I find generally if you rotate the lights shadows [music] towards us, you know, that usually will look the best. And if we want to take this even further, the backlight cough cough spotlight is absolutely fantastic, but push it back and mess with the same intensity fall-off and shadow settings to get the best results. Though, most importantly for this type of scene, I [music] kind of like keeping the shadow darkness on the lower side. And just cycling through the lights, you know, I think this looks pretty good. But to finish the scene, you can key frame the rotation of the chair to give it some [music] constant movement. And we can do some really cool camera animations by starting far away and getting closer. It’s completely up to you. And for example, I actually don’t think I like depth of field turned on for this type of scene. And that’s going to allow for faster render times. [music] And speaking of render times, let’s go to renderer options right here in the middle. And we can try to find the perfect shadow box size to keep those shadows high quality. And I want to go over the top on the quality slider right here. But obviously, what you do with your [music] scene is up to you. I hope you like this one. Subscribe to be the best and always be creating.