Hi everyone, my name is Brad Magnus, and I'm glad you're taking a minute to watch this
tutorial.
I run an Adobe After Effects user group in Johnson City, Tennessee, where we get to discuss
all things After Effects and production premium, basically, video and visual effects.
And recently we had a meetup where we created this effect using two great plugins from
Aescripts.com called 3D Extruder and Eye Expressions.
Let's take a look.
So in this tutorial, I plan on showing you quickly some basics of animation in this first
portion, that kind of kinetic typography appearance, and then we'll move on to using
the two plugins up here from Aescripts.com, 3D Extruder, which is creating this beautiful
3D looking text, even though it's really not truly 3D, and then Eye Expressions, which
determines the beat of the song and gives us a slider value that we can animate with.
All without having to write a single line of expression.
So let's take a quick look here.
This is the landing page for 3D Extruder, I'll put a link in the description, 3D Extruder,
just creates two and a half D objects out of layers that appear to be 3D, so that you
don't have to leave After Effects to get some really great text effects like this one.
And then we'll be using Eye Expressions, which has different bundles available to it, and
today we'll only be using the Audio Bundle, but I would strongly suggest you take a look
at Eye Expressions, check it out.
When I get into After Effects, I don't want to write code, and this is an amazing thing
for me.
When I get into After Effects, I'm usually tired of writing code because as a web designer
that's what I do most of the time, so I want to get away from that, and this lets me just
focus on movement and design and animation, and I'm really, I can't say enough great
things about Eye Expressions, and I look forward to getting to use it more and more in the
future.
So if you'd like to learn more about these, I will put the links in the description.
So let's go ahead and get into After Effects.
And what we have here is a comp, I just called it the Kick Drum Heart Start, and we have
Kick Drum Heart by the Avid Brothers.
I just cut out the very last 10 seconds or so of the audio and we have it in here.
And I'm starting with these layers already built so that I don't have to mess around
while you guys are watching this tutorial to learn everything I did.
I'm going to try to keep this as short as possible, but it will probably go for quite
a while, and I don't want you guys to get too bored or upset with me for wasting too
much of your time.
So we've got, we have a solid layer with a four color gradient.
If you're new to After Effects, I really love the four color gradient tool because it gives
you a lot more control in creating these kind of like burnt edge type look with a lot more
control over the ramp effect.
In my opinion, you know, you can have a darker top corners and a lighter lower section.
Anyway, big fan of that as well.
So let's move on.
We've got this illustration, which is, I'm going to brag at myself a little bit and tell
you that it is a custom illustration that I spent several hours, even though it's pretty
simple, several hours creating because I wanted to be able to control the look of this animation
as well.
And then we've got our three text layers, the text broken into these three sections,
my heart and like a.
And so yeah, let's get started.
I will give a quick tip that if you're new to After Effects even, I wasn't sure I had
to double check it.
I knew I could scrub the audio, but it is control alt and you scrub the timeline and
you'll be able to hear the audio.
If you aren't holding control alt, you can't hear the audio, so that can become very frustrating
having to try to ram preview.
And if you do ram preview, a portion of your timeline is that the current time indicator
isn't like perfectly aligned to where it truly is in time.
It's just pretty much a rough representation.
So in order to determine where the words come in in my right, that is really the only way
I found to do it is to hold control and just sit there and cut forth in that manner to
then have the layer selected and hit the asterisk key on the number pad to add in these
layer markers.
And so that's what we've got going on here.
So yep, so that's easy.
What we did then was create the layers, trim them, you guys got this figured out by now,
and the drum slides in from the right.
So what we need to do now is that we need to create a new camera and we're going to
just use a 28 millimeter, I think it looks the wider angle lenses.
I like the way 3D text looks in a wider angle lens, so that's what we're going to use.
I'm also going to create a new null object and here is, like I said, this is going to
be kind of the beginner portion of this tutorial.
If you're more advanced, you probably know this kind of stuff, you might be able to skip
ahead.
We're going to use a null to control the camera.
So what we're going to do is we're going to rename this null, hit enter on the keyboard
and type cam null, or it doesn't really matter, it's just so that you know what it is.
And a very important thing to remember is to hit this 3D switch if you're going to use
it for a camera control.
