- Designing Motion Content with 3D Models
- Designing a 3D Product for Motion Design
- 3D Motion Design in After Effects
- Compositing with Additional Elements
- Rendering the 3D Motion Design
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
3D Motion Design in After Effects
Now that you have a well-designed 3D model, you can begin creating an After Effects composition that uses the Advanced 3D rendering engine. You’ll start by creating a new project, importing your GLB file, and animating it across a 3D composition.
Creating a New Composition
Before you can use the 3D model you’ve designed in Substance 3D Stager, you’ll need to create a new After Effects composition and save your project.
In After Effects, click the New Project button on the Home screen or choose New > New Project from the application menu.
The Home screen disappears, and you are prompted to create a new composition.
Click the large New Composition button in the center of the screen, or choose Composition > New Composition from the application menu, to create a new composition.
The Composition Settings dialog box appears.
In the Composition Settings dialog box, enter Mosquito for the Composition Name and choose Social Media Landscape – 1280x720 – 30 fps from the Preset menu. Set Duration to 0:00:10:00 (10 seconds) and choose black (#000000) for the Background Color.
Click OK.
The Composition Settings dialog box closes, and a new composition is created according to your choices.
Save your project by choosing File > Save from the application menu.
A save dialog box appears.
Choose a location for the file on your computer and name the file Mosquito.aep.
Click Save.
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You now have a new After Effects project file that contains a single empty composition. You will spend the remainder of this chapter working in the composition just created.
Importing a 3D Model
You spent a lot of time in Substance 3D Stager designing the cream tube model, layering it with branding assets, and tweaking everything so it appears just as you like. You’ll now import that model into After Effects to use it in your composition.
3D model files are imported into After Affects much like any other asset.
Ensure your Project panel is open and locate the file mosquito.glb, which you exported from Substance 3D Stager.
The only item in your Project panel is your Mosquito composition.
Drag mosquito.glb directly onto the Project panel from your file system to add it to the panel. It will appear as a folder named Mosquito.
Open the Mosquito folder to reveal the mosquito.glb file inside it.
Recall that a GLB file contains all meshes, textures, and other assets in a single file. If you were to import a GLTF file, you would see many different types of assets in this folder—perhaps even subfolders.
The Mosquito composition should be open in the timeline below. If it is not, double-click it in the Project panel to open it in the timeline.
You will need the composition open to add the 3D model to it.
Add the mosquito.glb file to the Mosquito composition by dragging it from the Project panel into the timeline.
Drop the file into the left or right area of the timeline; it makes no difference.
The Model Settings dialog box appears, and you can make adjustments to how your model appears in the composition.
This dialog box offers choices for how your 3D model will scale in the composition and how its position is affected when scaling. The Basic tab focuses on object scaling, and the Advanced tab allows you to choose the units used to measure the scale and which of the three axes determines what is considered “up” for this model, determining how the gizmo overlay appears and how each axis influences the model.
Select Do Not Affect Position from the Object Position While Scaling dropdown if it is not already selected. Leave Object Scale and the other parameters at their default values, and click OK.
Now that the 3D model is available in the composition, you can see it is quite small and not ideally positioned to fill the frame.
To adjust its appearance, choose the Selection tool
from the tools at the top of the interface. Ensure that the mosquito.glb layer is selected, and use the gizmo overlay to adjust the scale, rotation, and position of your 3D model to view the details of your work so far.In the figure, I’ve adjusted my object so that it better fills the frame, and the details of the materials, patterned background, and label can be easily viewed and appreciated.
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Don’t worry about getting the tube positioned and scaled in any meaningful way just yet; you’ll be more precise in the next section, when you begin animating the object across time.
Adding Motion to the 3D Model
Now that the 3D model is imported and included in a composition, it’s time to add some motion to it! Although this is a new capability of After Effects, the process for giving motion to a 3D model is conveniently the same as with just about any other asset.
Open the Transform properties of the mosquito.glb layer and move the playhead to the 4-second position, 0:00:04:00.
Click each Stopwatch toggle
to the left of the Position, Scale, and Orientation properties.Keyframes are inserted at the 4 second mark along the timeline for the chosen transform properties.
The most direct way to set up your motion design is to start with the end.
Use the gizmo overlay or adjust the numeric transform properties to place the tube product in a prominent position in the composition frame.
If you would prefer direct values for these properties, set them as follows:
Position: 190, 465, -55
Scale: 1080%, 1080%, 1080%
Orientation: 0°, 7°, 80°
This results in a tube that fills the screen while facing the viewer and being slightly tilted to keep the view interesting.
You can always deviate from these choices if desired, of course. Just remember that if you do so your results may differ from the figures in this chapter.
Now, let’s set the second set of keyframes.
Move your playhead to the 2-second mark along the timeline, 0:00:02:00, and click the Insert Keyframe icon
to the left of the property name to duplicate keyframes for the Position, Scale, and Orientation properties.This sets these property values to be identical across time between the two sets of keyframes you created.
You should have identical keyframes for Position, Scale, and Orientation properties at both 0:00:02:00 and 0:00:04:00 along the timeline.
The tube of cream should emerge from the bottom of the screen to the previously set Position, Scale, and Orientation property settings.
You should be at the first keyframe, at 0:00:02:00, which is your starting point.
Next, you will set the 3D model so that it is much smaller in scale, rotated differently from its final value, and positioned out of frame beyond the bottom of the composition.
Using either the gizmo overlay or the numeric property values to adjust the following transform properties:
Position: 250, 1200, 1640
Scale: 345%, 345%, 345%
Orientation: 295°, 325°, 30°
Again, you may deviate from these values, but the result will differ from what you see here.
The tube should be rather small and appear lost in blackness at this point. You will, of course, embellish the composition with additional artifacts to keep things interesting for the viewer, but the motion of the centerpiece tube asset is of primary importance.
If you play back the motion you’ve created, it will be very linear and not so interesting. You can fix this by applying easing to the keyframes.
Using the Selection tool
, drag a selection rectangle across all the keyframes in the timeline.The selected keyframes are highlighted in blue.
Choose Animation > Keyframe Assistant > Easy Ease from the application menu to create simple easing across the selected keyframes.
The selected keyframes change from a diamond shape to an hourglass, indicating that an ease has been applied.
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This action produces a much more dynamic and physical motion across the keyframes’ property transitions. Play back your composition to see how much smoother the animation is now.
The tube emerges from the bottom of the screen, rotates slightly, scales up, and settles into position in the center of the frame. The primary motion for this composition is now complete.