Illustrator to After Effects: 3D Model Animation Workflow

welcome to my latest brainchild animated movie  posters it's like a wild ride through my private cinematic cosmos and you are more than welcome to  join me for this journey now if you are wondering what spark this quirky adventure check out the  full story in the link I dropped below I'm going to dive head first into after effects and its  gang of plugins to make my Visions pop but hey let's keep those expectations in check shall we  so what's the deal with this animated poster you ask well I'm

going to go back into my favorite  films hunt down the perfect aha moment and give it a lively spin think of them almost like a mini  Love Letters to cinema greatness oh and as a fair warning some spoilers may sneak in so make sure  to watch the movie first now about these tutorials they are not your typical step by step guides  no more like a free willing discussion with a Sprinkle of Gossip a dash of dry humor as you know  me and hopefully a nugget or two of wisdom but hey I'm all ears to hear

your ideas and critiques as  I unleash these babies into the wild all righty enough chitchat let's dive in into the first  movie poster tribute for day leave lights camera action okay so they live is a Sci-Fi action horror  film from 1988 directed by John Carpenter it follows a Drifter who discover special sunglasses  that reveal the true nature of the ruling class who are actually aliens manipulating humanity  through subliminal messages with the glasses he joined the resistance to expose the

aliens control  and awaken others to the truth the movie is based on a 1963 short story 8:00 in the morning by Ray  Nelson it's really short only six pages so if you have time I highly recommend reading it anyway  I adore John Carpenter's work and this one is no exception I also love all the artwork that  was created for this film in fact in my living room I have an alternative version of this movie  poster that I grabbed at Comic Con a few years ago a daily reminder of my deep admiration for  C

arpenters work so when I decided to create my version I started in illustrator and created this  artwork inspired by a few posters that I found on the internet floor there are many more but I  ended up with these six options none of which by the way is the official poster just in case you  are curious and this one in the lower corner is the print that I have on my wall downstairs looks  nice doesn't it anyhow I created the alien face piece by piece using this muted color scheme and  the plan was

to use the relatively new 3D inflate option to bloat the and give it some volume and  then export it with its texture to After Effects where I can orbit around it and zoom out or maybe  zoom in while revealing the important message of the movie which is of course obey followed by the  name of the title and the director so I separated the text elements to their own layer as well as  the movie title which I converted to outline so I can punch a hole into the letters and then  distorted it into th

is colar shape now I knew that I must include the sunglasses image somehow  as this is a major part of the movie I remind you that wearing these unique sunglasses allow you to  spot the aliens as I told you there are going to be some spoilers here and if you haven't seen the  movies I'm just going to destroy part of it for you or maybe you are just an alien and you you are  still obeying H never mind I'm drifting so as I said I knew that I wanted to use these sunglasses  but I didn't have a clue

on how and where so I left it for a later stage in hope to somehow  find a solution when I'm working or maybe it will present itself who knows this is a bad idea uh but  uh you know I'm on a time frame so um let's just move on so um what I forgot to tell you by the  way are the limitation the technical limitation that I've put in place for this project and the  one that will follow so here they are I set the size of the poster to 1400 by 1800 pixels which is  based on the same aspect ratio of a

printed poster but it doesn't confirm to any common social size  oh yes I want to be different the length of the animation shouldn't exceed 10 seconds and I must  execute it using only after effects now plugins are allowed and I can use any software I want to  create and prepare elements but I must animate everything and composite the final result inside  after effects and the reason for this is because we are under a tight deadline the animation should  be completed in less than 3 hours now th

ere are a few exceptions that I've managed to squeeze  in into this very tough client imaginary brief for example the R&D and render time should be  considered not part of the deadline The motto I'm embracing here is creativity loves a good straight  jacket okay so now that we know all the boring stuff let's put it to the test and this brings  us to the main event of this tutorial creating 3D models from illustrator now I discovered it by  taking the long way home but since I respect your time a

ssuming you are still here with me I'll  save you the guessing work and tell you that you need to create a unified 3D object from all  the vectors if you want to bring them together to After Effects and then apply shadows and  interact with other 3D models so to do this we need to group everything and only then apply  the inflate operation from the 3d and material panel now if you're going to take a look at the  appearance panel here after I select the group you'll see that by doing so we have a

