Create a 3D Room Using Cineware in After Effects

Joey Korenman : Well, hi Joey here at school of motion and welcome to day 10 of 30 days of after effects. In a previous tutorial, we talked about how to make a 3d environment from a photo. What we're going to talk about in this first part of a two-part tutorial is how to set up a scene. So it feels like a 3d environment. When you're basing the scene on an illustration, we're going to do kind of the same thing we did when we made that 3d environment from a photo, but we're going to do it in a very different way. We're going to go into cinema 48 just for a little bit, and we're going to use CINAware the link between cinema 4d and after effects to create the environment. I want to give a big thank you to my buddy, Matt Navis shack for letting me use the illustration of the Boston terrier in this lesson.
Joey Korenman : And don't forget to sign up for a free student account. So you can grab the project files from this lesson, as well as assets from any other lesson on this site. Now let's go do the thing. So first I want you guys to just, uh, notice a couple of things here. Um, cause again, this is a two-part tutorial and in this first part, we're going to talk about the environment and the second part, we'll talk about the dog, but, um, as far as the environment goes, I want you to look at the floor specifically, all right, this, uh, this environment, it feels like a 3d environment. The floor is kind of lying flat, um, and the camera's not moving too extreme, but, um, you, you know, if you look closer, you can see that the walls have perspective on them. And this feels like a 3d room.
Joey Korenman : Um, and you know, in another tutorial in this 30 days of after effects series, uh, I showed you guys how to take an existing image and sort of warp it and after effects to make a 3d scene. Well, today I'm going to show you a different way. Um, and this is a way this is actually the first time I've tried it and it worked out pretty great. And I figured it would be a neat thing to show you guys. And it uses a, one of the newest features of after effects, which is called CINAware. All right. So ignore the dog and what he's doing, we will talk about him in the next tutorial, but for this tutorial, um, I want to talk about the room. Let's hop into Photoshop for a minute and let's look at the Photoshop file. First of all, again, I want to give a shout out to Matt Navis, Shaq, who is an incredible illustrator and a dear dear, if not kind of warped friend of mine.
Joey Korenman : Um, and he's an illustrator in this dog. Uh, he's probably been drawing this dog since he was five. Um, and I love the way it looked and I thought it would be great. So I asked him to borrow it and he let me do it, but the room and everything else in, in this scene, um, I just created in Photoshop. Okay. And it's really simple shapes. There's some textures on it. And all I tried to do was create this kind of warped looking room, right? And I used a few composition tricks. If you notice the lines, all kinds of point to the dog, and then I'm kind of focusing on the dog, right. But ignoring all that this room is very simple, right? And if you know, some basic Photoshop, you can make something like this. And I knew this would be a great environment for the dog, but I wanted to be able to make this room feel three dimensional.
Joey Korenman : And you know, I kind of intentionally made the lines a little askew and you know, there's these there's no right angles and PR perspective wise. This really makes no sense. It's just a stylized illustration. So if you want to turn something like this into a 3d layer or sorry, a 3d scene, it's tricky because after effects works really well, when you have 3d layers that can kind of be aligned in a certain way in, and sort of make a room. But when things are all over the place, it's kind of tricky. And so there's a really sweet trick. I'm going to show you guys. Okay. And all it requires is that, you know, a little bit of cinema 4d and then I'll show you how to make this work in after effects. So again, I know this is 30 days of after effects, but we're going to go to cinema 40 just for a minute.