Master 3D with After Effects and Substance 3D

[music] [Wes McDermott] All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome to our session. Thanks a lot for being here. We're super excited. And so, yeah, we're gonna be talking about Master 3D or mastering 3D with After Effects and Substance 3D. So just a little quick about us. So I'm Wes and this is Robert. [Robert Hranitzky] Yeah, hi.

Okay.

All right. All right. I flew all the way from Munich, Germany, so I'm expecting a little bit more energy here. So let's try that again. - Hello, everyone. - Come on. - Yeah. There you go. Yes. - See? -Okay. -Thank you. So we're going to do a quick selfie, okay, with you cheering. Just imagine your favorite team, football, basketball, whatever just scored and you just go crazy. And we're going to do a team selfie with all of us, because we want one team. And then when we're finished, you can just be back into your normal no clap mode. But feel free to clap anytime you want. Okay? So here we go, Wes. Let's go. All right, let's do it.

All right, you ready? All right, here we go. One, two, three.

- All right. Okay. - Okay. Okay. - Thank you. - Best presentation ever.

All right, so Robert and I, this is, you know, this is who we are, this is what we do. This is like our corporate version, but, you know, we also have kind of a funny clown version of ourselves. And, you know, that just helps keeps us creative, right? Yes. That's what it's all about, you know, and you never, as a creative, want to lose that wonderment, right? The wonderment to create, the wonderment to learn more and stuff. So that's what we're really excited to share with you guys in this session today.

So a little bit about myself. I joined Adobe, like, last year in November. Before that, I was a filmmaker and motion graphics designer for almost 25 years. So I have a long history of working in the industry doing 3D animation and basically a lot of spaceship stuff. I like spaceships. Seems to be, like a common theme. And also in the keynote. - Who doesn't like spaceships? - Well, exactly. Yeah. I also like basketball and also like mixing all of my passions, you know, like either spaceships, film, movies, basketball, sports, and basically be able to inspire you. In my role as an evangelist, my role is to create cool stuff to inspire you, to show you the tools that I enjoy day in and day out. So I really appreciate that. And again, thanks for coming out. So we can't wait to get started. So what are you doing, Wes? Well, you know what? I'm doing a session here with you, Robert, which is quite awesome. Because seriously, Robert, he's one of my heroes, man. This guy is legendary, and it's really cool to be on the stage with him. So, yeah, just for me, I'm Wes and I work with the Substance 3D team, and I've been with them for, it's been over a decade, and I've been a 3D artist for over 20 years, and now I'm at Adobe and it's pretty awesome to be here.

So today we are going to talk about a fantasy product. It's a case company. It's called Dubber or WR, like Wes and Robert. So we developed a new case to protect your phone. So we've got you covered. And we're going to do all of this in the tools, like Substance 3D, a little bit of Cinema 4D. But all of this that you see here is coming out of After Effects. So we're going to do all that you can see here. So it's pretty packed. Yeah, that's precisely it. And so just real quick, if you take a look at this kind of pipeline, this gives you a quick idea of the pipeline. And as Robert said, this is a pretty packed session. We're going to be whizzing through some things, but really, I want to stress is the idea is that we just want to show you what's possible with the tool set. Right. So don't worry about. I didn't know what he said here or that because we're going to be here the rest of MAX, come down to our booth. Come down to the Substance booth, the Adobe After Effects booth, and we can talk one on one and showcase everything. We have printout cards like this that show different workflows and everything like that. So have fun, buckle up and let's jump into this. So starting off, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to jump right into the software and you can see I'm going to be talking about model prep, animation and texturing. I'm going to be looking at Cinema 4D from MAX on and Substance Painter, Sampler, and just a little bit of 3D Assets. All right, Robert, let's take a look at what you're going to be doing. So I'm going to take then the fantastic assets that Wes will give me, and I will put them into After Effects and put them to life, adding lights, adding animation, adding footage, graphics and all that to create the actual stuff that you just saw, like two slides before. So it's going to be, again, a whirlwind of things. So buckle up. Yeah. All right, sounds great. All right, let's get into it. All right, so I'm going to jump over here to the demos here.

