Let's start with a new project,
and I'm going to make a new composition and we'll call it Chrome Look.
I'm going to make sure that it's 1920 by 1080.
You can do whatever size you'd like.
I'm going to stick to a frame rate of 24 frames per second because that's what film is,
and I want this to look more cinematic.
But again, you can use whatever frame rate you want.
The duration, 15 seconds is probably plenty,
but to be safe, I'm going to change this to 30 seconds.
Then I'll click, "Okay."
I'll start by creating a type layer.
This is going to be the source of our chrome procedural effect,
and it can really be whatever you want.
This could be a graphic like a logo,
so if you're planning to apply it to something else, that's fine.
Just know that this isn't going to work on video.
It's not a filter that you're applying to it on Instagram or something,
it's all based on the alpha channel of what we're applying it to.
It's going to completely get rid of the contents.
If you want to use a logo, that's fine,
you can start by bringing that in,
but I'm just going to use some text.
I'm going to just bring up the Text Tool control,
or command T, click in my comp and I'll just type out the word Chrome.
I'm going to change the font to one called
abolition because I like the way this one looks.
This is part of Adobe fonts that you can get for
free with your Adobe Creative Cloud subscription.
But again, you can use whatever font you want,
so don't feel like you have to use this one.
Then I'm going to bring up my Align panel by going up to Window, Align,
and then center this in my composition by
clicking on the center horizontally and vertically.
Actually, while I'm at it,
I'm going to switch to my paragraph panel and center
justify this so that if I change the text in here,
it'll always be centered.
Now that that's done, I'm going to have my layer selected and come up to Layer,
and then all the way down to the bottom,
Pre-compose, the keyboard shortcut is Ctrl Shift C or Cmd Shift C on a Mac.
I'm going to do that and then give this composition a name.
We'll call this "Chrome",
and then I'm going to use this little symbol as a divider,
that's a vertical bar.
I'm not sure what it's actually called,
but it's in the same position as the forward-slash key,
just hold down "Shift" and press that to get that vertical bar.
I'm going to call this the Source.
This is how I plan to organize my comps because there are going to be a lot of pre-comps.
That way, I can easily identify that this is for the Chrome part of
the overall look and it's the source for this Chrome look.
I'll click "Okay" and now that text is in a pre-comp,
I can go into that pre-comp and adjust this, do whatever I want to it.
I'm going to close out of that and I'm actually going to
pre-compose this one more time before I do anything else.
With this Chrome Source layer selected,
I'm going to use the keyboard shortcut this time,
Ctrl-Shift C or Cmd Shift C on a Mac,
and I'm going to rename this Chrome 3D move.
It doesn't matter which one of these I check because I haven't changed anything,
so I'll just click "Okay" and I'm going to jump into that pre-comp.
What we're going to do in here is make a 3D
fly-in of the text as if it's coming from behind the camera,
flying into place as well as rotating into place.
I'm probably going to say this a lot,
but you have complete creative freedom as to how you want to animate this part in.
But for my example,
I'm going to have it flying this way.
To do this, I'm going to make it a 3D layer by clicking on the 3D layer switch,
which if you don't see the switches right here,
it's probably because you don't have
this little button enabled in the bottom-left corner.
Make sure that's enabled,
and you'll have the 3D switch,
and now this is a 3D layer,
or at least two and a half D layer because it's actually a 2D layer existing in 3D space.
I can now rotate it in three axes.
This 3D move is going to be very simple,
I just need to keyframe the position and the rotation.
I'm going to open up the layers Transform controls,
set a position keyframe by clicking on the stopwatch for that position there.
I'm actually even going to separate the dimension,
so I'm going to right-click on "Position" and say "Separate Dimensions",
and that just gives me a property for each one of these position axes.
I don't need it to move left and right,
so I'm actually just going to get rid of that keyframe.
I just have the Y up and down position in the Z,
in an out position.
I also want to be able to rotate it on the x-axis,
so I'm going to set a keyframe there and then press
the "U" key so that I'm left with just those three keyframes that I set.
