hey what's up Andrew Kramer here for Video Copilot dotnet and welcome back to another very exciting tutorial today we're gonna be taking a look at our new After Effects plugin Video Copilot for now this plugin allows you to create some amazing 3d scenes inside of After Effects and it's 100% free we even made a trailer so let's go and take a look [Music] [Music] [Music] alright so there's a lot of really cool things that you can do with this plugin and you'll be even more amazed when you see how
fast and easy it is to use now some of you may know that about ten years ago I created an earth tutorial in After Effects using CC sphere now it might be the worst tutorial ever made but recently I posted a screenshot of the old tutorial next to the new one and there was this comment that said Andrew after ten years you're finally getting better good for you so that was encouraging today we're gonna create this entire earth scene along with the stars in the background and we're gonna dive into s
ome of the features like the automatic shadow illumination which allows the lights to turn on when it falls into the shadow of the earth you can even shift the edge to allow more overlapping or less and show you a lot of the unique features that help you layer these different effects now we're also going to be using the orb plugin to create a 360 degree star field all around us now before we get started on the earth tutorial let's do a quick walkthrough of the orb plugin and i can just show you
a few of the different features that we'll be using all right so once you download the orb plug-in from Video Copilot dotnet jump inside of After Effects and we're gonna create a new composition and we'll call this planet and dad will do HD settings and hit OK now to use the orb plugin you want to create a new solid that is the same size as the composition so call this orb and we'll hit OK then we could jump over here to the effects and presets and we'll type orb and we'll see Video Copilot vici
orb drop that onto our solid and right away we have a 3d sphere along with some plugin options now it is a 3d effect so we're gonna create a new camera 35-millimeter hit OK and let's go ahead and just create a light so do new light you can do a point light 100 hit okay and so now I can move this light around and we've got some 3d lighting but the power of this plugin comes from being able to load textures so go over here to the project and I've got this planet 4k texture I'm gonna bring it out
here now it's pretty large so I'm just gonna disable it maybe move it to the bottom then I'll click on our orb layer go up to the orbit plugin it'll open up the layer maps so for the diffuse I'll load the planet 4k and so now we can see the texture on the sphere I'm also going to load it into the glass map which is here and if we take the camera tool we can actually see some variation in the glossiness or the shininess of the material based on this map now I'm also going to load that planet text
ure into the bump map slot as well and this is where things start to get fun and to make the plug-in as fast as possible we've integrated color correction options for each of the map slots so you can control some of the surface properties we've even added UV texture options so you can change the way that the texture wraps around the surface so right now it's being spherically mapped we can change that to a box and this will actually project it with a little bit of feathering so we don't see any
seams we can also increase the repeat so say to 2 by 2 and as I take the camera tool I can zoom in here a bit we really have a nice result so it's really fast and this is the power of the physical based shader we have areas that are really diffused and also areas that are really shiny now another really cool thing we have is a built-in illumination map so if we go up here to the material options we can turn up the illumination so illumination turn that up you change the color maybe to like a blu
e color and then any illumination options we have something called a Fornell and what that will do is push the color to the edge and then we can turn up the fernell bias maybe turn up the illumination amount and so that's pretty cool and this can be used to create a bit of an atmosphere effect now the only problem is that we only want to see the atmosphere in the illuminated area so there's an option to control the shadow light in this case we want to move it to the right so that it's only visib
le in the light we can also turn the contrast down now one thing to keep in mind is that if we did want this to be in the atmosphere we might not want the bump effect to be so strong and so what we've added is a bump influence amount and if we turn this down it hides the bump map in the illumination alright so these are the basic settings of the orb plugin there's some transform settings here for rotation options to render the front or back faces of the sphere also some options to change the set
tings of the material so we could turn the glossiness down for the entire sphere there's also an option between a sphere and a hemisphere so hemisphere being a half a sphere orb also supports all types of After Effects lights so you could do point lights spotlights parallel lights spotlights even work if I hit a a with the cone angle so you can control their feathering and size color all that good stuff so very very handy to work natively inside of After Effects and of course there are many othe
