three D. In after effects. That's what we're going to be covering in this lesson. Of course you are awesome. And this is a quick example of what we're going to be showing you how to do creating this animated swinging text that's actually swinging in three D. Space. You can see that the text kind of flies on, It swings forward and backwards and then it rotates around and spins around as if it was rotating in three D. Space. This project file is available for you to download in this section so you can follow along or you can build it from scratch. The other project will be working on The composition is this three d. space composition and this is using cameras, no objects which we'll cover in just one of the future lessons and multiple layers to create this three D. Scene. How does 3D actually work in after effects? Because we're not actually creating three dimensional objects. That's not what after effects is for. But we can place two D objects in three D. Space and do animations and mov...

ements like this to make it look as if we are building a three D. Sort of set or three decomposition. All of these different icons and graphics are also available in the download folder if you want to follow along. So first we're going to look at text to show you how three D. Actually works in after effects. Create a new composition. I'll just call this three d. text 1920x1080 is fine. Five seconds. Perfect. I'm going to take my text tool and I'm going to type and I'll just create some new text. Hello And let's make this a little bit bigger. I don't see my tools so let me click this button so I see the edges and then I'll make this bigger. So see this button right here. This is the toggle mask and shape path visibility. So those are the edges. So to make sure I can see these little points to control it and the anchor point as well. Let me align it to the center just because I like doing that. Alright, so up until now we've been able to do different animations, we've been able to move our position to the left or right up or down. We've been able to rotate around just in this flat, not three D. World, but there's this three D cube icon that enables three D. Layers for your composition. So check that on for this layer and you'll see that a few different options pop up first press P. And you'll notice that a third number pops up. Well the first and the second one, those are for our horizontal and vertical space. So that's our X. And our Y axis. The third number is our Z axis or our Z. Space. So if I click and drag this around you can see that it's actually well it looks like it's just growing and shrinking but it's actually moving forward and backwards. Think of it as you this composition is your camera frame and the Hello text is moving forward or backwards. If I duplicate this you'll understand this a little bit better. So let me just duplicate this text. Press command D. Now let's just change it so it's easier to double click it just right Phil now if I take the position the Z. Position of the fill text and drag it to the right it's actually pushing it back in three D. Space. Let me change the color so you can see it a little bit better. Something like this pink just so you can see so now this fill text is actually sitting behind the hello text and we can actually move the it forward to if we want. So let me set it back to zero. You know let's put it to a negative number and now it goes in front of the hello text. So you can imagine using key frames, you can create some pretty cool animations just with that. Let me turn this off for just a minute and then show you about rotation. Press R. With the Hello text selected and you'll notice that we now have X. And Y rotation. Z. Rotation is just that typical rotation. Of course this is according to our anchor point to and then we have our X rotation. So this flips it around that way around the X. Axis and then why around the Y axis. So if we move our anchor point so take our pan behind tool, move this up, let's center it. So pressing the command key on a Mac. I lock it to the center or it snaps to the center. Now we'll take our X. Rotation and it rotates like so so you can create some pretty cool animations for having text pop on this way as well. And this goes for every layer, not just text but if we put an image here, if we put let's just take this actual Earth graphic that I provide. So if I take this Earth scale it down, press s to bring up scale scale it down to like 24 so it's all in the frame, take our selection tool, put it right here in the middle, Turn on our three d. layer. Press R. To bring up our rotations. And if we rotate you can see that this is just a flat layer, it's nothing more than just a flat layer. And you can kind of see that it's split between our Hello text. Cool. Right okay so I'm gonna do one more thing just to show you to help you visualize what's actually going on. I'm going to add a camera. So go up to your layer new menu. Remember we use this menu to add solids in the past? Well let's add a camera. This pops up with this cameraman menu. This goes a little bit more in depth and it's very advanced. You can basically change your camera lens that you're using, change all kinds of things about your camera, your focal length so that if you want a blurry background, you can do that by enabling depth of field, all kinds of stuff that we can go over in the future. But for now just click OK, Nothing happens. But now because we have this camera layer on our composition, we can use our camera tool up here. We haven't used this before, but now we can actually click in our composition and we could move around. So if I'm clicking and dragging, I'm just clicking and dragging you can see that I'm moving around with a camera around our text. So this is again you can see how this 3D text kind of works. Let me undo that our camera tool has different properties. So if I click and drag you can see that our position is changing and we can animate these things, but there's actually a better way to animate your camera using a null object which will go over in a future lesson. Another thing you can see once you have, you know, three D. Enabled is a different view. So right now we have the main view of our composition. So this is how it actually will look for the video but just for setting up your composition, you can change your view so we can go on this menu where it says active camera to the top view. So now we see what's basically from up above and you also see this red line up here, Let me zoom out to like 25% or even further 6.25%. So you can't really see it's kind of hard but you see there's this triangle right here. This is basically the view of your camera. Imagine this at this point down here, this is your camera set up over here and it's looking this way and this line right here, this is what's in view of your camera. We can also add two views. So right now we're just seeing the one where we set right here. But if we choose to views for example we can see our main composition, the active camera plus the top view. And this view is helpful just in case we want to move our Earth And be able to do it a little bit easier. So let me actually zoom in it up to 100%. Now using these arrows that were coming out of the anchor point. So you can, it's kind of hard for you to see. But there's a little Y. And then there's an X. That pops up and there's even a Z. Two. So if I take the Y. I can move it back like so so now it's behind the Hello text. Now if I take my camera tool and I rotate around our composition. You can see that the Earth is now behind our Hello text. I know this is kind of confusing because you might be thinking, well what is this view over here? Is this what it's going to look like when I export? No, that's not what it's going to look like when you export what it is actually looking like is the active camera. So make sure that if you don't have the active camera up, if say you have the back camera or something like this, which shows from behind, make sure your understanding that this isn't what it's going to actually look like. You can even have four views if you want. So if we do four views, let's do that. So now we see the vertical, we have the right we have the front the active camera, we can change these if we want just click on each box and then on this drop down you can change it. So maybe we want the bottom view or maybe you want some sort of custom view. So I take my custom view and then I take my camera tool, I can rotate around and now this is my custom view at this point, you're probably really confused and we're going to take a step back, we're going to animate our swinging text and then we're going to move forward with our three D. Space animation. So let's back up just a little bit and in the next lesson you're going to be following along with this project right here, which is a really cool effect for introducing and exiting text.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Practice Files

