More Motion, Less Control

Most of you are probably familiar with the concept of using a camera to pan and zoom around still images. Popularized by Ken Burns in his documentary on the Civil War, it is a great trick for any occasion when you don’t have moving video for a scene. You can simulate this by simply animating the position of a still image in virtually any compositing or video editing program. However, there are a number of refinements that can make your life easier, and the end result more realistic.

Pulse Rays

Ordinary light ray effects can often look too solid or static (upper left). To add more life to them, matte them with an animated noise texture (above). This looks particularly nice when composited back on top of the original effect (left). You can click on any of these to see them full size. Light rays created with Trapcode’s Shine plug-in; radiation symbol from P22’s Atomica font. Click here to download a project file for this technique.

Light ray treatments, where streaks of color extend from type, a logo, or image, are popping up everywhere these days. But you’ve no doubt heard the saying “familiarity breeds contempt” - and we have to admit, many of those treatments are starting to look a bit…familiar.

At their stock settings, most light ray effects look too solid or static to our eyes. The excellent Shine light ray plug-in from Trapcode has an animateable Shimmer parameter that adds some animation to its rays, but it seems few are taking advantage of this feature. Even with Shimmer, we’ve been interested in finding ways to make rays seem more ghostly and animated.

As it so happens, we recently had a client approach us asking if we could make light rays look as if an energy pulse was flowing out from the center. After some experimenting, we hit upon a formula using stock After Effects Professional plug-ins in conjunction with Shine which we think did the trick - see the figures at the top of this page.

Gobos and Gels

Finishing our tour of 3D lighting in After Effects, we’ll discuss gobos and gels. For those new to lighting, a gobo is an opaque object that blocks off some of the rays cast by a light, either to more carefully control where they fall, or to give the impression of light streaming through an object such as a window blind or the leaves of a tree. A gel is a translucent object placed in front of a light, which colorizes the rays cast by it. It is generally a solid color, but can be a graphic. Here are a few different approaches to replicating these inside After Effects.

Lurking in the Shadows

The second stop in our overview of 3D lighting in After Effects is the subject of shadows. In the Dark Ages (before version 5, when After Effects got 3D), in order to fake the all-important perspective clue of one layer darkening another layer behind it, we needed to use plug-ins such as the stock Drop Shadow effect, Real Shadows from Red Giant Software’s Image Lounge, and CC Radial Shadow (formerly part of Cycore Cult FX; now included with After Effects). With the introduction of 3D space in After Effects back in version 5, the correct casting of shadows between layers became somewhat “automatic” – as long as you know how to set it up.

Blinded by the Light

The 3D implementation in After Effects is very flexible. You can selectively place some layers in 3D space, and leave others in normal 2D. If you don’t create a camera, the composition reverts to a default camera. If you do create a camera to fly around your 3D layers, you don’t need to create lights – by default, the layers keep their original colors, as if perfectly illuminated. Or, you can add 3D lights to your composition.

Lighting is probably the most subtle and powerful aspect of 3D in After Effects, as it can create wonderfully moody shifts in brightness and color, as well as “automatic” shadows without needing to tweak Drop Shadow effects for each layer. Lighting is also probably the least understood aspect of 3D in After Effects. Therefore, we’re going to spend the next few columns discussing lighting tips and tricks, starting this column with the basics: the differences between – and uses of – diffuse, specular, and ambient lighting effects.

Making 3D Effects Behave Like 3D

Expressions can make “fake” 3D plug-ins such as CC Sphere track After Effects’ 3D cameras.

After Effects is, at heart, a 2D program: All layers have no thickness. You can arrange them in 3D space, illuminate them with 3D lights, and fly around them with 3D cameras, but if you view the layers on-edge, you will still see that they have no thickness.

A number of clever plug-in effects work around this by taking an image and the camera, rendering what it would look like if it actually had depth (such as extruded text, or an image wrapped around a sphere), and then render the result back to a flat 2D layer. Although a great stride trick, there are some limitations.

Urban Legends of Video

Like urban legends, there are a few pieces of “conventional wisdom” that float around the motion graphics and 3D communities about how to handle video. They are oft-repeated, but several are simply not true. Some are based on wishful thinking; some on a germ of truth; some from articles or manuals which are incorrect. Yes, you probably already know all of these – but they certainly have caught out colleagues of ours.

Not surprisingly, many of these legends are based around the subject of frame rates and interlaced fields. Fields in particular are an area where traditional video diverges perhaps the most from the computers we’re creating our video on, and for that reason are easiest to misunderstand.

Expressive Animation

One common use of expressions is to set up automatic relationships between layers, such as having a minute hand rotate 60 times a fast as the hour hand, and the second hand rotate 60 times as fast as the minute hand. Rather than have to keyframe - and edit - three layers, you can keyframe just one layer and have the others follow automatically.

In a recent column we discussed the Parenting feature that was originally introduced in After Effects version 5. Parenting is an excellent way to group objects together, or to have one already-animating object also follow another.

Expressions offer a different approach to making one object do what another does, yielding even more control. Many right-brain artists are scared off by expressions, as they do involve math and programming (very left-brain activities), but learning just the most basic form of expressions will help alleviate a lot of tedium while working on a project - they’re like having a sharp, unpaid intern!

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