Because if you don't do that, your camera and null will not move as you'd expect.
So then we're going to parent the camera to the null object by grabbing this guy and dropping
it right here.
So now, if I reveal the position of the camera again, we can move it left and right and we
can see the whole scene is moving.
Well it's not really, the scene isn't moving, the camera is moving and it's positioning
itself directly in line with the camera null.
And as a side note, that is usually the best way to set up a scene with your camera parented
to a null.
It gives you more flexibility in being able to do 3D orbits or other effects easily.
And then also as another side note, we're using it here because instead of trying to
animate these objects to the lens of the camera, in other words bringing this object up to
like your face of the camera and then moving it back out, animating the camera will allow
us to do things more quickly and only have to position them once.
So this is our key frame, this is our main landing position here and that's just an
important concept.
So let's do it.
So we're going to go back in time and we are going to, in conjunction with animating the
position of the camera null, we are also going to animate the Z position of the camera in
order to control its basically its zoom.
So in the animation, my is up close and center.
So let's remember the Z position and I'll tell you why in a second of the camera which
is negative 746.7 and let's go ahead and we'll just move this down, move this over, kind
of get it centered up and zoom it in.
Zooming, to be all technical we are dolling in, let's get a little bit closer, a bit tighter,
there we go.
And so we really don't need to animate up until the point where we move to the next thing
which is where heart comes on.
So I'm going to go to where that is, this layer marker, the beginning of the layer here
and I'm going to go page up two frames and I'm going to insert our key frame by hitting
the stopwatches.
So now we're ready to animate.
So let's page down two frames to where heart pops on and it also appears in the audio as
shown by our layer marker here.
And then we're going to go ahead and use the null to push it up, kind of kinetic typography
like, maybe zoom back just a little bit, it fits in there a little better, I think that's
what I did.
I do have to admit that I created this a few weeks ago now and it may or may not turn out
perfectly as it appears in the video.
So there we got that.
Now we know that the next animation point is where like A comes on and you can see it
just came on right there.
So what we're going to do is we're going to copy and paste these layers or these key
frames so that it doesn't move in between the time of heart and like a.
So I'm going to go to where it comes on just right here and it's time, that marker, I'm
going to page up.
So you'll one frame before that, control C to copy, control V to paste, control C to
copy, control V to paste.
So now in between these two key frames, if we won't move, then we'll go down a frame
and we will actually, we will reset, we'll go back to the, to like that main pose we
had.
So a little trick is we can re, you can use this under transform or hit reset and that
will set us back to where we started and we just created that key frame there.
And you'd think that we'd be able to do the same with camera, but if you do the camera,
I don't really know exactly, I guess it tries to get to the center, but it doesn't remember
what center was, I don't really understand why it doesn't go back to 00 instead goes
back to center of your canvas or stage, but we just need to zero these out.
And nope, that didn't do what we wanted because it changed our point of interest.
So let's just undo all that and say the reset the Z position, which was, we'll see right
here, negative seven, four, six, copy that, undo it, redo it, I'm sorry, I'm bouncing
around and paste that in.
Okay, so now we are, we have pretty much reset the position of the camera back to this key
pose and now our drum will slide in.
And so there, that's the beginning portion, we've got everything laid out for being able
to use 3D extruder and I expressions and that that's kind of like a little bit, I wanted
to do a quick rundown of basic animation and that's, that's where we are with that.
So now we won't need to animate the camera anymore.
So I'm actually going to show you, I really have enjoyed using this other script from
AScripts.com called Zoro the Layer Tagger and what it allows you to do is we can always
shy layers, you know, we can hit the little switch here and hit this shy.
But what Zoro the Layer Tagger does is imagine you have a hundred layer composition, well
you wouldn't want, you may want to shy just a portion of the hundred layers, not all of
them and then you can also select, it adds a selection tag that lets you shy only a portion
and reveal only a portion.
So we're going to grab these two layers and we are going to add a selection tag and we're
going to call it CAM, alright so we got those two layers, now if we use this select, have
CAM, we can timeline shy them, now let's just shy the things we don't need, anyway it's
not really all that useful in this scene because we aren't creating hundreds of layers but
I would definitely suggest you check out Zoro the Layer Tagger, also has a cool name.
