Next, I want to show you a little trick that I came up with
for creating a fake extrusion to a 2D layer.
Because remember this is all just 2D layers right now,
this is all based on this one-flat solid piece of text.
But we're going to add an extrusion here to make it look like it's truly
3D and it doesn't even give that much
of a render hit so I think it's a really cool trick.
I'm going to go back to my main render comp with this chrome look pre-comp,
that's where we just were inside and I'm going to pre-compose this again.
Control shift C or Command shift C on a Mac
and I'm going to rename this one Chrome Extrusion.
Leave all attributes, it's fine, click "Okay."
I'll go into that pre-comp,
and I'm just going to close these other ones just for organization.
We're going to use a couple of expressions for this trick as well,
but they're not going to be nearly as complex.
We are however, going to make some custom controls using Expression Controls.
Let's go up to the Effect menu,
down to Expression Controls,
and all of these are effects that just give us values that we can tie expressions to.
We're going to need a point control,
so I'm going to add that and then we're going to go back up to Effect,
Expression Controls, and down to Slider Control.
These are two empty effects,
they don't do anything on their own,
they just give me a two value array for
a point control and the Slider gives me just a sliding value,
one single value property.
Next I'll add an actual effect,
so I'll go to my Effects and Presets,
and type in transform and bring that out.
I'm going to go ahead and rename this effect.
You can rename any effect the same way that you rename a layer.
Just have it selected. Press "Return" to start editing.
I'm going to rename this Extrusion Transform and put one at the end,
because we're going to be duplicating this and I want to keep track of the numbers.
While we're at it, let's rename Point Control to
Extrusion Depth and the Slider Control to Extrusion Perspective.
It'll make sense why we're naming that in just a little bit.
Now, we're going to link a couple of these properties
to these two effects using expressions.
What this transform effect does,
is it just gives you a layer of transform controls,
the same as the actual transform controls for the layer.
But they're completely independent of
the actual layers' transform controls so I can shift the layers,
position around, I can scale it up and down, rotate it,
skew it, that's one feature that it has that the regular transform controls don't,
but it just gives you those transform controls in the form of
an effect rather than the actual layer controls.
We need to link the position to the Extrusion Depth point control.
I just double-clicked on position to bring it up down here in my layers,
and I'm just going to grab that property pick whip right here,
click and drag up to the Extrusion Depth point value.
With that highlighted, I'll let go.
After Effects automatically generates the expression,
I didn't have to write anything,
but now this is linked to that value.
Because it had the same value of 960 by 540, nothing changed,
but I can now effect it with that point control rather than this value right here.
You can think of that property pick whip without changing any of the expression,
like parenting properties instead of parenting layers.
Next, I want to take the Scale and link that to the Extrusion Perspective Slider.
Click and drag on that property pick whip up to the Extrusion Perspective Slider,
let go and that is going to change because the slider value was
set to zero and the scale needs to be 100 percent to be able to see it,
so we basically turned it off.
If I scale this back up to 100,
we'll get back to where we were.
But I actually want to modify this a little bit.
I'm going to leave that at zero and we're going to go into the expression in this case,
and just modify it very simply.
I'm going to click in here to edit and at the beginning of this line of code,
I'm just going to type in the number 100 minus,
and what that's going to do is basically reverse it,
so that zero is now full-scale and as I increase this to 100,
that will make it invisible.
But I want to make this a little bit more sensitive so that as I increase this number,
it doesn't scale down quite so much.
I'm going to go into that effect expression one more time,
and at the end of this line of code,
I'm just going to divide the final value by 100,
basically making this a 100 times less sensitive.
If I increase this value,
you can see that the scaling is happening much more finely.
I'd have to go all the way up to 10,000 to get that to be zero scale.
If I back it off of 10,000 then it's going to be scaling back up.
That'll be really useful in just a minute,
but I'm going to reset that back down to zero for now and this is all set,
so I'm just going to collapse that.
Then I want to add another effect,
this time it's called CC Composite.
What CC Composite does is basically,
duplicates the original layer prior to
any effects being applied and sticks it right back on top,
at least by default, it's set to composite in front.
You can composite this in any one of these blend modes,
and it's a super useful effect.