So, like I said, I'm going to start off with Cinema 4D, and the thing I want to talk about here is just model prep. So I have this 3D model case, and you saw that we were working with a phone. So first off, where do I get the phone? Well, for that, I jumped over to Substance 3D Assets. And Substance 3D Assets is an online library, has tens of thousands of models and materials. So if I do a quick search here for, like, say, smartphone, you'll see that, well, we have some 3D models here. So this is the model that I started with, downloaded this, textured that inside of Substance Painter. But what we're going to look at today is how the case was actually animated and textured inside of the applications we're going to be working with. So, for example, you're now seeing the 3D case. Now, this is a cool story. So one of the guys that I get to work with on the Substance Evangelist team, his name is Giovanni Nakpil, he worked at ILM for forever, and he actually sculpted and modeled the first Hulk from The Avengers movie, The Avengers. So I like to look at this as-- Yes, I did get an Avenger to help me with this project. So with that said, let's take a look at the model itself. So you can see we have the model. Now, the thing that you really want to bring, that I really want to bring to your attention, is these two materials here. Now, we'll get more into how they're made in just a bit. But for this particular model, which you can see is just made up of a bunch of these different mesh parts. And, you know, here's what they look like. There's a back piece here, there is the side frame, a couple different parts. And so these are all going to have two materials associated with them. And when you have these materials for texturing, you need to talk about UVs. So let's take a look at these UVs. If we look at the cover here, and if I just solo this, this is what I'm talking about here. Just the cover for the smartphone case. And you can see this is what the UVs look like. So the UVs, in case you don't know, think of it like, you know, you have a box and you need to wrap it for, like, a Christmas or birthday present. That's kind of what they're doing there, right? And so what you want to do is just really fit these 2D coordinates to this grid so that they really maximize. The idea is that you're just getting the most out of the pixels from the texture that you're going to be working with. So this is always something I like to kind of showcase. Now, the next thing we'll look at is the rest of the phone. So again, here, if I select the right side, the left side and the back frame, again, you can see I've got these little UVs here. And again, they're filling the entire 2D space. Okay, so UVs, materials. Let's talk about the animation itself. So one of the things that I want to showcase here, and if I expand this up and what I'm going to do is just kind of play this little or scrub my timeline and you can see that we have this case. And the case is actually folding, you know, from open, it'll fold and cover the top of the phone. And then I even have a reverse of that where it'll back out and fold around on top of itself. And so this animation is using a joint skin deformation. And so you can see that here. So what I'll do is let's just select the cover here. Well, actually, what I'll do is go into the joints themselves so you can see it. All right, so you have these little joints, and I actually have a root joint which is here at the metal case connector. And you can see this color value indicates where that joint's influence is going to be on the case. And then we'll take a look at the second joint. And again the colors indicating where the influence is going to be when that phone bends. And then we get to the third joint again, color indicating where the case is going to bend. So once we have all that in place, what I did was I created a little system here that I want to show you. So I've got this little animation controller. And to do that, what you can do is you can create a null. So I have this little null that's in the scene and inside Cinema, you can jump over to what they call user data. And so I have a couple of these little, like, variables, we'll call them. And so, for example, if I want the connector rotate, you can see it's using a float a degree slider from negative 90 is the minimum. And then I have the cover flip base which is going to rotate from 0 to negative 180. And then the cover flip end is going to rotate from negative 180, all the way to 180. So what does all that mean? Well, I can come over here to this little animation controller and just play around with these little values to get a little rigged animation that you can see here. So it just gives me a quick way to repurpose these animations. And then, like I said, once I've done the animation like you can see here, I threw them into Cinema's motion system. So now I have two motion clips. And if you've used Adobe Premiere, this is kind of like I'm in a video editor, right? I have two clips, and I'm going to blend them together. And you can see that the blend goes from frame 0 to frame 28. So we go from open to close, and then from frame 28 to about 67, it goes from close all the way to open. This is going to be important because when I actually export this animated material or this animated 3D model, I can give this to my buddy Robert, who's going to be able to access all this animation data that you see here. So a little later, when Robert starts doing his magic, you're going to see that these frame ranges I'm talking about, this 0 to 28 and this 28 to 67, where those are going to come into play. And so, again, Robert will talk more about this. But what's really cool is the ability to be able to work with these animations baked in. As the 3D artist, I can design what these are going to be, and then I can hand this animation over to the motion designer, which is Robert, who can then have access to that. He can retime these animations and work with them. So it gives me a way to consolidate the animation data without having to have Robert go into the 3D file and mess around with it himself. Okay, so what I do from this point is I am going to open the case, I export this out as an FBX file that I can then take into Substance Painter, which looks like this. Now I'm in Substance Painter, and I can start the texturing process. First thing I'm going to do, I'm going to jump over to my handy Substance 3D assets. Again, I could get models, but here I just am looking for a rubber material. So I do a quick search for it. Lots and lots of options. What I'm actually going to use is a material for tire, even though it's for a phone case. Again, what's fun about 3D is it doesn't matter what it is, as long as it looks good. What I do is I download this, and then over here in my favorites, I've got this material. Now that it's here, I can just drag and drop and apply it right onto the phone. We start to get a material. It looks quite insane. And that is because it just needs to be scaled. And you know what, the height value, which is the bumpiness of this is too much. So I can simply just turn off that channel. And then now what I'm going to do, and if I zoom in really close and I move my light around, you can start to see that there's a little bit of detail on that. You know, a little bit of detail for that material. So again, what I might do here is jump over to my tiling and I can just repeat it by a value of two. And now, because this is a Substance material, I get all these cool parameters. So, for example, if I want to increase the color variation, I can do that. You can see it's just giving me a little bit of variation. Speaking of color, I need to change my color. So I'll click the rubber color and I'm going to select here a swatch that I've already kind of set. And there we go. I now have the material. It was that easy. So here in Substance Painter, I'm working with this 3D model and this material, but it's like Photoshop in 3D, so I have this nice familiar layer stack. So speaking of, I can just simply duplicate this layer. And now what I'm going to do is go to my color and I am going to set-- Let's see, my color is not coming up.

Bear with me a second here. Is it on the other side? Okay, my color picker is not coming up, so let me see what I can do here.