buy this class

$00

Buy Class

Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2000+ more >

79.7K Students

99% Recommend this Class

00 Student Work

0 Video lessons in HD
00h 00m of class content
Exclusive bonus content
Lifetime access, anywhere, anytime
Streaming access on desktop and mobile browsers
Download and offline access with class purchase
Offline sync with our iPhone & iPad apps
100% satisfaction guarantee

Philip Ebiner

Professional video & course creator, photographer & teacher to 1mil+ students; 10+ years experience with 1000+ videos.

2,000+ classes ranging from fundamentals to advanced techniques.

Intro to 3D

Intro to 3D

Lesson Info

52. Intro to 3D

Lessons

Class Updates & My Favorite CC 2020 Updates

Understand the After Effects Workspace

Starting a New Composition

CC 2018 Update - Starting a New Composition from Footage

Adding Media to Your Project and the Timeline

Using the Basic After Effects Tools

Create a Perfect Circle, Alignment, and Shape Colors

Working in the Timeline

Layer Properties

Quiz: After Effects Basics

Animating in After Effects

Position, Scale, and Rotation Animations

Tips to Make Your Animations Look More Nautral

Using the Graph Editor

Challenge - Bouncing Ball

Solution - Bouncing Ball

Quiz: Animating with Keyframes

Working with Solid Layers and the Ken Burns Effects

Working with Shape Layers, Strokes, and Paths

Adding Layer Styles like Drop Shadow, Bevel, and Gradients

Shape Effects - Trim Path Animations, Wiggle, and Zig Zag

Quiz: Shapes and Solid Layers

Track Matte Animations - Make Layers Appear and Disappear

Using Pre-Compositions to Group Layers

Easily Reverse Complicated Animations

Playing with Time

Blend Modes

Stabilize Shaky Footage

CC 2018 Update - Previewing and Favoriting Fonts

CC 2019 Update - Responsive Design Time

CC 2019 Content Aware Fill

CC 2019 Create Motion Graphic Templates

Quiz: Important After Effects Skills

Intro to Motion Graphics Projects

Clean Lower Third

Logo Reveal Animation Bumper

Colorful Transition

Text with Mask Path Animation

Text Bubble Animation

Weather App 1

Weather App 2

Weather App 3

Quiz: Motion Graphics Projects

Flat Animation Challenge

Phil Designs his Flat Animation Scene

Animating Fireworks with the Repeater Effect

Removing Green Screen Background

Adding a Background that Matches the Foreground

Adding Motion to a Still Image with the Puppet Tool

Adding Movement with the Ripple Effect

Quiz: Flat Animation Challenge

Intro to 3D

Swinging 3D Text Animation

Build Out Your 3D Composition

Animating Our 3D Scene

Create Stars in After Effects

Quiz: Green Screen (Chromakeying)

Using the Rotoscope Tool

Cleaning Up Your Edges

Finishing Our Rotobrush Animation

Quiz: 3D Animations and the Camera Tool

Easy Screen Replacement with Masks

Replacing a Screen Version 2

Screen Replacement with Mocha

CC 2019 Update - Native Mocha AE Plugin

Quiz: Rotoscoping

Using the Puppet Pin Tool

Animating Your Puppet Pins

Animated Blinking Eyes

Adding Perspective with Animated Clouds

CC 2018 Update - Advanced Puppet Pin Tool

Quiz: Screen Replacements

Applying Text Animation Presets

Create a Page Turn Effect with CC Page Turn