I want to make sure that I un-check RGB only so that it
includes the Alpha channel and then I'll rename this effect,
Extrusion CC Composite 1.
That's it for that effect,
I'll just close that up.
Now, if I grab my extrusion depth and just shift it around,
you can see that I basically have two copies even though there's only one layer.
This is what I was saying with that CC Composite.
It's taking the original unfiltered,
unaffected layer, and compositing it back on top.
If change it from in front to behind,
then it's going to shift it behind.
But we want it in front and that's what's going to drive this entire fake extrusion.
Let me reset this back down,
collapse that up again.
What I need to do now,
is duplicate this extrusion and CC Composite a whole bunch of times.
Just to make this a little bit clearer as to what's happening,
I'm going to just bring this point down a little
bit and scale it down just a little bit as well.
Now, I'm going to grab these two effects,
Control or Command D to duplicate them and this is going to be
easier to see down here because it doesn't auto expand them.
But then I'll just grab those two effects and drag them below so that
we have this pattern of the extrusion transform, extrusion composite.
I'm just going to keep duplicating these.
Take a look at what we're seeing up here,
we have multiple copies now and they're each being offset by an incremental amount.
If I select these four effects again,
duplicate with Control or Command D,
drag them to the bottom of the effect stack,
it's just going to keep making more and more copies of them,
and offsetting them incrementally.
I'm just going to do this a whole bunch of times.
Let's see, this has about 16 copies,
maybe I'll do it one more time.
Just grab all of those effects,
Control D to duplicate,
and then click and drag down so that they all stay in order.
Now you can see that we've got this trailing extrusion effect.
It's not finished yet,
but it's getting there and if we go back to the Extrusion Depth, in fact,
let me just select all of my effects in my Effects Controls by selecting any one of them,
pressing Control or Command A and then collapsing one of them,
and then I'll just click over here to de-select and pop open these two that I care about.
Now, if I shift this around,
I can really change the way that my extrusion looks,
so 540 would be the default.
If I just increase this by one pixel,
you'll see that it has a pretty drastic effect.
But let's say 542, and then I'll
shift around this perspective so you can see what that's doing.
It's basically, creating more or less perspective on the text.
If I want no perspective,
I set it to zero,
I could set this back down to 540 and then you don't see anything.
But if I increase that perspective,
even just a little bit,
you can see that now we have this text that looks like it's facing the camera
perfectly and it's just got that nice clean extrusion.
This is all fake,
it's all just a bunch of duplicates,
but it's doing a really good job of making this text look 3D.
Now, I don't want the extrusion to be the exact same colors as the face of the text,
so we're going to add a couple more effects at the bottom here.
Let's bring up the tint effect,
drag that to the bottom of the effect stack,
and that's just going to get rid of all the color.
But what I want to do is use this to give it a color cast.
I want to make both of these colors the same color,
probably some kind of a dark blue,
purply blue, we'll try that.
Then I'll just make the map black color the same by using the eyedropper right here.
That's going to basically, fill the layer with that color,
but if I use the amount to tint value,
I can back it off a little bit so that we still have
some of that original color showing through.
But what am I going to do about the face of the text?
Well, simple, we're just going to add another CC Composite.
Let me bring that backup,
add it at the very end of the layer stack,
make sure to un-check RGB only so
that it's looking at the Alpha channel of the original layer
as well and that's going to place that first layer right back on top.
Now, this did slow down my render time,
I probably don't need quite so many instances of all of this.
I'm just going to grab a handful of them and make sure
that I grab the transform at the top,
composite at the bottom,
and then I'll just hit "Delete."
That is going to take away some of the extrusion
so I'll probably change these values a little bit,
maybe go to 35 on that perspective.
But now that should render a little bit more quickly.
Basically, you just want as many copies of this as you need.
If I took away a whole bunch of these,
let's say all the way up to here,
and deleted and then increased that even more,
you can start to see
the segmentation between each layer and that's what we want to try to avoid.
Let me just duplicate a handful of these again and
collapse them so it's easier to see and then drag it down,
and then maybe do that one more time.
Duplicate, collapse.
Oops, I just lost my selection by accidentally clicking.
If that happens to you just undo,
it will go back to before you duplicated.
I can duplicate one more time,
collapse, and then drag down.