There we go. All right. Always fun, live presentation, this happens, like, every time I do anything, but we got it. All right, so now we're just going to select the orange here. And so it overwrites everything. So I need to mask this. So just like Photoshop, I can come in here and I can add a black mask, and I'll add a little paint, and then I'll grab my paintbrush, and here I can go in and start to meticulously paint a mask. And I'm telling you right now, this is not fun. I don't want to do that. So instead of doing that, I'm going to grab my Fill Object tool. Again, I keep saying this. It works like Photoshop, but, yeah, it's the Fill Object from Photoshop. And then I can Just come over here and just click. And that is going to set for me the actual material. So now that this is in place, what I'm going to do is just simply copy this layer, go to my cover and just paste it in. And let's see, we'll make sure we paste that guy in. And then I'm just going to remove the mask. And really quick, we've got the cover is now textured. All right, let's flip over to the back side of this case. This is all pretty basic. Now, at this point, I want to start adding maybe a little bit of grip to the bottom of this case. And so here in Substance Painter, we ship in our asset library tons and tons of textures and resources that you can use. And here, my little favorite tab, I've just favorited a few of these that I want to showcase to you guys. So let's use these circles. So I'm going to drag the circles here and I'll place them into the scene as a mask. And now I have these circles. So what can we do with this? Well, first things first, I'm going to repeat this across the surface a lot, so 24 times. And now I'm getting these little dots. Again, this is a procedural texture, which just lets me change all these parameters after the fact. So now look, I can make little changes to this, adjust the size and get something really dialed in like I want. That looks pretty good. All right, so now I've got these little dots. The problem is they're all over the back of the phone, which I don't want, and they're all over the side and just going nuts everywhere. I don't want that. What I really want to do is this. I would love to go into here. We'll grab my Fill Object tool again, and I'd love to just fill the circles so that they just are inside of this little white area that you can see here. But I also want to just show half the white area. So let me show you some cool ways that Painter works that lets us do things like this. So I have this little square asset, and this is something I can drag into my mask again. And once it's here, I'm going to set it to this mode called Planar Projection. And what that does is it just gives me this cool little widget here. And what I can do with this little widget, if I just subtract this. And this is really cool. I'm using Layers. This is like Photoshop, where I've got all these blending modes that I could work with. And now I've got this little subtraction from the white area that I had below. And the reason I'm doing that is because, look, this gives me this little controller here where I can just move up and down and control how much of this grip that I want to have. This is really awesome way of working in 3D because you always want to have the control of being able to change things after the fact. And I'm not baking anything in. So now that this is in place, what I'm going to do is take my circles, we're going to turn them on and again using a blending mode, we'll set it to multiply. And where is multiply? There it is. Boom. Now I've got my texture in here. And again, this is what I'm talking about. Coming back to this little widget, look, I can control and just say, you know what? I want just that little bit of area on the grip. So awesome. Now this is white. I don't want it to have a color. What I really want to do is I want this to look like some bumps on the surface. So what I'm going to do is just come over here to this bump channel and start to increase the value, and look at that. Now I have this nice, modeled looking texture that's showing up right here on the phone. Awesome. Now Robert has made for us a really cool logo with this totally innovative name, Wes Robert Phone. So let's use that. So this is awesome. I love this part. This is really cool. So right here, what do I have? I have this Illustrator file again that Robert made. Illustrator file sitting on my desktop. Watch this. I can take this and drag and drop it right onto the 3D model. That quick. It's on here and imported in. Now what I'm going to do is just move this guy. We'll scale it up and we'll rotate it around. You can see how easy it is for me to place this little decal. Now because this is an Illustrator file, if I scroll down, you can see that it's a total vector graphic. So I have access to the artboards and so I have three artboards and I believe this is German for Artboard 1. Is that right? OK, thank you. But he did give me some English, so Artboard 2. That's awesome. Thanks, Robert. All right, so now if we come over here to material, check this out. Because this is like I said, it's just a vector graphic. I can stroke the curves. But what I really want to do is come over here to my material, increase the roughness, decrease the height information down. So now it's kind of going into the surface. So what I'm going to do for this is I'm going to come over here and just turn off the color because really, I just want this to look like it's pushing down into the surface. Now, one last thing here, the little dots are showing up on our logo. We don't want that, right? It doesn't look good. All right, so let's come over here. Robert doesn't want it, so we're going to change it. Let's come over here and grab our paint. And I have my paintbrush, and then what I do is I just paint it out like this and we are done. All right, Robert, - does that look okay to you? You good? - Yeah, it's cool. All right, Robert's happy. All right, so we're going to export this guy. Uh-oh, we got a problem here on the back. No issue, though, because we can come over here to our setting where we have our circles. And again, because I have my square or here my fill, which is right here, I can go in and I can change the projection depth of this. So say I don't want the logo to be reversed on the back, I can just slowly back off the projection depth, and you'll see I can just make that go away. So now it's gone. So here, if I want to export these guys, here's what I would do. I would now come over here and I could say, File, Export Textures. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to export this special format here. Here's what it looks like, It's called an sbsar. That's a Substance material file. And in any 3D program that can read those, which is pretty much every one of them out there, you can create a Substance material, and then you can drag and drop it into your 3D program to apply it. I'll show you how to do that in just a bit. So we could do that. I'll save you the time. I already exported, so I'll save the mystery. It's already been done behind the scenes, so we could do that. Something else we could do. Let's say that I want to prototype this in After Effects right now. Well, I could come over here and say, File, Send to After Effects. Then this will open After Effects or if I have a project open, it will create a GLB behind the scenes and throw it right into my After Effects comp. Pretty cool. All right, so let's do this, let's jump over here to Cinema where we have our phone. And like I said, I've already exported these, so here's what they would look like. I've got the Substance material. Where is it? Right here. This is the case. If I just drag and drop it in, it already creates a material for me. So if I double click, what this does is it creates the Substance node, which means I have special controls for changing the resolution because Substance is resolution independent when you work with your textures. And it already hooks up all the texture coordinates and everything to a redshift material. Now this is if I'm using Cinema 4D, but if I was using Maya, it would be an Arnold material, or if you're using Blender, it would be a material that works with cycles. So something like that, it all comes into place. So then all I have to do is say, okay, well my case cover, let me just apply it and then let me come over here to the other objects and then I'm just going to apply the material to those guys. Let's see, just get them into place here. Boom. Done. So now I've got the model textured, it's animated and then what I do is I would come over here and I would export this out as a gl-- Well, GLB is what I want to use. Make sure that my textures and my skin and bake animation are all enabled. Click OK, now I've got a GLB that I would hand over to Robert and he'll work with that in just a bit. But that's how the system works. Now what if, and I know this never happens, no one ever needs changes when you do anything? I know it's very-- This is, I'm talking crazy