Compositing 3D Assets in After Effects

Music :[intro music]
Joey Korenman : Joey here at School of Motion and welcome to day 29 of 30 Days of After Effects. Today's video is going to be about compositing animation from after effects with 3d animation, from cinema 40. This is a very common thing you have to do as a motion graphics artists. And we're going to talk about how to really lock those two programs together and get your 2d animation from after effects to sync up 3d animation from cinema 4d, we're going to use pre-rendered elements, but we're also going to use CINAware to pull in information. I'm going to show you a lot of compositing tricks. It's going to be awesome. Don't forget to sign up for a free student account so you can grab the project files from this lesson, as well as from any other lesson on school emotion. Now let's hop into after effects and get started.
Joey Korenman : So in this video, we are going to cover how to sync up your after effects animation with 3d renders using cinema 4d. And we're going to sort of go over a lot of other compositing things, including using multi-layered EXR files and a lot of really geeky cool stuff. So let's talk about, first of all, what are, what are starting elements are here? So I'm gonna hop into cinema 4d and show you my project. Now I'm not going to get too deep into this, cause this is not a cinema 4d tutorial. I'm using cinema 4d, AR 15. And if you have cinema 4d light, and that's the only version that you have, the free one that comes with after effects, that's okay. You can do this entire tutorial, the exact same way. I'm not using any special features. Really all that's going on is you've got an iPhone model and it spins around and kind of lands in that's it all right.
Joey Korenman : And, um, what I want to be able to do is composite, whatever I want onto that screen in after effects. And so let me, let me just do a quick render here and show you what this looks like. Um, you know, I've lit this in a specific way, uh, actually just using, um, one of the presets that comes with cinema 4d called the array light. And then I used a couple of, um, of just planes with a white texture on it. And I used that, so that it actually gives me a nice reflection on the phone. And I also rendered with global illumination, which is why it's taking forever to render for you guys. Uh, but here it goes. So this nice diagonal highlight that's going across the phone that you sort of see on a lot of cell phone commercials, that is actually just a reflection.
Joey Korenman : Um, and I want to make sure that I'm able to keep that when I, um, you know, when I composite something in the screen, so I'm gonna show you how to do that. So the first thing you need to do is you need to make sure that you prepare this cinema four D file a certain way. Okay. And what I mean is, um, you need to make sure that if you want to stick something on this screen, you need to have a reference object in the scene that you can then import into after effects. So if I open up this phone, now this is the Knoll. That's holding all the pieces of the phone and here's the front of the phone. And here's the screen of the phone. And even the screen has multiple pieces is a pretty detailed model. Um, and this cap one object here.
Joey Korenman : If I, uh, here, let me, let me go forward here and jump into my isometric views here. You can see that that object has its anchor point, right in right smack dab in the center of the phone and right on the surface of the phone. So if I was somehow able to get a Knoll that mimicked exactly what that screen is doing and get that into after effects, then all I'd have to do is parent my animation to that novel. And so that's exactly how you can composite stuff in after effects in cinema 40. The only thing you need to make sure is that on your object that you want to bring into cinema 4d, you need to have this tag, okay. Now I'm not going to go too deep into tags, but you basically right. Click your object or control click. You go to cinema 4d tags, and you put an external compositing tag on it.