(Originally posted May 31st 2024)
For as long as I’ve used it, After Effects has been a program mixing 2D compositions with the option to position layers in 3D space, apply lighting and move a camera in that 3D space.
Adobe has recently introduced new 3D features to a After Effects Beta. For someone like me, who sometimes animates paintings with parallax and is no stranger to 3D modeling, finding out their extents by testing them in a simple scene seemed like an interesting topic to delve into.
With the new tools, it’s possible to set up a 3D scene like the video below, directly in AE without plugins. However, there are no modeling tools beyond extruding and beveling shapes and text, so the 3D models would have to be brought from another piece of software.
Short summary of my notions:
- The new renderer called Advanced 3D Renderer seemed very fast to render a 3D composition with
- Importing 3d models with PBR materials and bone animations is possible (though some features missing, like shadows for most lights, definitely reflect that it’s still in Beta)
- Environment Light with a HDRI map can be used to light your scene, and it can cast nice looking shadows
- Extruding and beveling Text- and Shape Layers, and curved footage, which were previously available in the Cinema 4D renderer, are also supported in the Advanced 3D Renderer.
Limitations to keep in mind:
- Features that don’t work yet in Beta: shadows (except for Environment Lights), motion blur (except if you add Pixel Motion Blur on an Adjustment Layer), depth of field (except if you add it as a 3D Channel Effect, which has its drawbacks), as well as effects on 3D layers and precomps of 3D scenes
- Ability to do 3D modeling or modify geometry of imported models isn’t in the pipeline according to Adobe’s FAQ. So this won’t be a full substitute to using other 3D packages, but for something like adding a 3D object to a composited sequence, the features will give an option of a faster workflow.
In this post, I’ll go through my experiments with the new features.
1. Animated butterfly
Exporting bone animation
This is the bone animation, with which I exported the butterfly from Blender.
After Effects can currently use 3d files of OBJ, GLTF and GLB format (GLTF and GLB being just ASCII and binary version of the same format). OBJ doesn’t include skinning and animations, so I used GLB. Importing the model in After Effects was as easy as dragging and dropping it in the Composition window, and pressing OK in this prompt.
If the model has several animations, you can pick the one you want to use from the list shown below:
As a nifty detail, you can also animate Time Remapping of the imported animation, the same way you would with footage (which is how I animated the butterfly to flap its wings at different speeds throughout the video, using the one looping animation clip)
Trying to import a Shape Key animation
Just for the sake of experimentation, I tried to export the animation as a Shape Key* animation. A 3d model can have several Shape Keys, which are different arrangements of the same vertices. You can turn them on and off with a slider to adjust and animate the form of the model. They’re often used for facial expressions or features for example.
*same as BlendShape or Morph Target in other 3D software
In After Effects, the Shape Key animation appeared as an animation clip, but the model didn’t move (although checking with import to Blender, it exported correctly).
2. Grass / placing objects
I made a very simple grass asset by using a transparent grass texture I painted in Photoshop, on a plane.
For the ground below the grass patches, I used an image with noise map as a displacement map for a subdivided plane in Blender.
Positioning the grass patches on a ground plane in After Effects was quite slow, since moving the view is as difficult as it’s always been with the camera tools. In hindsight, it would’ve definitely been handier to combine the grass patches with the ground plane in Blender before exporting.
With the grass patches placed in After Effects, I noticed that the objects too far from the center of the world coordinates didn’t cast shadows:
However, I fixed this by linking all 3D layers (that weren’t linked to something else) to a single 3D null layer (placed at the center of the world in 1920, 1080, 0 since my comp was in UHD resolution). That’s a good way to do all-encompassing scaling and positioning changes in AE, even if there’s position or scale animation on some of the layers. Here’s the result, with the grass patches further away as well now casting shadows:
3. Beveled Text and Shapes
Using the Advanced Renderer, you can extrude a text layer without having to deal with the slowness of the Cinema 4D renderer. Like previously with the Cinema 4D renderer, you can extrude text and shape layers with three types of bevels. For the material, you can adjust the values shown below, but it can only be of single color, not textured.
According to the list of enabled features in Composition Settings, there’s something called “Material overrides on text/shape bevels and sides”. I didn’t find out what it means. Apparently you can add a stroke on a beveled object and make it a different color, but the stroke doesn’t have separate material settings, and there seem to be some z-fighting between the stroke mesh and the color fill mesh:
4. PBR Materials
Below is the butterfly imported to After Effects, side by side with the Albedo and Opacity maps. Full and partial transparency and double-sided materials seem to work fine. For the textures, the FAQ mentions only PNG and JPG being supported. I suppose that\’s when using OBJ as the format. The albedo texture below (with opacity map on its Alpha channel) is a TGA texture, but when embedded in a GLB file, it worked fine in After Effects.