As long as you're happy with the way that yours looks at
100 percent, we can call it good.
Remember that tint effect is what's driving
the shading of the extrusion and to make this even easier to adjust,
so I don't have to change one color and then use the eyedropper.
I'm just going to double-click on one of these so I can see the effects down here,
and I'll grab the Map White To and
just use the property pick whip to link it to the black.
That way I only have to change one color for them both to update.
You can play around with this,
choose whatever color scheme you want,
and adjust the amount of tint to your own taste.
I'll probably make that extrusion a little bit smaller now,
but now we have a very convincing 3D effect.
The problem is, let me give myself a little bit more room,
as this moves back towards the camera you can see that the illusion breaks.
That is not how it should be extruded when the text is rotated like that.
It's only working when it's straight on.
Well, in the exact same way that we linked the reflection offset
to the rotation of that text layer in the 3D move comp,
we're going to link the extrusion depths y-value to that rotation as well.
We'll probably even add in some of the perspective control
to it so that once again it ends up like this,
but as the text rotates it's going to adjust for proper perspective and extrusion.
Let's give ourselves a little bit more room.
Bring up the extrusion perspective and
the depths expression controls and then go into my project and into the pre-comps,
let's move that extrusion comp down there,
and we need that 3D move comp again.
Let's go into that, and I'm going to drag that
to this upper position so we can stack the two timelines again.
That way I can reference the properties that I'm concerned with.
I just realized I named this Extrusion Depth.
I should have named it Extrusion Direction.
I'm just going to rename that really quickly.
But let's add an expression on the point control by holding Alt
or Option on a Mac and clicking on the stopwatch.
Let's get a little bit more room here.
It's a little tight on my screen recording, but here we go.
I need to start by making a variable for that x rotation,
so var for variable,
and we'll call this r for rotation equals,
and then use the expression pick whip to grab the x rotation.
I'll finish that line off with a semicolon and then drop down a line.
Now remember this is a two-value array,
so I need to define a variable just to make my code
a little bit simpler so I can target that part of the array.
I'm going to say var, l for linear,
and then equals, and now I can write my linear expression.
Just like before, we're going to say linear and auto fill,
it gives me those parentheses,
and we're going to target the variable r for that x rotation,
comma, and we're going to again put in
negative 90 for the minimum value that we care about,
comma 0 for zero degrees rotation as the maximum value that we care about.
I want to map those two values to
again something I'm not quite sure yet for the minimum and 540 for the maximum.
Let's say 545 because remember
this adjustment makes a big difference in the look of the extrusion.
We'll just say 545, 540 because the resting position again is 540 pixels.
Then we'll just go outside those parentheses and finish that with a semicolon,
drop down two lines,
and then write an array.
Remember you do that by writing an open square bracket,
it'll auto fill the closing square bracket and I'm just going to type in a value
[0] for the first value that references this value right here remember,
comma l for the second value,
this linear expression up here.
Finish it all off with a semicolon and click off.
Now if we I out a little bit and pan around,
we should be able to see that as I backup in
time this value is changing and the extrusion is shifting a little bit.
It looks like 545 might not be quite enough,
so let's back it up to about here where we can see how
that extrusion should be shaped and then just edit this expression one more time.
Maybe we'll change it five more pixels and go to 550.
Apply that. Now that extrusion looks like it might be angled properly.
There's a lot of division here,
so we might need to play around with how many copies of
those effects we have or decrease the amount of extrusion there is,
but the angle is really close.
I might increase it just a couple more pixels, 552,
and I'm basically just trying to imagine this being a 90-degree angle right there.
I think that's much better.
Let's just call that good for now and scrub through this a little bit.
At the start when it flies in it's nice and aligned,
and as it's rotating up it appears as if that extrusion is
rotating properly with it until it gets to its final resting state right there.
I'm going to close out this Chrome 3D move
so that we can see the comp a little bit cleaner,
and I think it looks really good.
Maybe I'll turn down that extrusion depth a little bit,
and I'll do that with the extrusion perspective control.
Honestly, this is probably what I could have named extrusion depth,
maybe that makes more sense.
I'm going to rename that extrusion depth,
and now those controls just make a little bit more sense.
