Hey, what’s up? Andrew Kramer here and I got a tutorial that is going to knock you socks off, literally, knock them off even if you got sandals on, you just knock them right off.
What we have here is just a 3D room, kind of dark 3D room. I like to call it ‘the room of darkness’ and this is actually the room police put you in when you get caught stealing printers from best buy. Well actually, we probably would got away with it except that we have to go back there they get the USB cables, so that kind of jammed us up there.
Okay, let us go ahead and get started. What were going to be using is a textures from the right gear DVD collection. So, if you are not familiar with that, check out videocopilot.net right gear, awesome collection if you do not know. But what we are going to do is going to be crunchy textures collection and I will go down to the low resolution, gray scale ones, and what we have is this is grunch gray number 11, just kind of cool looking texture and what we are going to do is take this and drag it into a new composition.
Now the next step is the turn this layer into a 3D layer by clicking on the 3D layer switch, hitting W for the rotate tool. You know I heard that the first time, instead R, because R brings up the rotation but the tool is actually W and actually write it in there somewhere as the “wotate” so I thought that is got to be the stupidest this thing I ever heard and I cannot say that and yet here we are.
Anyway W, we are going to rotate it, hold down SHIFT, if we go back to the selection tool, we just kind of move this over, kind of creating a wall, duplicate the layer, edit duplicate, move this over to the other side, check it out, duplicate it again, hit the ‘wotate’ tool again, rotate on the X axis—the red axis till if is flat, bring it down to the floor and basically we want to position this into a room.
And we want to bring this over so intersects and then up so that the black is kind of work intersects, so go ahead ands do that for both of these layers, right there. So it is okay if overlaps a little bit, so that is good. Now, we will take the floor, duplicate it, move it to the top and you might need to create a camera at this point, just go ahead and use the 35 millimeter preset, choose okay and then I am going to take the track Z camera tool, I’m just kind off pull out of this room here, and kind of bring it back into view.
Okay so, let us go and create the back wall, so I am going to duplicate the layer again. Bring it down and we just rotate it like so, and will just push it and Z space to the back. Does not have to be perfect, we go to the top view make sure that we lined it up and also if you want, you can select all the layers and take a different color so it is easier to see, go back to the active camera, scale this up just a little bit. Okay, looking good. Now, we want to create a new light, we will go ahead and make the intensity 150 and we will make the color like a blue color.
Okay so that looks pretty good, let us take the camera and position it inside of this room so it kind of move forward and we can even zoom out as we move the camera and just to create the illusion of a little bit of a larger room and the rooms are little dark so let us go into the light properties and bring the intensity up. So, when you use a color the intensity is changes based on the intensity of the color.
Okay now, this room is a little small and what we will need to do is make this room a little bit bigger. Now you can duplicate these walls, you know forever, or there is another way we can do that. So, let us take this back wall, we will call it the back wall otherwise you can hit return on a keyboard. Oh! One other thing, I got an email about how do I show my frames instead of time just, CTRL click, instead the time, just CTRL click until you get frames. Nice tip there that one is free.
Okay so, were going to take our back wall, shut it off for a second. Then we go the effects and presets, type in ‘motion’ and you going to see the motion tile and drag that down to all four wall layers. Now what we going to do is change the output with to 500. Will copy this, select the other three layers, paste it, CTRL C, CTRL V. Then, we take our back wall and go to the Z axis and you can hold down SHIFT and basically just push that back there till we close it off.
Okay so, it is a little dark in here but let us go ahead take the track tool let us back up some. See that? By duplicating the room, we also created a longer hallway, is that cool? I do not know if you have just seen just before possibly in a promo for a product. I can not remember. Anyway, we can do an animation where we kind of fly down this hallway and that is pretty cool.