right now. No one's going to ask me to change this. But if I say I wanted to make a variation of this, like, oh, let's do a leather case. - Leather case, right? Okay. - Yeah, okay. - So what-- - The looks. Yeah, let's do that. So the thing is, that's interesting is let's look at a tool called Substance Sampler which lets me create a material out of a single image, okay? So here's what we're going to do. We jump over to Substance Sampler and I have this weird cloth looking 3D model. It's going to be perfect to show us what we're talking about. Now Sampler is awesome. I love this tool because I could take my phone here and I could shoot a picture and then send it into Sampler. And Sampler will say, oh, you've got an image. Here, let me make a material out of that. And then I can use a bunch of filters to clean and process that to make a material. Or I could do this. So we have a new beta in here which is using generative textures input. So I set the texture type and you can see here, if I zoom in on this guy, I just gave it a quick prompt called flat black leather and not worn. It still made it worn somewhat. That's Firefly. We'll blame Firefly. So we put this in and what does it do? Well, it generates a bunch of texture maps for me that look like this. And you can see I've kind of, just to save us time, I've kind of pre generated a few of these. If I jump over, you can see where everything is. I've got a bunch of different versions. I've got a green one, a brown one, so on and so forth. You know what? I think I like this brown better. So I'm going to go with this. So let's say I want to use this. Here's what I do. I take the image, drag and drop into Sampler. And this is the same whether I'm doing this little generative texture, which is just helping me kind of get a texture to use really fast. Like normally I could use, like I said, I could use my phone, I could do a search online, find some type of texture, but this was really quick and it says, oh, you got an image. I bet you want to make a material. Yes, Sampler, I do. Help me with that. So now we click Import and what's happening here in this little layer stack is a base material is created. Sampler imports the material, I mean the texture, and then here you can see that Image to Material AI Powered is now running for me. So then if I just back out, you can see, well, we're starting to get a material and here's a map. Well, it's set to ground as the category. I don't want that. Let's switch it to leather. So now it's going to do a better job of creating the material. But you can see it's really what you see is what you get. I'm like, I don't like that. Let me change something. It's a very creative process. So now we're getting something like this, looks worn, looks crazy. But here's what it's done for me behind the scenes. It's created color, it's created my normal information which is basically like the bumpy of the surface. And look how great it does at that. It's also created roughness information, height information. Look at this height map. So if you are familiar with 3D and you know about height maps, this is awesome. I love this. And then you've got your ambient occlusion information. Of course, I can change all this. So if I wanted to like maybe come in and decrease the ambient occlusion strength, I could do that, so on and so forth. But here, let me show you something really quick with this. Now if I hit T on the keyboard, this takes me into my Tiling Mode. And here's something right off the bat. You can see this little red square is denoting the texture size, and then it's repeating itself. Well, this operation that I got from the Generative Beta gave me a texture, Sampler went on ahead and made it seamless for me so I didn't even have to tile it in this case. Now if I wanted to tile it, there's tools for that. I'll show you what I'm talking about. But this is already seamless. However, I don't like these little white splotches. So this is how Sampler works. Now it's just a matter of adding some filters. So here I'm going to press my space bar and I'm going to say, you know what, I would love to equalize or balance out the discrepancies between the highlights and the shadows in this image. So I'll grab trusty old Equalizer here and then just drop the radius down and look at that. It's getting rid of kind of these white areas. And you know, just with a simple slider change, here I'll hit T on the keyboard again. Zoom in. Completely seamless image. I'm pretty much done. Now, of course there's more work I can do to this, but just for time constraints, I won't really jump into it. But one of the things I want to show you here, we've got this nice layer stack if I hit my space bar here, I have all these filters. So for example, let's say that I did take a picture with my phone. It's not going to be seamless like what Sampler has done for me. So here what I would do is I would drop in and say, oh, can you give me-- make it tile or can I add a tiling filter on top of this? So again, it just gives me this little tiling widget and I could go in and just rework this around. There's clone stamp, all kinds of tools for cleaning and processing this information. So once this is done, what I would do is I would just hit this export button and say, hey, send this straight into Substance Painter. So now if we look at Substance Painter, let me just open up a different version here of the phone case. And I've got the leather material, drag and drop. It comes in. Size isn't right. No problem. Watch this. We just come over here to our tiling and I'm just going to try to guess a value, maybe eight. Okay, eight is looking okay. But look at the height information. It's the bump. It's way too intense. But here's what you can do. A Fill layer or this object is like a box that contains a bunch of channels and these channels, I can pull them out and do things with them. So for example, I can use this little drop down and say, hey, layer, I would like to look at the height information. And so when I do that it says, okay, well, the height's using this blending mode and it has its own layer opacity. So just like Photoshop. So here I can just scroll and look at that. Now I've got this awesome leather. Let's say that we want to do something like, hey, could we add some stitching to this? Well, we sure could. So I've got a Topstitching tool that ships inside a Substance Painter. Check this out. We're going to go in here and just plot a curve really quick. We'll do something like this. This is going to be really shoddy. Terrible curve work here. Of course you know, it's just like a curve, like in Illustrator, I can always change everything and change the tangent, handles and all that stuff. But just looking at my time, I need to go a little quick. But let's say we get a curve, looks something crazy like that. So now I get some stitching. But what's cool about this is I can come over to the material and it's completely procedural. So I could say, you know what, let's do a Decorative Stitch. Well, wait a minute, I would like to see a Ladder Stitch. - Have you ever seen a Ladder Stitch? - Yeah, of course. - I don't think I have. - Yeah. Okay, but let's go back to the Classic Stitch. And I can do things like let's come in here to the puckering. I can say, hey, this is leather, and I'm going to increase the intensity value. And then I can also play around with the fading of it. So now it looks like that stitch is in the leather. Also, like I was telling you, this is Substance Painter's procedural. You can always work and change things. So I've got this, and I'm like, oh, you know what? I made the stroke too long. But watch, I can come over to my size and adjust it after I've laid the curves down, or I can go back and edit the curves if I want to. So that's how quick it is. And like I said, I can just select these little points and you can enable tangent handles like I'm doing. Let's see. Let's select a point. I'll come over and grab my little tangent handles, and then I can just tweak and change this just like you would a curve. Nothing crazy there. Okay, so with that said, we're going to flip the phone over and we're going to do one last thing here. So let's do-- Let's delete these guys, and I'm going to turn off my little demo. So now let's say that we had something like the phone. Why do you need a case? Well, that's a great question, you know, because how many people in here has dropped and broke their phone? Does that happen? Yeah, we all do it. Right? It's terrible. So just for fun, let's say, like, Hey, Robert, we're working on this protective case. Well, what if I need to break the phone? Could I do that? Well, that's the fun thing about working with things like Substance Painter. So check this out. If I come over here, I have this magic brush, I call it. It actually paints with a particle system, but it looks like a magic wand that I'm just flailing around. So here I've got my cracked glass brush, and what I'm going to do is just come over here and just start to paint with some cracks and look at this.