So let's jump in, let's create some 3D text with 3D extruder, so all you have to do is
use your horizontal type tool, create some text and it is kick, all caps kick, drum, and
done.
So 3D extruder will work on any object and shape layer text, text is probably the more
popular option, people are going to want to do the most and all you have to do now is
with that selected, oh I want to make changes, it's hard to see here but I want to make drum
line up with kick, so I need to hide that for just a second so I can see, make this a
nice square block, and that's close enough, so we unshire on hide that layer, select kick
drum art or kick drum, come over to 3D extruder and it has presets which this isn't really
going to be a great demo of all the features of 3D extruder because I'm only using tune
bevel, but check out 3D extruder, I highly, highly recommend 3D extruder, Ben Rawlson
did a great job with not only creating a great plugin script but also doing really great
documentation and you can, it comes with a HTML user guide that defines what all this
stuff does, but today we're just going to use tune bevel, I'm going to bump up the iterations
because I know I'm going to extrude this quite a bit and then on the sides I'm just going
to turn the tint down just so it isn't really obnoxious when we apply it right now which
in all of the documentation of 3D extruder you will hear and see Ben say it's a two step
process, so this is step number one, you hit the extrude and it does a little magic and
boom, we've got the text, now we just need to get it and position it to make it look
like it's sitting on the face of the drum, so I'm just going to use this layer, you
can see we've got these little notes right here that tell us what to do, controls shading
and specular, so we really don't need to do anything with that layer, but we just need
to transform, animate, control, look and feel on this layer, so let's get this layer's
position and hold shift R to get orientation and rotation and I'm going to go ahead and
rotate on Y, if I remember correctly 40, not negative 40 degrees and I'm going to push
it back in Z space instead of scaling it, move it around here by the numbers and actually
I'm going to go ahead and turn on edit mode, edit mode 2 and I'm going to change its extrude
depth down to just 10 so that I can see where I'm placing the back side of the extrusion,
so this is a real important feature of 3D extruder is this edit mode boxes, if you turn
off edit mode you can see it renders out what we'd expect, but in edit mode you're allowed
to, you're able to move your object around the scene much more effortlessly, so let's
zoom back here just a little bit and we're going to change the tint amount or tint sides
and the amount and I want to tint it to the color that we already have in the scene which
is this blue color created by the layer style of our illustration, so we're going to map
it, we're just going to use this little eyedropper and grab that color and there we go, that's
pretty much fitting it down into the scene like I would expect and I might, let's see
let's push it back towards the camera, oops wrong way, just to make it feel the head of
that drum a little bit better, I don't want to mess around too much, waste your time,
let me fuss around with this but we'll get it centered up, so that's it for the 3D text
as far as using 3D extruder, so really quickly, hopefully you can see how quickly you could
create some nice 3D text and be able to move, animate, move the camera around it, do all
sorts of really great stuff, so now we have the 3D extruded text, we're going to go ahead
and slide these layers down to where they line up to where the drum illustration comes
in and then I'm going to parent the drum to the illustration so that at the beginning
this illustration kind of slides in, the kick drum kind of follows along, we're also going
to animate the kick drum's transparency or opacity, so let's go back, let's go to the
beginning here, about there, add a key frame, push it down to zero, go up a few, maybe right
there, animate to 100, maybe right there it's 100, just grab that and move it over a frame,
there we go, that looks pretty good, they slide into place together and now we're done
with that, so that's it for 3D extruder, let's use iExpressions and as I said before
iExpressions has a lot of libraries and we won't have time to get into all of them, all
we're going to use today is actually the audio library, so you click library and it loads
up what you can do in the audio library and we need to go ahead and beat detector via
threshold, that's how I chose to do this tutorial but there is, you could go through and set
the beats with a marker and use automatic and again this is another great script that
is well documented, if you forget how something works you can always just read about it right
here but as you can see in this first sentence, it determines audio amplitude based on convert
audio into key frames of the key frame assistant, so we're just going to select it, I'll show
you what that means and click ok, so now it's loaded up and we'll need to get back to that
in a second, so what we need to do is it said, it even told us already, animation key frame
assistant, convert audio to key frames, convert audio to key frames only does, converts audio