Now there is one thing that we have to compensate for and that is the back wall is just way to bright, it is almost like a myrrh. And so what we need to do is take the back wall, choose effect color correction, exposure, and just bring that down—that looks pretty good. Quick interruption, I just want to show you one tip, I forgot to go over that, is if you go down to the light intensity, ALT click, add that wiggle expression, wiggle, three commas 40. And that will just kind of give the room in a little dreariness, the light will kind of a flicker a little bit, those dark incandescent bulbs.
Okay so, were back in the room and what I want to do is add some text, so I will take the text tool, click on here, alright, final image. By the way that is my company, we do visual effects—we do visual effects and motion graphics punch font stuff and right presents looking good, by the way this font is Arial Black, Italicize I think. Turn on the 3D layer switch for both of these and they go back to the zero-zero position of our camera originally.
If we see our layers were actually still up there, were actually just looking at the motion tiled addition we have added to our nice that room. So if move in here, and get to our finals image text and we can reposition it at eye level, it is important to put things at eye level, like picture frames and stuff in your house, you want to make sure they are kind of eye level, otherwise it look awkward, it is what my wife told me and she is right, she got to be.
And now we can go ahead set up a nice little camera move, we take the orbit camera tool and kind of come over to one side. I mean, this like a 3D room, you know a lot of possibilities. But let us go ahead and animate the position in the anchor point or the point of interest, move forward and we will kind of track in, nice and close here, nice, we got to offset here over to the side and play around with the light too, make sure we have good lighting, good lighting—it is important. I believe it zoom-out further to be like this huge zoom in and we can start out here, lower at the ground, coming from the darkness or whatever, looks pretty good, can we call it crossover?
Okay so, that it is look pretty good. Let us go ahead and select the key frame, set F9 for nice curve, easy curve on the key frames there. Okay, let us go and play that back.
Now, the other thing I did in the original animation was add a little bit of a position wiggle and to do that I ALT click on the position, choose wiggle, parenthesis, 1 comma 35. Actually we will go .5 comma 35, and then I will just add a little bit of light at the end and even turn that down just a little bit and we can also add motion blur to these layers. Turn on the motion blurs switch, turn on motion blur, we may want to speed the animation up a little bit, just move the key frames closer together and they create this crazy, going down a whole room kind of effect.
Now, how also can we enhance this? Well, let us go and pull down the camera options and we have the depth of field, turn that on. And nothing really happens, let us increase the aperture, see that? See the walls blur out here, increase the blur level. Alright now, one little problem—our focus point is not our text. How can we fix that?
Well, there is a nice little expression we can do, we could animate the focus distance and try to figure out where that is, but that could take seconds, even minutes, you know, if we really trying to be perfect. So, we are going to actually use an expression. So, final image, I will hit P to bring up the position. Then for the focus distance, I am going to ALT click, adding an expression, I am going to delete what is there, I am going to type length, nice, parenthesis, then I am going to take the pick with and I am going to drag it to the position of final image.
So what is the thing is the length from the final image text comma to, where would I go to the camera’s position in parenthesis. So, the value were going to be creating here is what is the length from final image to the camera. Well it is 573 at this point, well what about right here? Well, it is 1230.8 sir. I like the sir part, that was really nice.
So, what we have created is an expression that will dynamically calculate what the distance is, no matter what, pretty sweet. Now let us play it back. Okay, do not be a fool—that will take a long time to render, that motion blur with the depth to field, it is a killer but it is worth it. See that? Pretty nice huh! Now you are going to add a little more wiggle, give that a little more life 35.75 so, wiggle it once every three quarters of a second, 35 pixels or units.
Okay so that is the end of the tutorial. Sorry, if I was a little excited today. I found an extra box of peeps and just really boosted my spirit. And if you do not know what peeps are, they are basically these sugar colored marshmallows, they look like rabbits. If you know what they were, you would understand. Anyways, my name is Andrew Kramer you can check me out at creative.net or visit my website videocopilot.net, we got some great other tutorials and of course you can purchase right here, pre-made organic stock footage. Anyways, I will see you guys next time. For now I want to go see what is at the end of this room—that is kind of dark back there.
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