So now we can do something kind of fun here where it looks like the phone is shattered and broken.

So like I said, just magic, fun stuff that you can do inside a Substance Painter. All right, so like I said, that's going to cover everything that I was going to be talking about. One last handoff over here to Robert. As you saw, we did our texture, we had our case, it was animated, and the materials were applied, and I've got these frame ranges. And what I did was I exported this over using GLTF. And now I have this GLB that I was able to send over to Robert. And with that, Robert, let's see what you're going to do with this in After Effects, because I know it's going to be awesome, switching it over to you.

That was crazy. A little fun story. That was awesome. Like, two or three years ago, I was following Wes on Twitter, or X, what it's called now, and I was always admiring his tutorials and his work, and I'm like, there's no way I'm going to be on stage with him. And then, like, two years later, here we are - Presenting to you guys. - I know. So I'm always baffled by his talent and I love the energy that we are playing back and forth. Whenever he does something, I go like, oh, shoot, that's really cool. I need to up my game to do also something similarly cool. So I'm trying to do just that. And thank you for handing me over the files. So who of you is using After Effects? Show of hands. All right. Since we are in Miami, everything stays in Miami. Who is not using After Effects? Be honest. Oh, come on. Okay. -Just one. That's all right. We are friends. So hopefully by the end of this session, you'll be using not just the Substance tool, but also After Effects. Now, as Wes said, I have the assets right here, and as you can see, they're just coming as GLB files, and the GLB file is nice because it has not only the geometry, but also the materials and everything packaged in a nice little format, so you don't need to worry about that. And how can you get started with 3D? Well, let me show you. The easiest way is certainly to go in and grab all the files and drag them to a new comp. You can do that just easily as this, let go, and then you have all your 3D stuff in there. Now, the thing is that everything is, I mean, it doesn't look 3D actually, because it looks 2Dish. But now if I hit down to C, like camera, like the shortcut is C, you can actually rotate the view in After Effects to see that. And the matter of fact is you can hit the key C multiple times just to toggle between the different modes. And as you can see, wherever I'm clicking, it will actually take that point to use as a pivot. So this is how I can navigate. And in fact, I'm using multiple objects now. So I have the phone, so you can see the phone here. I have the cover which is animated, I have the left and the right part, and everything integrates together really nicely to form this cohesive shape of multiple objects that I can then start animating. Now, you can also go ahead, start with a new comp and just drag and drop your files as you used to. So same thing, you can go in and rotate around. Now I just have this brand colors that I want to use here. And the cool thing is you can use-- Again, let me just add those as well on top of that. And since this is completely with the After Effects tools that you know and love, you have all the handles to basically work, and rotate, and animate all the stuff that you want. But you can also go ahead and add, for example, a light. And let's go ahead and add a white light, turn off the background, and show you how it looks like. Because now I can just move the light and I can just play around with it and just really create cool looks. And the cool thing is going into my Properties panel, I don't have to fiddle with the settings here. I can go with one click and change the light to this red or this orangish color that we have here for our brand and we can play with that. So that's really cool. Okay. It's completely interactive and it renders super fast. Now, speaking of rendering, there is one thing that I want to point out, and this is like the Draft 3D mode, and you also have a couple of settings here. Next to that is the Advanced Mode, which actually shows you the render that you have selected. So Advanced 3D with Render Options that you can toggle on or off to basically see render quality, shadow resolution, and smoothness. So you can play with those. And a quick tip, this has to be opposite. So to work quicker, I usually have it at 3 or 4. I don't need to see it really pristine in my work at the end. Yes, but just to iterate, it's fine. So I crank this up towards the end and I can lower this. So for working, this needs to be higher. Sorry, lower. This needs to be higher and vice versa if you're rendering. So that's always very helpful. Now, if you're animating and you want to get things moving faster, you can always hit on Draft 3D, which allows you to see not only a faster preview of the model because it's turning off shadows and all that, but it's faster than real time, - so it's actually the future, right? - Yeah. And you can also show and hide the grid, which actually helps you to navigate, and see, and understand the space. So that's really cool. And also you can show the expanded area around your comp. So that's a lot of fun. So now let me just jump ahead a couple of frames and I will show you this little animation that I did here. So we are building this commercial for our phone, for our case, and a couple of things I want to point out. So first of all, I animated all of this with all the tools that you know, like, just simple position keyframes, easings, all the nice stuff is there. Now with this cover, I'm going to solo that cover, I want to have this cover animated. And as you can see here, it's already specified at what time the animation happens. So going into my model, going into the animation options in my GLB, I can select the animation and now if I play that back, you will see it will do all the animation, and again I can show you all the other stuff.

