Now that's taken care of.
I've got my 3D camera move,
it's nice and clean.
I'm going to go back into my main comp and we're going to pre-compose this one more time.
I'm going to select that layer,
Control Shift C or Command Shift C on a Mac.
Again, it doesn't matter if we leave the attributes and move them
because there are none applied to this layer in this comp.
But I'm going to rename this Chrome Look,
and this is where we're going to start building the actual look.
I'll click "Okay", go into that comp,
and now we can change it from looking like this blank text layer
to an actual shiny metallic chrome effect.
But before I do that, let's just do some clean-up real quick.
I haven't saved at all yet,
that should probably be something I do.
I'm going to save my project and I'll just call this Chrome-Look_V1.
Then I'm just going to make some folder structure real quick for my pre-comps,
so I can keep this nice and organized.
I've got a folder for the pre-comps and my Chrome Look is my main render comp.
The thing that really sells or creates this chrome effect
at all is the fact that it is a reflective material.
The reason it looks like it's chrome is because it's reflecting everything.
If you do a little bit of research,
I just went to Dribbble and searched
Chrome style logo and found a whole bunch of reference.
Obviously, these are modern takes on an '80s effect,
but if you just search Google images,
even you'll find a lot of examples of this effect,
and the signature thing with a lot of them is the sky and ground reflection in the text.
You see that in basically every single one of these designs,
it's not exactly realistic because the background
itself doesn't necessarily have this reflection that we're seeing in it,
but it's instantly identifiable as that look.
You can do a little bit of your own research if you want
and find a look that you like yourself,
but I'm going to go with something very similar to this.
To make it even easier to replicate this reflection,
I'm actually just going to take a screenshot of this section of
the image and save it to my desktop so that I can bring it into After Effects.
Just import that screenshot and make a new composition that's also 1920 by 1080,
and I'll call this one Reflection Source,
click "Okay" and then bring that screenshot right into here.
What I want to do is basically make a gradient that recreates this reflection.
I really like the colors of this effect,
so that's what I'm going to base it on.
We'll be doing this with a shape layer and a shape layer gradient fill.
I'm going to double-click on the rectangle with nothing selected,
the rectangle tool, that will make a shape layer rectangle the size of my comp.
Then I want to turn off the stroke just by clicking on
"Stroke" and then that red line going through it to remove it.
Then for the fill,
we're going to make it a linear gradient.
I'll click "Okay" and I want to bring that screenshot back above this shape layer,
so just switch those around.
Then I'll mask off the gradient in this first couple of letters.
That way I can sample these colors really easily.
First thing I need to do is change the direction of that gradient.
I'm going to open up that shape layer and go into the contents,
into the rectangle and then the gradient fill.
There's a start point and an endpoint for the gradient.
If I click and drag on these handles,
I can freely adjust them,
but I just want to set this exposition on the endpoint to zero
and probably just adjust the y-values of the start and endpoints.
We'll just start with somewhere around there,
we'll say negative 250 and 250,
it doesn't really matter at this point.
But now that my gradient is aligned properly,
I can go into that gradient fill and start sampling these colors.
At the start point,
I want it to be this darker blue color.
I'll just grab my eyedropper and pick something about there,
maybe a little bit brighter,
a little more saturated.
Then I want to get to this bright blue color,
so I'm going to click to add another color stop somewhere around here.
Grab that eyedropper again.
Then sample this bright blue.
Again, I might make it a little more saturated.
I'm not going to worry too much about the positioning right now,
but I'll just try and get it close by clicking and dragging that color
stop so that it's aligned to about that position.
I need to add another stop and make that one,
it looks like white,
maybe with just a touch of color to it, little bit of pink.
Then we've got this hard line between the sky and the ground.
I need to add another color stop,
but then bring it very close to that previous color stop,
and this location value can be pretty helpful with that.
If I hold down the Control key,
I can adjust this a little bit more finely,
so put it about there and then select the next color,
which is this dark and deep,
bluish purple color, then I'll add another color stop.