I don't want this to still look extremely thick,
so maybe I'll back that up just a little bit
more just so that we have that nice extrusion there,
but that should take care of seeing those divisions as it gets closer to the camera.
But as I'm backing up,
you can really see those division cell as it's closer to the camera.
Now I'm realizing that's just because this is not real 3D,
so After Effects does not know that the extrusion should be
different when the text is closer to the camera than when it is further away.
Let's just borrow this expression we just wrote on the extrusion direction point control.
I'm just going to select it, Control C or Command C to copy it,
and just put it onto the extrusion depth and
modify it slightly so it works with this value.
Let's remember that we want the final value to be 25.
I'll alt or option-click on the stopwatch to add an expression and paste,
and then just give myself a little bit more room.
We can modify this so that it's not in
an array because this is a single value, it's not an array.
I'm going to just get rid of this part of the expression.
Since it's only a single property,
I can actually get rid of this variable and drop this down as my expression.
Now, this is not going to give me the correct values because these are
the pixel values for the point controller and we need a slider that ends at 25.
I know that the maximum new value should be 25 at its resting point,
but I have no idea what the minimum value should be.
Let's go back to where we can see that text rotated again,
and this is obviously way out of work because it's set to
552 when the x rotation of the text is at negative 90.
This should probably be something smaller than 25.
Why don't we try 15 and see what that looks like?
Yeah, I think that looks a little bit better.
Let me just disable this expression by clicking on this equals sign
and show you that this isn't exactly the extrusion depth.
Now that I decided to actually name it that,
it's just changing the scale of all of these transform effects.
For what we need I'm pretty sure 15 and 25 is going to work fine,
but I'm going to need to modify
the extrusion direction expression just a little bit as well,
because it's a combination of these two effects that gives us this extrusion.
Instead of 552, let's dial this back to, say, 545 again.
This might just take a little bit of back and forth between the two properties.
Now that that is a little bit more compact,
it's not such a big extrusion.
I think that I need to shift it forward just a little bit more,
so maybe we'll go back to our extrusion depths and change
the minimum value to 10 and that's looking pretty good.
If I just back this up to where we can just start to see that text,
I can verify that that extrusion is looking pretty good.
I think I'm happy with that.
I'm going to preview this so we can take a look at it as a whole. There we go.
That is looking pretty convincing as a 3D extrusion,
but it's completely faked with just a whole bunch of
transform effects and CC composite effects. Very cool.
Now, you can modify these values to end up however you want.
If you don't want to be able to see the extrusion at the resolve of this logo,
then we can just change the extrusion depth from 25 to 0,
and it's basically going to disappear as it gets to that resting point.
We'll see the extrusion at this point because of our linear expression,
but as it rotates to zero degrees it disappears.
Play around with that, modify these values to be whatever you want.
One thing that I did notice as I was previewing this,
if I switch back to my full resolution and zoom in here on the extrusion,
it's pretty soft and that's probably
just an artifact of the way that all of the CC composites are working together.
So I'm going to add one more effect to this effect stack.
I'm just going to search for levels and I'm going to
use this right before the tint effect,
so I'm going to drag it right there.
What this is going to allow me to do is basically crush up or add contrast to
the alpha channel by switching my levels channel from RGB to alpha.
Then I'm just going to crush that alpha by bringing
these two control points towards the center of the graph.
You can see how that really sharpened up the edges of that extrusion.
If turn that off and back on,
you can see the difference.
It's softer there, much sharper there.
I don't need to overdo this, it doesn't need to be super crunchy,
but that just made everything a little bit tighter there.
Because of the way that we set this up,
you can put anything before
this final CC composite effect and it will only affect the extrusion.
If you wanted to make this hot pink and have a crazy glow to it,
you could do that really simply just by grabbing
this and putting it just before the last CC composite.
To make it really nice and shiny,
you could turn down the tint amount a little bit to
get more of that original color in there.
It's totally up to you what you want to do with that extrusion.
I'm going to get rid of that glow,
turn this back to a dark blue color.
But I do like being able to see some of that reflection in there,
so maybe I'll just leave that tint value
a little bit lower and dark in that blue color a little bit.
Looking good. That's it for my trick for making
this faux-extrusion inside of After Effects.