So that's cool. But how can you actually work with that in a way of being able to control the animation? Well, there's a couple of things I want to show you, a couple of tricks. You could have multiple tracks, or if you have only one track, you have to work with that. So for this I'm going to Layer, Time, Enable Time Remapping, and this will allow me to actually choose the frames. And I can see, okay, from 0 to 27 is basically open to close. So let me just add a keyframe. It's already added, and I'm going to go ahead and-- One second, I'm going to do the 27. OK, I'm going to keep it at 27. So I'm going to do the key. Actually let me just copy and paste the keyframe because it's way easier. So it's going to close, stay closed, and it will open up as soon as it hits that keyframe. So I can play with those keyframes, and add keyframes as I want to go. Now when I hit the end, this happens, it disappears, right, because the animation track is only that long. So there's a couple of things you can do. You can Alt+Click and expand that, and basically you're expanding the keyframes because it is a baked in animation, but it's dynamically baked in, right? So you can extend and make it longer or slower or if you want to hold that position, the easiest thing is go to Time and Freeze On Last Frame. A lot of people don't know this, oh, when did you add this feature? Like, oh, it's been there for a while. I could say it's a new feature, and you go out, and you just download it and play with it. But no, it's been there for a while. So it's going to stay there and we can play with that. Now that's pretty cool. And I want to show you something else. This is like a placeholder screen. And the beauty of working with After Effects in 3D, I mean, I did a lot of jobs working with Cinema 4D and After Effects in conjunction. I love Cinema 4D, render it there and everything. The thing is that once it's rendered in Cinema 4D, it is rendered, right, it is done. And we all know clients. They're the ones that pay our bills, hopefully, but they're also the ones that call us up on a Friday asking for changes. What the hell? And what do you do? You say, "Yes, of course I can change it. No problem." So client wants not the placeholder screen that we designed here with Firefly, but wants a pristine screen. So we can go ahead and go into our display content. So let's check that out. I'm going to select my phone screen, and this is already set up, so I can see all the essential properties areas here. And now the beauty is that, yes, although this is 3D, it's not rendered. I mean, it is rendered in real time as we see and speak, but I don't have to go back to a 3D tool to render it out, and to change something because it's dynamic. So the beauty of it is I can grab any screen, for example, I can grab that screen and just add that. And now here we are. So I'm late a little bit, but it's fine. So it's 13:29 on this screen. I will not change it. No, no, no. But if you go back and say, hey, how about an animated screen? I can also do that. And just go ahead and make sure that I'm dropping this in the right place. And here's my animated screen.