Now obviously, this is what I want it to look like in its final position,
so I don't want these keyframes at the start of the layer.
Let me zoom in by pressing the "Plus" key,
and I want to go forward to about four seconds.
We'll say that's how long we want this camera move to go.
I'm just going to click and drag these three keyframes over
while holding "Shift" to snap to that play head.
Then I can move my timeline back to the start,
and we can move this into position where we want it to start with the animation.
I know that I want to rotate it 90 degrees backwards,
so I'm just going to type in negative 90 on
the X rotation and it goes invisible since it's perfectly aligned with the camera.
But then, I'll move it down a little bit and then back it up on the Z a lot.
I want to basically move this all the way outside of the comp so we don't see it,
and then it's just going to fly in and rotate into position.
Now, this looks a little flat,
it doesn't have much perspective,
and that's because of the default scene camera.
I want this to look like it's pretty big and like we're in a very big environment.
One way we can do that is by adjusting the perspective by using a wider angle lens.
To do that, I'm going to add a new camera to this scene.
I'm going to go up to Layer, New, Camera.
In the camera settings,
you don't need to worry about all of these crazy settings.
I'm going to choose the preset of 24 millimeters.
If you're not familiar with focal lengths of cameras and lenses,
50 millimeters is basically what the field of view of your eyes are.
Anything smaller than that is going to fit
more into the view of the camera than what your eyes would.
If I change this to 24,
it's a little less than half of 50,
it's going to give us some more camera distortion.
Now it looked like it zoomed in quite a bit,
but that's just because of the way that the 24-millimeter perspective works.
I'm going to need to adjust my keyframes a little bit.
Let's just bring the Z position forward
so that it's right at the edge of the screen again,
and now when it comes in,
you you see that it looks a lot bigger,
and that's because of the distortion from that wide angle on the camera.
I like that a lot better.
Now I just want to finesse these key a little bit
on the easing so that it's not such a linear move.
If I play it back, you see that it's very rigid and it just stops right there at the end.
Obviously, I don't want that to happen,
I want it to ease into that final position,
so I'm just going to select all my keyframes and press
"F9" on the keyboard to easy ease them.
Or you could right-click on them,
go to Keyframe Assistant,
and say Easy Ease.
But now that they're eased,
it'll be a lot easier to mess with the graph editor,
so I'm going to jump into there.
I'm going to switch to the speed graph,
which I realize you can't see,
but it's right underneath this button,
and then just a couple of menu items down is Edit Speed Graph.
Now I'll select those three properties again so I can see them
and ease into this final value a little bit more quickly,
so it just eases in there.
It's moving fastest at the beginning of
the motion and then it eases into that final resting place.
I think that's a little bit drastic,
so I'm going to just back this off a little bit,
and actually probably don't need much easing at all,
maybe 50 percent on that side.
That way, it's just this nice slow move rotating into position and that resting place.
Now, if we take a look at this on the beginning of the animation,
and I zoom in here,
I'm at 50 percent now zoom,
but if I move into 100 percent,
you can see that it's a little soft,
and that's because we're scaling up this pre-comp.
Once you pre-compose something,
even if it's vector inside the comp,
it's not going to be continuously rasterized by default.
In other words, this vector artwork is no longer vector, it's just pixels.
What I need to do is click on this continuously rasterized switch right here,
and that will mess up for a second,
and that's because if I go into that pre-comp,
this layer is not 3D and continuously rasterizing or collapsing
the transformations basically disregards whatever you did to
this comp and it looks at the contents and applies what it has in there.
Inside of this Chrome source,
I'm going to turn this text layer 3D as well,
then when I come back, it'll be back in place.
If we zoom in here, you can see that it's nice and crisp again.
Obviously, if I zoom into 400 percent it's not going to be because
100 percent is the magnification that After Effects is rasterizing it for.
But if I disable that switch and enable it again,
you can see how much softer it is with it off, than with it on.
But now that we have it nice and sharp and clean,
we can move on to actually building the Chrome look.
This is going to be the foundation for the rest of the effect.