Create a 3D Scene from a Photo in After Effects

Joey Korenman : Hello, Joey here at school of motion and welcome today for 30 days of after effects today, what we're going to talk about is taking a photograph and turning it into a 3d scene inside of after effects. I'm sure a lot of you have done this before, but I'm going to show you some tricks. Maybe you haven't seen yet how to really, really sell the illusion that this is a 3d scene and how to make it look great. And fool everybody, don't forget to sign up for a free student account so you can grab the footage and the project files from this lesson, as well as assets from any other lesson on school emotion. Now let's hop into after effects and get started. So one of the things I love about this technique is that it's just kind of instant cool. Um, you know, you take a still image, you turn it into a 3d scene like this, and you know, it's not that hard to do, but it's really impressive.
Joey Korenman : Um, and if, if any of you are familiar with, uh, the concept of matte painting, which is used on, you know, feature films to kind of extend sets and, and add, you know, castles to the background and stuff like that, um, this is pretty much the technique that's used and you can do it in after effects pretty effectively. Now I want you to notice there's a few things that, um, that I do when I do this type of thing that, um, I think makes it feel a little bit more natural, um, than sort of the simplified version of this. And the main thing that helps sell the shot is the ground. If I kind of scrubbed through this, you can see the ground is not, you know, it's not like this hill or these rocks where it's just this flat image, um, that kind of, you know, it looks like it's facing the camera.
Joey Korenman : It actually looks like it's oriented correctly on the ground. Um, and you know, there's a lot of sort of blending going on to make this feel as seamless as possible. And then I also did some compositing tricks and some other things that maybe I'll show you a couple of those, but the main thing is how do you set this scene up? So it really sells the effect. Okay. So you got to start in Photoshop. So let's hop in there. This is the original image I started with, and I won't go through the process of cutting everything out. Cause it takes a long time. If you need help with that, you should definitely check out. Um, there's a tutorial on my site called how to cut out difficult images in Photoshop, and that'll give you some good tips. So I'm going to turn on this layer here, just so I can kind of see these pieces on a background that lets me focus on the edges.
Joey Korenman : So these are the three rocks that I cut out. Um, I want you to notice that I spent some time to kind of fix the edges after I cut them out. Um, a lot of times when you cut things out and Photoshop, no matter how careful you are, you're going to get, you know, edges that have, you know, bright pixels or dark pixels. You know, this, these rocks are up against a sky. So some of the pixels of these clouds would show through and I took the time to paint those out so that, um, you wouldn't notice any of that when you actually composite this thing. I also want you to notice that down at the bottom of each of these rocks, I feathered the edge of my layer mask so that I could sort of blend the bottom of the rock into the grass.
Joey Korenman : All right. So that's the first thing is just cutting out all the foreground elements. So the next thing I need to do is create a clean plate. Uh, and this is the clean plate that I created. All right. And all the clean plate is it's just, you know, it's your shot without your subject in it. Um, and so, you know, you have to use a few Photoshop tricks to get to this. Um, and I'll show you a quick one, really, really fast that I use all the time. And it's amazingly effective. What I'm going to do is, uh, I need to select all three of these rocks. So I'm going to, I'm going to hold command and I'm going to click on the layer mask for this layer and you can see it made a selection there. Then I'm going to hold shift in command and click the other two.