Rendering the 3D Motion Design
Now that you’ve completed the composition, it’s time to render it for distribution. When you created the composition, the duration was set to 10 seconds. Although this provides a good amount of wiggle room for designing motion, 10 seconds is a bit too lengthy for the final output. That’s okay because After Effects includes mechanisms that allow you to render a specific segment of the composition.
You’ll now set the work area to render and produce a distributable MP4 video file. By default, the work area is set to the entire duration of the composition. To set it to include a segment of the composition, you’ll adjust the work area start and only end markers at the top of the timeline—located above the layers but below the time marks.
Locate the Work Area Start marker, at 0:00:00:00, and drag it to the 01s mark. Similarly, locate the Work Area End marker, at 0:00:10:00, and drag it to the 08s mark.
This effectively trims the resulting content. When rendering this composition, only the work area you’ve defined will be rendered into the final MP4 video.
Be sure that the composition is selected in either the Project panel or the timeline, and choose Composition > Add to Render Queue from the application menu.
The render queue opens alongside the composition timeline, and a new job displays.
Ensure that Output Module is set to H.264 – Match Render Settings – 15 Mbps and set the Output To name and location.
Click the Render button.
The composition work area is rendered as an MP4 video file to the location and name you specified.
Locate the file on your computer.
The duration should be 7 seconds, since that is how you defined the work area in the composition timeline.
That’s it! You’ve completed the project. You’ve used many skills and workflows to produce this 3D motion design across Adobe Express, Illustrator, Substance 3D Stager, Firefly, and After Effects. It is truly amazing what can be achieved through the combination of 2D and 3D software.
In the next chapter, we’ll consider several additional workflows and related techniques.