We'll grab this lighter purply color,
maybe bring it down a little bit,
and obviously these need to move over,
maybe I'll just align that right about there.
Then we'll add another color stop and grab this hot pink color,
and that actually could have been the last color.
I'm going to click and drag this last one out so that this can be the very end.
But that worked out pretty well.
I'm going to grab this color stop right here and just drag it forward a little bit,
just so it's aligned with the top of that text.
But obviously all these color stops may need to change based on the size of your font,
so there's really no point in me making this line up perfectly.
But what I can do is compare how my colors are fading
into each other compared to the source materials.
You can see that this white streak right here stays brighter
a lot longer before fading into this blue than mine does.
It's white right here,
but it very quickly fades into that blue.
To fix that, I'm going to grab that color stop if I can find it,
then copy this hex code right here,
double-clicking on it and then Control C or Command C on a Mac,
add a second color stop.
Then paste that same value into it,
and now I can widen out this bar a little bit.
I'll bring this one back so that it's a nice harsh line right
there and a nice division between the sky and the ground.
But now I can pull this back a little bit more.
I might want to do the same thing for this blue color
where I just widen it a little bit more.
The way these color stops work is if you click to the right of a color stop,
it's going to add another one, the same color.
If you click to the left,
it's going to go to the one previous.
Basically, click to the right of whichever color stop you want to duplicate.
I wanted this one to be a duplicate and bring it back about that
far just so there's a little bit more of that
solid blue before it moves into the darker blue.
Then I want to saturate this last blue a little bit more,
maybe bring it closer to the actual blue
instead of so much teal and maybe make it a little bit brighter.
But there we go, that's very close, maybe down here,
I'll bring that pink up a little bit and maybe add
another purple here just to control those color bands a little bit more.
Somewhere around there, looks pretty good.
I'll click "Okay" and now I have my reflection gradient.
I can turn this screenshot off,
close that pre-comp, and in my Chrome Look comp,
I'm going to drag that reflection source into it,
I'm going to bring them reflection source into my pre-comps as well.
Now that that's here,
I can use this Chrome 3D Move comp as a matte for
the reflection so that the reflection only exists where this text does.
To do that, I'm just going to put the reflection below the text,
then under the track matte column,
which you don't see is this switch right here.
Make sure that's enabled.
Then I'll change that Track Matte to Alpha Matte,
and you see it says Chrome 3D Move.
When I do that, it's going to use the layer above it as a mask,
basically for that layer.
It's taking the Alpha channel of this layer and applying it to this layer,
and now the reflection is living right inside the text.
You can see that the alignment is imperfect and yours probably isn't either.
Again, it's all dependent on what your source comp is.
But we can adjust this very easily and be able to see what we're doing very easily.
If I just go into that reflection source,
I'm going to add an adjustment layer, go up to "Layer",
"New", "Adjustment Layer", and I'm going to add an effect called offset to it.
In my Effects & Presets panel,
I'm going to search "Offset" there it is under Distort,
click and drag that to the adjustment layer,
and all this lets me do is move
the layer's contents around without actually moving the layer.
I'm going to now have that ability to shift that around.
While I'm at it, I'm going to add the transform effect.
I'm going to search 'transform',
drag that in, and this will allow me to adjust the scale as well.
If I uncheck uniform scale,
I can scale this up or down to fit it to my text a little bit better. I'll undo that.
To be able to adjust these controls while going back into this comp,
all I have to do is click this little lock icon on that Effect Controls panel.
Then when I go back to this comp,
I still have access to those controls.
I can shift this up.
I do have to let go of my mouse to see the update,
but I can just adjust this slightly,
and let's say I want to scale it down a little bit.
I'll just grab that scale height, bring it in.
Then just fit this to my text a little bit better.
While this is a very basic thing that, we're doing,
it is already working towards that Chrome signature '80s look,
just because of the colors and the gradients and the way that it's set up.
But obviously we're going to take this a lot further.