to key frames in the work area, so I need to extend that but I'm actually going to trim
it off the front so it doesn't do extra work and with that selected, the audio layer selected
animation key frame assistant, convert audio to key frames, that's done, it's easy, fast
and what it does is it creates these sliders and all these key frames, that if we look
at a graph, you can see that it gives a value, a number, a numeric value to the audio's
volume level and so we need to take a quick peek and we see that the audio's at its highest
point that we need is going to be 48 and then you can see these spikes being our drums,
but at its lowest point, we have 31, so 48 and 31, comparing to see that we get those
numbers in minimum amplitude, so minimum amplitude is 31, maximum amplitude was what, 48, which
it does have to be super precise, just close, fade in and out, I want to fade out duration
to actually be shorter, 5, so it'll be a little bit snappier and the fade type is x potential,
you know, it's the interpolation of key frames and that's it, make sure you have slider,
the slider selected for both channels and you hit apply, you can see that it did it,
there's our expression and now that we have that, basically what it did is it rewrote
this slider to a value of 0 to 100 and we can then use another library or another function
inside the library of iExpressions called change on beat1d and the difference between,
the 1d is, all we need right here is 1d because we're only changing one value and that's
going to be the slider for the extrusion depth.
If you were using it for say, a 2d layer and you were going to scale the x and y separately,
you know, you could, you would need to do that on a 2d or if it was a 3d layer, 3 dimensional,
hopefully it's self-explanatory, so click that okay and we've loaded it up, now this
is going to ask us to link it to the beat and the beat that we determined via threshold
is this, so it's real simple, you just select what you want it, what the beat is and you
click link and it's there, so now we need to get our layer, 3d layer and we want, let's
set this base, the base value of this to around 50, looks pretty good there and then as you
can see right here, it's pretty self-explanatory, value on beat and it's going to add that value
to the original, so I'm going to select this slider and I want it to add 200 to the value,
so it'll go from 50 to 250 on the beats and hit apply and that's it, actually 200 might
be a little too much, it all depends on how far away from the camera it is, so let's make
it back to 150 and that's still selected, hit apply again and there it looks a little
better, it doesn't cover up our text and that's it, I mean that is literally does the animation
for us, now I'm going to make one minor change and I'm just going to drop the tint amount
down, wash it out just a little bit and just so it looks a little bit closer to the original
and you're done, basically, however while watching this animation, let's make a RAM preview here,
I noticed that the animation feels a little bit, a little lifelike and I determined that
was just because a drum should be moving as well, something else in the scene should be
moving, so we're going to take the illustration and we're going to get its, we're just going
to push now S for scale and we're going to scale these values a little bit on the beat
so that it looks like the drum is actually getting kicked, which would make sense, right?
So we need to load up the audio library change on beat 3D because it's a 3D layer, it has
three values, okay, we're going to link it to the beat, so it's this slider here, both
channel slider, there we go, we've got it linked up, now I'm going to add to original
just 1% on the horizontal scale and none to the vertical and none to the 3D or Z axis
and hit apply, oh, I made a mistake of not selecting what I needed to be, so pretty,
what's really great though, I didn't do that on purpose, but I'm glad I did it because
you get, that was a good error message that said, oh idiot, you got the wrong thing selected,
it's the right thing and then it also keeps everything loaded up for you and you can just
hit, try it again, hit apply, that time it actually worked, we can see it, this stuff
turned red and if we were in preview again, we'll see that the drum will scale just 1%
on the beat and add a little bit of life, you can see it there already and this little
bit of life to the drum, so with that in mind, because we've already created this audio amplitude
layer with the expression on it, on this slider, we could do anything with that information,
we could wiggle the camera on the beat, which I don't think would look good in this case,
we can do a lot of things with our audio library out of our expressions and just a little
bit of creativity, so that's it, we created it pretty quickly, created some pretty interesting
effects based on our audio, so that's it, thank you for watching, hopefully you will,
I hope you go ahead and go check out AScripts.com, take a look at these two scripts and see
if they're right for you, at least try the free trials for each of them, I think once
you get started using them, you realize how great the tools they both are, so thanks again
for watching and we'll see you next time.
