Olympic Success to 3D artwork

Posted by on Aug 8, 2012 in After Effects, Blog

Olympic Success to 3D artwork

Now I’ve probably broken all manner of copyright and Olympic committee infringements here but I loved seeing the 3D Olympic rings flying over the screen so wanted to have a play with After Effects within the new CS6 suite to see what could be done. I also wanted to practice using Adobe Illustrator to create the rings in vector form.

I’m pleased with the result, though can see lots of ways I would do it differently next time. The first draft took about 90 minutes of playing, creating the rings and animating into 3D, then another 30 minutes playing with colours and putting together.

After making the video, I wanted to leave myself a reminder of how I did it and what I would do differently. It’s a bit wordy but is meant mostly for me. This may help others, but at the bottom I’ll note the two places I sought my inspiration and knowledge from.

The result:

Ingredients:

CS6: Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere Pro

Method:

1. Make the object in vector form using Illustrator. For the rings I simply drew circles, then used the ‘shape builder’ tool to make each ring into it’s necessary parts. Each colour ring needed to then be placed on a separate layer if it is intended to have them coloured independently. This is one area I rushed so on close inspection you can see the rings overlap too closely in places, particularly the yellow and black.

2. Import the Illustrator file to After Effects. Drag each of the layers to your composition panel. The following works for anything else you want to turn into 3D, such as text. I don’t have a supported GPU so set the lightning symbol under the preview to ‘fast draft’ which does what it says. Also need to check you have the CS6 ‘Ray-Traced 3D’ set which should be displayed above right of the preview. (To change, go into composition settings, advanced)

3. Highlight all the layers, right click and select ‘Create shapes from vector layers’. For each one you want to turn 3D, click the tick box of the column with the 3D cube symbol. This will then give you a new ‘geometry’ menu under ‘transform’ menu that allows you to extrude to the depth you want, bevel edges etc.

4. Very little can be seen at this stage, but now is a good time to consider whether the items need linking (click on the little whirl symbol on the child and drag it to it’s parent – I dragged the other rings to the blue one so I only had to control movement from the blue ring) and anchor points (I moved the anchor of the blue ring, which started at its centre, and dragged it to the centre of all the rings – therefore if I rotate the blue ring, all the rings rotate about their centre).

5. To see the 3D clearly, you need to add a light source. Quite simple though has taken me a while to understand the principle. I normally end up with too much, too little, or misplaced lighting. Simply right click in the composition, select New and Light. Simply adding an ambient light will give some effect and is a great place to start. I actually start with a spot and by using key frames, changing the intensity and moving it, I created the initial show of colour in the film. That’s why even though the rings are colour, they appear black until the spotlight pans across them. Changing the camera view in the preview panel above to ‘top’ can help with understanding where the lights are in relation to your object. When the rings can be seen more clearly later, it is as I have effectively turned on two spotlights, from a slight distance either side. The only other light I added was an ambient light coming on as the gold rings went off, as they were going off into darkness, past my virtual spotlights.

6. The next thing to play with is the material of the rings. I start with the default, then turn them to yellow gold (in a separate composition), then coloured steel. Under the ‘geometry’ menu is a ‘material’ menu with options to play with such as reflection and transparency. Using the template from Motionworks below is a great guide to what settings are best for glass, plastic etc. It is possible to use keyframes to change the material during the composition.

7. That can work as it is, but if using a reflective material, at the moment all it can reflect is itself. Therefore an ‘environment’ can be added for the object to reflect. I simply created a new ‘solid’ in the same way as creating a light. I then right clicked on it and clicked on ‘Environment Layer’. You can then add an effect such as noise, and play around with the intensity and contrast. You must click on the ‘options’ of the environment layer and select appears in reflections ‘ONLY’, otherwise it wil be your background as well. With the gold on my film, I had the environment far too busy and intense so the rings have too much to reflect. I reduced both the contrast and intensity for the coloured steel rings to make it gentler for reflection.

8. Then it’s just a case of playing with key-frames to move the object around in X, Y & Z and playing with scale. Adjusting the lights may be necessary and checking a few final frames by changing back from ‘Fast Draft’ may be useful.

 

I learnt a lot from the templates provided by Motionworks:

http://www.motionworks.com.au/after-effects-cs6-3d-material-template/

and template here:

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=extensionDetail&loc=en_us&extid=3081023

They were great for playing, changing the text and getting it to work for yourself.

My inspiration to really do it for myself came during Adobe’s creative week, which should still be available here:

http://www.adobe.com/uk/special/ccevent/index.html

On the Wednesday How To Session 2, Birgitta Hosea does a whirlwind tour of how to do all this from scratch, and how it links so well with Illustrator.