Quickly Create 3D in After Effects

In this video tutorial we'll take a look at how to quickly create 3D objects in After Effects.
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Partial, Auto-Generated Transcript Below 👇
Joey Korenman (00:19): What's up Joey here at school of motion and welcome to day seven of 30 days of after effects today. What we're going to talk about is something that's a little bit back to basics and after effects and something. A lot of you probably already know, which is that after effects is sort of a 3d program, you can create 3d objects by taking two and a half D cards and kind of arranging them to create maybe a box. Now, why would you want to do that when maybe you already own cinema 40? Well, I'm going to get into some of the reasons why you might want to do stuff like this in after effects. I'm going to show you some cool tricks. We're also going to talk about animation principles, which is a big deal to me. It's kind of the secret sauce that makes your work feel good.
Joey Korenman (00:59): It's kind of hard to put your finger on why it feels good if you don't understand animation principles. And unfortunately we can only cover so much in just this one lesson. So if you really want in-depth animation training, you're going to want to check out our animation bootcamp course. Not only is it several weeks of intense animation training, but you also get access to class only podcasts, PDs, and critiques on your work from our experienced teaching assistants. Every moment of animation bootcamp is designed to give you an edge in everything you create as a motion designer. Also, don't forget to sign up for a free student account so you can grab the project files from this lesson. All right, that's enough. Let's get to it. So what I'm going to show you guys is a really simple trick to, uh, you know, kind of get a nice 3d object that you can use inside of after effects using all native after effects stuff, you know, no fancy plugins, no elements, um, no plexus, nothing like that.
Joey Korenman (01:55): Um, and you know, this isn't always that useful. And of course, if you're, if you're great with cinema 4d, then a lot of times, if you need a 3d object, that's what you'll use. But you know, this example here, I thought it would be kind of appropriate because it it's a look that it's just easier to do an after effects. Um, so I thought that that would be kind of a good way of showing you guys something that, um, you may not think to use after effects in, in this way. Um, and sometimes it's useful. So let's start a new comp real quick, just, uh, you know, standard HD comp, uh, 24 frames a second. And I'm going to show you a super fast trick. This is really easy. I'm sure there's a million tutorials out there that show you how to do this, but I'm going to show you how to put together a 3d cube, a really quick and easy way.
Joey Korenman (02:40): So let's make a new solid, and let's just kind of pick some red color here. Um, and let's make it a square just to make it easy. So let's make the width a 1000 and the height 1000. So there you go. Um, so we'll make it a 3d layer, right? So obviously now we can, uh, we can rotate it around and we can sort of move it in 3d space and put together a cube. So let's just call this side one. Um, and then I'm gonna duplicate it. I'm gonna change the color of this. So I'm just going to hit shift command. Y brings up the solid settings and we'll pick a different color. All right. So this will be side too. And, uh, and then we'll just keep doing this. We'll make six sides. We can make a cube and I'll try to do this quick. So you've got red, green, blue, I'll duplicate it. Why don't we make this one kind of yellow?
Joey Korenman (03:38): We'll make this one. I don't know how a pink, pink so hot right now. It's like one of those in colors and then six is going to be, let's go orange. Great. All right. So we've got six sides. So one of the, one of the things that, uh, is cool about after effects is that if you kind of make a 3d scene in a comp like this, right? So this is comp one, why don't I rename this? Uh, why don't we rename this cube? Underscore PC PC stands for pre comp. Okay, I'll put this in my comms folder. So if I make a 3d scene and this comp, and then I drag it into a new comp like this, um, it comes in as one layer, but using a couple of tricks, I can actually turn this into a 3d object, which is really sweet.