single  instance of the 3d and materials effect applied to everything which is going to be much easier  to manage and of course it will also register as one single 3D object when we'll export it to After  Effects but before doing that let's make sure that we are using the front preset and then change the  depth to 30 and TI inflate both sides now as you can see every little change that I'll make here  will be followed by a progress bar which makes this process a bit tedious but will also save y

ou  tons of time and manual labor comparing to model this alien phase in 3D app like blenders Cinema 4D  or whatever you are using so I'm going to say that it is worth the wait time I also recommend not  to play with this articulated model here inside illustrator unless you have a very beefy machine  we'll do all the fancy 3D stuff inside After Effects so now let's export the model and for that  I'm going to say goodbye to the 3D and material panel and then I'll go to the layers panel select  th

is group and click on this tiny icon which will send this layer to the asset export panel after  showing us of course another progress bar over here I'm going to change the format to GLTF and  then I'll click on export choose my destination and sip another couple tea coffee water or beer  whatever makes you happy while you are watching Another progress bar filling just in front of  you now before we'll switch to After Effects I will revert this document back to its original  state because this i

s what I need inside after effects to animate if you want you can save a copy  of this version with the 3D model but for me it's unnecessary because it will actually slow down  my process inside after effects if I import a 3D layer which is now a 3D object inside illustrator  so this is my recommendation inside After Effects I'll start by importing the GLTF 3D model which  will come in its own folder we're going to return to it in a moment but now I'll import the  multi-layer illustrator documen

t and I'll create a com out of it setting the footage Dimensions  to the layer size I'll open this composition and verify that it is set to 10 seconds long and here  you can choose your favorite frame rate so I'll set mine to 30 frames per second next I'll drag  the 3D model and using this dialog box that I'm seeing on screen I'll scale it to be more or less  the same size as the original layer so let's go with 500% I'll click okay and then I'll move it  to place using position and of course if

I need I can scale it up and I can also switch off the  visibility of the original alien face logo now I'm going to convert the background layer to  a 3D layer so it can interact with the model and I'm also going to send it back in z space  to let's say 120 and compensate by scaling it up so it will fill the screen this will help us  when we are going to enable lights and shadows so you know what actually let's do it now I'll  add an environment light with 100% intensity and cast Shadows turned

on and make sure that all 3D  layers are in the same bin meaning one under the other and this means that no 2D layers are in  between them and if you are doing so I mean two layers are going to break the render so they can  cause the Shadows not to render anyhow now that I said it correctly I think I can have a look at  it and I think it looks quite cool but we need to bring the textures and of course don't forget  the sunglasses let's begin with the movie title I'll select that day leave layer

and convert it to  shape so I can extrude these vectors by choosing create create shapes from vector layer then I'll  convert the layer itself to 3D and drag it above the alien face I'll open its geometry options  and I'll set the Extrusion depth to 1,000 and the bevel style to convex later I'm planning to  animate the Z position making the title slide into its place from the front or in front of the  camera but now let's bring the other text layers which are still live type inside illustrator a

nd  for that you have a few ways to work one way is to return to illustrator and if you have it you  can use the overload Plug-In or extension which is is of course a paid one and this is going  to help you send vectors and Native text layers from illustrator directly to After Effects and  by the way vice versa however if you don't own it you can also use copy and paste so I'll select  the OBEY text layer and copy it to the clipboard by pressing of course command C then I'll switch  back to Afte

r Effects and create a new text layer by pressing command option shift T now I can  press command V and paste this text which is going to bring everything so the font the leading  the tracking everything survived let's return back to illustrator and repeat the same process  for the John Carpenter's text so I'll copy it from AI which is Adobe Illustrator and then  switch back to After Effects create a new text layer and paste the text over here now I need to  convert these titles to 3D layers and

then place them in the desired position so to do it I'll  click on the draft 3D button this is going to turn off the Shadows but everything now is going  to work in real time so I can quickly extrude the titles and place them where they need to be I'll  start with the obey text which I'm going to drag 80 pixels closer to us so negative 80 and I'll do  it only on its Zed axis of course which is also Z Axis or Zod if you're coming from a DC World.  "kneel before zod" I'm also going to hold down t

he command key and double click on the Pan behind  tool and this is going to Center The Anchor Point in the middle of the text which is going to help  me animate it later I'll set the Extrusion for it to 400 and place it just Between the Eyes again  the plan here is to animate the position of the layer over time which is going going to be added  to a simple camera motion okay I'll now attend to the director's name I'll start by setting the  Anchor Point to the middle of the layer using the same