r settings that we'll dive into as we create our earth alright so now that we have a basic overview of the orb plugin now we're going to step it up and create this entire earth scene alright so let's go ahead and get started so jump up here to the composition create a new position I'll call this earth board and 1920 by 1080 it looks good we'll hit okay then we'll create a new solid and call this orb earth hit okay I'll take the orb plugin VC orb drop it on to the solid now I'm going to create a
new camera hit OK and a new parallel light now a parallel light is probably the most similar to an actual star since it simulates a really far away light so hit OK and we can move this light a bit now of course we want this earth to be really realistic so let's just do a quick search for earth our diameter kilometres 12 thousand 742 kilometers okay and we'll just set the radius we'll just leave it at 200 all right so now we'll jump over here to the project and we're gonna bring out some textures
so I've got the clouds diffuse glossy illumination and normal bump and we'll drop these into the comp now they aren't pretty large so keep in mind if you have a graphics card with limited memory you may want to down res these to 4k or 2k and we're just gonna turn them off then I'll select our orb effect go over here to the effects and controls jump down to the maps and then we're gonna load the diffuse earth diffuse 6k and it's cool because the color correction options pop on there and for the
glossiness will load the earth glossiness and for the illumination will load the earth illumination now for the bump we're gonna load the earth normal and this is a type of bump map and maybe I should just go over this really quick so a normal map usually looks like this it's sort of purple and has some different colors that represent the bumpiness of the surface now a traditional bump map usually looks something like this as an elevation map now orb allows you to load either one if we jump into
the effects again here you can see I have the normal map loaded into the bump channel and I just need to turn on use normal bump so we'll take the camera tool here and if we zoom in here we can actually start to see a little bit of what's going on so we've got a pretty good result we've got some nice glossiness you can actually see that the parts of the land are not quite as glassy now what exactly is a glassy map so you might have heard of something like a specular map so if we open that up we
can see the world here and you can see that the oceans are mostly gray and lighter and the land is a bit darker and essentially what we're saying is we want the surface that's made of water to be more smooth and glassy and we want the land parts to be more diffused or less glassy now one really nice feature is that we have a gamma and brightness control for the map so if we change this you can actually see we're getting a slightly different result and this can be nice just to get those final tw
eaks now a couple other things to point out is that in the bump settings we have a setting called bump fall-off and if you turn that up it actually cuts the amount of bump that's allowed to go past this sort of Terminator line basically where the lighting edge ends and this is a really useful setting for just being able to control how far your bump mapping goes all right so next let's turn on our lights now we have an illumination map loaded and we can open up that map basically it's just a bunc
h of lights that are on for the various cities in the world now if we go to the orb plugin all we have to do is load a map and then turn up the illumination settings so as we turn that up we're gonna see those lights turn on now notice that the lights turn on in the illuminated area so if I just rotate our orb where the light is say splitting up an area with a lot of lights what we can do is go into the illumination options and there's a setting for shadow light and we'll turn it up and you'll s
ee that the light only shows up in the illuminated areas now if we turn it the other direction and then turn up the light contrast we can actually start to cut it off in the illuminated area so as we rotate this we can actually see it cutting out now later we might play around with the expansion which allows us to just shift where that edge is we can also change the illumination map color so we can tint it you know just with a little bit more saturation if we wanted to change the color of the li
ghts and you know we could do something really crazy but just a little bit more warmth I think that's kind of cool all right so let's go and move on to creating the atmosphere cloud layer so to do that we're gonna create a new solid we'll call this clouds and hit OK and we'll take the BC orb effect drop it on the layer now for this copy we're going to be using the earth cloud texture now that looks something like this now in order to get this to work with orbs so we can see through the clouds we