Now you can tell the client that it took you eight hours to do that, right? - That's what I'm doing. - Yeah, of course. And you bill eight hours. - Yeah, and you bill the eight hours. - Yeah. Okay, so that's a lot of fun. And again, that's the beauty of working like in a somewhat non-destructive way because you can just, you know-- Wes. I know Wes. Blue is probably your color, so you're just going to want to have a blue one. So I can just change it to blue, whatever, and it just plays back beautifully. Now let's crank it up a little bit. Let's go ahead and look at Depth of Field. Anyone knows what Depth of Field is? Right? Okay. Who does not know what Depth of Field is? Okay, that's cool. No problem. Thanks for your honesty. Depth of Field is defining what is in focus. So I want to have, like a shallow depth of field to really being able to control the viewer's attention. So we are dropping the phone here on this rock. Fun story about the rock, Wes. Oh, yeah. So the rock's pretty familiar. That's actually a rock from my backyard, and using Substance Sampler, I went outside, took photos of the rock, and Sampler will actually do photogrammetry and create the 3D model, export as a GLB, give it to Robert. and now he's doing some magic with it. Yeah, so he gave me that rock. I animated, like, the slow mo shot. I have a low resolution here, so just to be able to render it quicker because it's not so much about the animation, but about being able to control the viewer's attention. So I want to have this nice little shallow depth of field. So now what I can do is I can actually duplicate this exact comp just the way it is. And I did just that. It's the same comp. I call it depth. And going into my start map, I will drag and drop this depth matte in there. Now I can extract 3D channel data. So I can go to 3D Channel Extract, double click on that, and I will get a black and white matte. So this will basically be your informational channel that tells you everything that is white is in the foreground, everything that is black is the background. So if I would be a camera, you in the front row would be like all white silhouetted, in the middle would be gray, and all in the way back would be black. And I can also play with those parameters. I can choose them to make them a little bit more differentiated. So just to have a little bit more variation in contrast. So something like this. Now I can use this information, I can hide it. It's still there. I can create a new adjustment layer. I'm going to call this DOF as Depth of Field. And I'm going to go in and choose the Camera Lens Blur effect. Now, the Camera Lens Blur effect, once I apply it, everything is out of focus. Right? So this is like the bokeh effect. And make no mistake, Gaussian blur is not the proper way to add depth of field blur. All right? Just want to make this clear so we're professionals. Why? Because if you take a picture of a Christmas tree and you use Gaussian blur, usually the bright areas will be smaller. If you do, like a proper optical blur, the bright areas will be bigger. This is the actual bokeh or bokeh I don't know how you call it, but that's what it does. Now the magic is I can select that particular source as my input source. I'm going to go ahead and select my depth layer. I'm going to activate Effects & Masks. And now look at that. Now it's only focusing on that rock. Let me just go in here and I can play with the actual focal distance. So I can say, OK, maybe I want to have this area in focus. So this is how I can actually create an effect like that. Now to be completely transparent with you, there's one thing that I prefer, a third-party tool that allows it to be a little bit more granular and finer in your controls, and it's called Frischluft. It's a German guy that basically programmed that plugin. It's called Depth Of Field. And this will allow you to be able to actually choose a picker and pick any point in focus, and also allows you to do like this rack focus effect. So all this while you still have all the flexibility of 3D. So you can start out like this and then you can say like, oh you know what, it's out of focus. But let's go ahead and focus on this part and be very flexible with it. So it's a lot of fun to work with that and I enjoy it a lot. Now a quick little extra because you're just such a nice audience. Have we seen a keynote this morning? Okay, Firefly video model. Now I did this in Firefly. Basically I prompted some particles, dust flowing up and I retimed it, so it's not like a high speed shot, so it's stuttering a little bit. But that's not the purpose of what I want to show you. The purpose is I want to show you that you can prompt things like this on black that you can then use to further enhance your material. So I can go ahead and say I want to have the green effect on that. And as soon as I activate that, this is how it looks, and I think it looks pretty sweet. Yep, pretty awesome. Okay, so this is how you can play with that. Now let's go ahead and say, okay, we have this typical motion graphics piece, you know, stuff flying around. I want to have like this radially placed things. And one thing I want to point out, you cannot add effects to 3D layers. However, if you create a layer and you add the calculations effect to that and you are taking the 3D information from the actual 3D layers, I'm using the smartphone_cover_animated.glb, and that is referencing it. That means I can use any way of Hue and saturation or any effect on that layer. This is how you can actually add effects onto the layer. Now, I made a setup and have an expression that will index the rotation and will rotate the copy around, I think, 30 degrees was my setup. And I can duplicate it a couple of times, and I can play that back, and this will work like that. So that's pretty cool. And of course, I can change the color values for all of these. I can colorize them. I can make it any color I like. And let me jump ahead just a little bit, because one thing I did here is I have all my favorite colors, and I also can activate the animation so it's animated while it's animated. See what I did there? So that's pretty cool now. - Well, Robert. - Yes. Would it be all right-- Let me play the bad guy here and ask for a change. And so I see you have your colors, but I'd kind of like to do the leather one. Remember that we did the leather? I mean, is that possible? We have the good cop, bad cop thing. Yeah. Okay, so we have the animated leather. Now we have all done this animation. And again, you know, I want to stay friends with Wes for a while, okay? So I want to be the servant to his wish. So I'm going to select that layer. I'm going to Control+Alt+Click and replace that material with that. And all of a sudden, I have exactly the same animation. It's maintaining all the information, all the color stuff that I did, and it's working beautifully with that. Now, I know that Wes likes Sports Watches, so I'm kind of, like, setting myself up to cover his next wish, which is, hey, can you make this a Sports Watch? Because phone covers are so yesterday, so today we want to do smartwatches. And it will maintain all the animation, everything. So it's all there, even the color change. So that's how beautifully you can work and the flexibility of using 3D. And you can bill me the eight hours it took you to do that. - Okay. - Yeah. - I'll do that. - Yeah. - Or you buy me lunch? - Yeah. Okay, everyone with me? All cool. Cool. All right.

Let's breathe. Let's go to our last part. So for this one, I want to integrate the phone into a real environment. And this is really fun. I love this part. Now I'm going to play that back to you. I shot this in my vacation in Croatia. Technically, I was on vacation, but I happened to have a couple of cameras with me. This being shot on the iPhone in log, I took this into Premiere. The new color management allowed me to color grade it beautifully and export it out, have all the color gamut retained. So this is what I did trying to be steady around this little rock, and I want to have the camera with the case integrated into the shot. So what I can do is I can add the 3D camera tracker and it gives you all those little points. So what I can do now is I can select those points and I can Control+Click and say first of all, Set Ground Plane and Origin. And then I can say Create Shadow Catcher, Camera and Light. Now this is where the fun begins because now I can go ahead and say, you know what, I want to take my phone and actually all my parts and just add them in here. And now you can see that it's all here. Of course I can move it as I like. So that's a lot of fun. Now the cool thing is with this is, since let me jump ahead to a mid version here, let me hide this real quick and show you the phone.