keyboard shortcut so command double  click while pressing on the anchor tool or the Pan behind and then I'll drag it above the  alien's head here I'll try to place it as closer to the head as possible so maybe 50 on the Z and  finally I'll set its Extrusion to 200 and lower it again almost until it will touch the head of the  alien I also want to override the side color for this object so I'll add a side color animator  to this text and in this instance I think I'm going to leave the default ado

be red color because  after all this is a horror movie now that all the layers are in place we can animate the camera but  hey something is still missing of course we need to add the sunglasses model so as usual I found  this 3D model of sunglasses on sketch poop this is courtesy of gin been or ghinabin, I need to  learn how to read and the only issue here is that I need to integrate it of course into the story  um now the role the sunglasses in the movies is critical by wearing them as I alread

y told you  you can tell who is human and who is alien but since I don't have any human here I decided to  betray the movie plot just wear it on the alien face now I know what you are thinking how can I  do this it is so offensive and um just basically destroying the entire story and I must admit it's  also a stupid move uh but I don't care I just want the sunglasses to be in the poster so I'll bring  them into this composition and then I'm going to move them forward so they are going to be in 

front of the alien face and then scale down this model and place them on the alien face nose  so something like this yeah doesn't make sense but yeah deal with it okay uh now it's time to  create the camera and animate it as well as maybe also animate all the relevant layers so everything  is going to converge together so since I already explained my intention and animating the camera is  something that I showed you million times before so I'm going to save the trouble and just go  to this compo

sition where I already animated the camera and the relevant object and this is  starting from an extreme closeup of the face and then pulling out while as I promised some of  the text layers are settling into their places I also added some easy using the graph editor and to  add continuous motion to the camera I've used my favorite trick which is animating the zoom value  so after the animation finishes the camera still move slowly just to make sure that I'm following  the golden rule of Motion

Graphics which is every pixel must move until the end stupid rule but also  makes sense I suppose okay perfect I'm happy from what I'm seeing and now it's time to render this  comp so since I'm using the advanced 3D renderer there are a few limitations we should take under  account first the quality and the shadow settings you can get to those by visiting the renderer op  options settings and I landed on these settings render quality is set to 10 shadows resolution is  half in my case and the sm

oothness is three the casting box size is 500 and you can read the XYZ  values and those numbers are going to obviously change according to the size of your composition  and the distance between the 3D layers um you can also notice hopefully through the YouTube  compression that the result that I'm getting is very noisy and super sharp I'll show you how to  remedy this in a moment but what's important is that using these render settings the render time  is relatively fast I'll open up the render

queue and show you that I've already rendered this and  on my MacBook Pro M1 Max this took approximately 20 minutes to finish which is reasonable so now  I can drag the render file back from the render queue to the project and create a new composition  from this file I'll start by duplicating the layer and to this duplicate I'll apply the depth  scanner plugin now this is the third party effect that uses artificial intelligence to create  an estimated depth map you can learn more about it if yo

u want by visiting the affiliate link  below and if I'll just show you this letter you can see the outcome of this effect now you can  tune up these settings as you need but I found out that for the most part it does a really good  job with the default setting so I'm going to leave everything as is and go and select the upper copy  so I will enable it and then I'll apply to it the camera lens blur effect I'll set the blur map  to the layer below and I'm going to take under account the effects an

d masks I'll also invert  the map and then click to create a key frame for the Blair focal distance because I want to create  a rack focus effect so by the end I want to make everything almost in full focus I'll start by  using a value of 15 for the blur radius at the beginning of this composition and I'll set a key  frame for it as well then I'll move the playhead to 7 Seconds where the animation settles in and  change the blur to 2 and the blur focal distance to 120 I don't want to take the ra

dius all the way  to zero because I don't like it to be so sharp and synthetic and I also want to try and hide some  of the noise artefacts that we got using those low render settings so let's preview it and see  how this looks quite nice I must say um now I also added a sound for this but since it is is  based on the original movie theme I'm not going to risk it over here instead you can listen to it  on my other socials and by the way um if you like this video maybe um just like it and also ad

d a  comment, I hear that each one of these can really help to grow small channels like mine so again  thank you so much for your support anyhow this is it for this one I hope this short Journey  was entertaining and maybe also you learned something new thank you as always for sticking  until the end and I will see you in the next one