need to create an alpha Channel so what we'll do is take that cloud layer and choose layer pre-compose we're gonna leave all the attributes we're called earth clouds alpha and hit okay and so now if we double click it so what we're gonna do is add an effect called extract drop that on there now I do think I should encourage you to get FX consul another free plugin from Video Copilot it allows you to search for effects without having to go over to the effects and presets here but for now let's g
o ahead and use the extract so we'll grab this slide it over and then take the bottom point and drag that back over so now if we look at the Alpha Channel you can actually see that when we turn this on and off we're actually cropping out the color based on the luminance so that looks pretty good let's add a tint effect so we'll just type tint drop that on there we're gonna change the black color to a little bit of blue alright so it looks pretty much the same except now we have a bit of an alpha
Channel so we can close this and go back to our Earth orbit comp and we'll select the cloud layer with our orb effect we'll go down to the maps and we're going to load into the diffuse slot the earth clouds alpha that we just created and into the bump slot the very same map earth clouds 6k alpha alright so now we want to make the clouds look a little bit more puffy and a little less plastic so what we can do is turn up the illumination and that'll give it a bit of a self illumination and get ri
d of some of that plastic Ness now if we solo the layer you'll also see that it's really shiny so let's turn the glossiness down to really low like maybe 0.1 I think that looks pretty good now the other problem is we don't want to see the clouds in the shaded area so we can use our same illumination trick so we'll slide this over to the light side and then maybe now we can turn up the illumination just to bring some more brightness up all right so the edges look a little bit rough so here's a co
uple of things we're going to do so we'll turn up the illumination just a bit now if we go back down here to the bump fall-off for the map we can actually turn this up and it will reduce the area where the clouds overlap so maybe we'll just turn this down to about 0.93 or so and it'll go up here to the illumination options and we're gonna turn the bump influence down and what that will do is soften the clouds a bit and then we can even expand the clouds just a little bit and maybe we'll turn the
shadow contrast down just a touch and maybe I'll just turn up the illumination just a little bit alright so now let's go ahead and add a curves adjustment and here I just want to go to the Alpha Channel and just put a little bit of contrast and just make some of these clouds pop out a little bit more same with the RGB we'll just brighten it just a bit and one last thing let's change the color from white to a bit of an off-white color all right so if you miss a step or you need to go back in tim
e a little bit just roll it back a few seconds alright so next what I want to do is add a shadow underneath our atmosphere so in order to do that I want to take our cloud layer and I want to duplicate it now the idea here is that we want the atmosphere to be above the surface of the earth so if we increase the radius to about 202 that basically creates a larger sphere now if we take the cloud layer that's below and maybe unload the bump map since we don't really need that anymore and what we'll
do is add an effect called color correction tint and we'll just change this to black and so now we have a bit of a shadow now I'm also gonna add a fast blur turn on repeat edge pixels and maybe just 1.5 just want a little bit of softness we can let me go to the alpha channel here and tweak how dark some of the shaded areas are basically but you can see that really goes a long way to giving this earth more dimension now here's a really cool feature that we've added that you're gonna find a ton of
uses for so if we take our cloud layer so I'll rename this middle one hit enter new cloud shadow and we'll take the top copy and we'll go into the material settings for the advanced and there's an option called edge feather and edge shrink so if we look closely the orb is going past our Earth and that's because we made the radius larger so what we're actually gonna do is turn up the edge feather amount and turn up the shrink amount and it will actually contract or erode the edge of the sphere s
o that you can actually get it to align with your main planet this is looking good and next we want to add some nice atmospheric haze and this is where the blue comes in all right so let's create another new solid call this haze hit OK and we'll come over here we'll type orb grab the VC orb drop it onto that same layer now for this one we just want to create an atmospheric haze instance so we'll turn up the illumination turn it to be blue let me turn up the Fornell and the bias now we want to ge
t rid of the lighting so what we can do is turn the diffuse down and the specular highlights we can turn the specular down now we might want to turn the bias down just so it's a little bit wider but again we only want the haze to be in the illuminated area of the earth so again we'll turn that shadow light amount up and we get a nice cutoff that's gonna blend perfectly so we'll set the transfer mode to screen and now we're starting to get somewhere so we might want to play around with this edge