The cool thing is it will basically have the 3D maintained in terms of the perspective and the tracking that I did. And I'm just going to play back the draft 3D so I don't want to see the shadows right now. All the animation, everything is, it's like it's sticking on that rock. Now that looks good. That looks nice. I made this animation, added the cover animation, all that. Maybe add a little tagline here. Now it doesn't quite fit into the environment, right? Because the light is a little bit off. I knew exactly how the light was set up when being on location. And I want to match that. And I'm going to show you a little workflow hack. It's not a hack, it's a tip. It's actually a really cool thing to do. I love it. So I had my Insta360 X4 camera with me and what I did is I placed it exactly at that rock and I did like a bracketed sequence of shots. Okay? Underexposed, overexposed, normally exposed. So it was actually, I think, nine photos that I took, and I'm taking these into Substance 3D Sampler to create an HDR light in EXR, and this is how it looks like. And let me show you how to do that. You want to see that? - Yeah. - Okay. So here it is, Sampler, my new environment light. I'm going to go to my Finder, I'm going to select my files and just drag and drop them in here. Now, Sampler recognizes like, okay, I'm in the light mode. Do you want to do an HDR Merge? And I can do it in, let's say, 2K for speed reasons, for demo reasons. So I'm just going to click on Import, and then this will create an HDR Merge, and basically take all the information and make this usable light information to light your scene. Now, this is it, basically, and you can see me sitting there in my goofy outfit. It was a somewhat remote island in Croatia and the light was coming from the left slightly behind me. Now I can do a couple of things. First of all, I can see that I have this ugly shadow here from the tripod. So for that I can go ahead and use a Nadir patch and basically patch this up. It doesn't need to be perfect. You just don't want to see that in your file. Now the next thing I want to do is I want to get rid of that stick here and let me just choose a different portion. And for that stick, I'm going to use something that is called Content Aware Fill. You might be familiar with that from Photoshop. And I can just start to paint out that shadow and get rid of that part. Again, it doesn't need to be perfect. That's not the point. It's about getting rid of that. And the same goes for this guy sitting over there. We don't want to see them in our reflections, so I'm just going to paint them out. Now, light, and especially sunlight is incredibly bright. So it's so bright that we cannot replicate this just by the sheer information that we have in these files. Now, there's a way how we can actually replicate the intensity, and this way is basically going in and adding what is called a Sphere Light. A Sphere Light is basically added in 3D and I can move it around. Now it is so bright I can't really see where the light is. So I can go ahead and lower the EV to actually show the sun. And the thing is, the bigger the sun, the softer the shadow. The smaller the sun, the harder the shadow. So I can go in and, first of all, make sure that I'm changing the sphere radius to be really small.

And also crank up the exposure really brightly so you can see this is our mat and he is properly lit. And this looks good. Now I can always go back and make sure that I'm showing you the correct Viewport exposure just to see it correctly. And now I can just go into Export and export this file as my EXR file. Now, having the EXR, going back to After Effects allows me to light the scene correctly. So let me show you really quick what I mean by that. So I have the environment light, and in the environment light, I have added my Beach Final.exr. Let me just go back and toggle on the Draft 3D mode. So this is how it looks like with the default HDR, which is like a studio HDR. It's pretty cool, but it's something that we don't want to use because again, it's not the actual environment where this took place. Now changing it to our actual Beach Final.exr, look what happens, the lighting completely changes. The shadows match the light intensity, everything is just as on location, and it works beautifully with that. Now you can also see that there's the proper shadow. And since we have the shadow catcher enabled, again, this is the shadow that we have here. I can toggle it on and off, and you can see what a difference the shadow actually makes on that shot. I can open up the shadow parameters and even change the shadow color. And you might be wondering, why do I only see the shadows and not the rest of layers? Because I have set it up to accept shadows only and basically just cast shadows. So this way, it will make sure that everything that is beneath it will come through and we only see the shadow. Now going into the color, I can go ahead with the color picker and I can pick the shadow color. And again, this is a little bit too bright, but it gets the color. So there's a somewhat warmer color. And I can go in and dial that down just to match it because it's not a pure black. Maybe we can even go slightly cooler and basically create the shadow that we like that perfectly matches that environment. Now, the other cool thing that I want to point out and let me switch back to Draft Mode really quick, is when seeing the phone, for example, it will show you all the reflections and let me switch to the rendered version so we don't have to wait, so I'm going to just play that back. So you can see that on that phone, you can see actually the reflection that is behind the camera because it's the actual environment. - Isn't that cool? - That's awesome. - You can clap. - Yeah.

So that's the beauty of working with those assets that Wes provided me with. It's just so much fun to create these things. And basically that's about it. Yeah. That was incredible, Robert. Thank you so much. It was really awesome to see that come together and thank you all very much for attending our session. So as you can see, there's a couple QR codes, there's some socials for Robert and I. We're both constantly making tutorials. So if you're interested. Yeah. Check us out, follow us and then you know also, both of us, love just to talk about this stuff. We could sit here all day, right? Because I even said, an hour long session, that's not enough. - We need more. - That's good. Two hours. Yeah. We're going to be also at the-- I think you're at the Substance Booth. - Yes. - I'm going to be also at the Community Booth that is further down the hallway on the right. I'm going to hang out there. Feel free to ping me, find me, find us, talk to us. Any questions that you have, feel free. We just hope you enjoyed it just as much as we enjoyed showing this to you, and hope we inspired you. So thank you so much.