According to the Adobe’s FAQ, the properties available for the PBR materials are those included in something called Adobe Standard Materials (ASM). Here are the details on what they are, quite a range of different properties.
I tried out these common PBR material properties in my test scene:
- Albedo (colors)
- Normal
- Metallic
- Roughness
- Opacity (partial as well)
- Emission
To show a wider range of maps of the PBR workflow in use, I made a UV mapped version of the 3D text in Blender. After cleaning up the geometry and mapping the letters, I imported the model in Substance Painter and applied different material presets to the different letters. Below you can see the effect of roughness and metallic maps, and how the normal map affects the grains of the wood for example.
5. Environment Light
Environment Lights use HDRI (High Dynamic Range Image) maps for image-based lighting. A HDRI means an image with high bit depth, but in the context of 3D graphics, it also means a 360° image of an environment. This article by Mark Segasby of lightmap.co.uk describes it in detail.
You can add a light, set it as an environment light, and apply any HDRI image (in your composition as a hidden layer). You can also tick on shadows for it, which can provide a nice looking occlusion that resembles Ray Tracing. My example scene isn’t the best setup to show it in, but the shadow below dragon on this video by SternFX gives a better idea of what it can look like.
Here you can see the effect of different HDRIs in my example scene. All the HDRI maps are from Poly Haven.
You can also make a 3D plane which only accepts shadows but is otherwise transparent, as described here.
3D Channel Effects
The effects in the 3D Channel section have existed before but I’ve never really noticed them, so testing them with the new features was a great excuse to try them out.
The workflow with these effects is making a precomp of your 3D scene, and then applying the effect to the precomp.
The fog effect lets you mask the fog with a separate black and white texture or precomp (which goes into “Gradient Layer” slot).
Here are three of the other 3D channel effects in use (the remaining effects are Cryptomatte, EXtractoR, ID Matte and Identifier, which I didn\’t test out this time).
The frame shown below has Fog and Depth Of Field applied.
However, you can see the edges of the screen being a bit messy, and that there’s some blur around the wings of the butterfly. Using the Depth of Field option in the camera instead (which is currently unavailable in the beta) wouldn’t cause these problems.
Also, as mentioned in the Composition Settings, effects on collapsed 3D precomp layers are currently not working (I also noticed this when trying to render the composition with the Fog and DoF effects through Media Encoder, fog was invisible and DoF had blur everywhere).
Testing with more complex meshes
I tried importing meshes that together amount to 1 million tris. This had no noticeable impact on the time it takes to update the frame in full resolution in preview (it was about 5 seconds both before and after).
I also added a chrome sphere by setting its material’s Metallic value to full and Roughness to 0. As you can see, it reflects the environment light but not the objects around it (since there’s no Ray Tracing).
Note that the blue sky on the background is not the HDRI map but just a solid with a gradient. CC Environment effect appeared way too dark, so I found no way to use the HDRI as a visible background.
Applying effects to a 3D object
As Adobe’s FAQ mentions, it’s currently not possible to apply effects to 3D layers directly, but you can add an adjustment layer on top of everything and select the 3D layer as its Track Matte layer. I tried recoloring the butterfly this way.
However, if there are other objects in front of the object you want to apply the effect to, you’d have to mask them out somehow.
Conclusion
Here are the new 3D features in a nutshell (introduced in 2023-2024):
- Advanced 3D Renderer, which renders the 3D content very fast. Rendering my scene in UHD resolution without particles and adjustment layers took only 6 minutes on my system.
- Image-based environment lights and shadows (HDRI Environments)
- Models with PBR Materials and possibility to use bone animations
- Curved footage layers and extruding and beveling Shape- and Text Layers now work in the Advanced 3D Renderer as well (not just Cinema 4D)
3D formats that can be imported (according to the FAQ, they’re working on adding more):
- OBJ: Contains only the static 3D mesh, but can reference .MTL files that contain materials and textures. Animations, skinning and Shape Keys can’t be included.
- GLTF: can include meshes, bones, animations, Shape Keys, materials (PBR) and textures
- GLB: binary version of GLTF (GLTF being ASCII), supports the same features
Still not included in the current Beta:
In addition to the points listed above, here are some problems I bumped to:
- In my test scene, only objects close enough to the world center cast shadows from the Environment Light
- If you have an Adjustment layer between two 3D layers, those two 3D layers don’t clip with each other
- Shape Key animations don’t get imported
Overall impression:
These 3D features don’t seem like an all-encompassing replacement for animating the more complex sequences in other 3D programs, but for simpler compositions involving 3d models (like flying and rotating coins, or a character running across a text title, or something), having it be possible to do without plugins and other programs will smoothen the workflow nicely. The HDRI environments casting shadows also seems like a low-weight solution for achieving nice lighting, although the missing shadows for regular kinds of lights is currently a big drawback with the Beta version.