here so we could turn up the expansion turn the contrast down so it blends really nice alright so let's go and start polishing this a little bit we'll play around with this haze color maybe just make it a little bit more blue and turn that bias down a bit so it really washes that color across the surface all right so let's go and add an adjustment layer and we'll do a curves adjustment put a little gamma on this I think that looks good and we could even add a little bit of noise and this just lo
oks like a little bit of film grain but just a little bit alright so next we're gonna add some background stars so we'll do is create another new solid call this ours hit okay and we're gonna drop this down below the earth and again we're gonna drop the orbit plugin on to that layer we'll go back to the project I want to grab the star map and that's basically just a square 1k texture of some particles and what I'm gonna do is drop it into the project disable it select our star layer go down to t
he map settings so we're just gonna load it into the diffuse so star 1k now I'll go ahead and solo this so we can see what's going on you can see a little bit of the stars on the surface and here's the Alpha Channel there now what I'm gonna do is go to the advanced settings and we're going to turn on unlit only and then I'll get rid of the lighting and just render the texture as it is now what we need to do is render the inside of our sphere so if we change the surface from front to back now if
we go inside here we can actually see that we're inside the sphere so let's make the size of the sphere maybe something like 20,000 and now we have our star map the only promise the stars are a little bit stretched out so if we go to the UV settings change it from spherical to box and set the repeat to maybe 4 by 4 now we have some nice stars we can rotate the map to just to sort of vary where some of the seams come together turn on the other layers and we're looking pretty good we can even go h
alf resolution and just keep in mind the maps are gonna reload at half res but it'll definitely be a lot faster while you work all right so this is looking really nice what we could do is go over here to the project and I just have a blue haze picture that we could take and just drop it on top and set it to Green and this just gives us a little bit of that Spacey atmosphere feel now one thing I want to do is just give it a little bit more contrast so that this blends a little bit nicer so if we
go to the color correction layer and maybe just add a little bit more contrast here and just keep in mind that there will be some variation between half res and full res so you want to make sure you're keeping an eye on that all right so let's see if we can create a halo so we'll duplicate our haze layer and we'll solo it here real quick and let's turn up the Fornell bias and maybe turn the brightness up here and I think this is a nice result for maybe a more realistic looking earth maybe a slig
htly less stylistic version but what we also can do is add a glow and like I like to do is duplicate the glow add another one with a slightly larger radius and we'll just play around with the intensity of both of them and then maybe a little bit of color correction maybe desaturate it just a bit so that looks pretty good now keep in mind that we can do that trick where we soften the edge to all of the layers so we can go to the or Blair feather the edge just a touch and the haze layer as well an
d that will just get rid of that really harshness of the planet edge and just leave us with a much nicer result all right so it's looking cool maybe a few other tweaks we could do here if we go to the earth instance we could play around with the expansion of the illumination and maybe overlap it just a little bit as if some people are just turning their lights on a little bit too early all right let's go and add a quick camera movement we'll grab our camera layer hit P hold shift hit 8th and we'
re gonna keyframe the position and point of interest we'll move forward maybe out 75 frames and we'll take the camera tool maybe we'll go to half res so it's a little smoother and we just want to make a very small movement keep in mind that in space you don't want to make the movements too fast or too large so that it feels real Oh times moving backwards Superman really screwed us over alright so this is looking pretty good we could probably spend a little bit more time finessing it there's lots
of other cool things that you can do with this plugin although one thing does come to mind is the Universal Pictures logo animation now maybe with a little bit of work we could recreate this although I'm thinking I'm thinking more like the one from the 1930s nice yeah this is looking good this is alright guys thanks so much for watching be sure to download this plugin have fun experiment and if you do like what we're doing here and you want to support us check out some of our other plugins elem
ent 3d optical flares 3d model packs all that stuff goes a long way to help support us so we can keep making awesome free plugins like this so thanks so much and I'm Andrew Kramer we will see you next time
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