Animating Sea Life in 3D with After Effects: A Dive into Depth and Motion

So I have the camera animation built, now it's just time to finish off the sea life. I'll go back to the beginning for this. So I'm going to animate all of them, pufferfish, whale, and shark, I'm going to animate all of them pretty much kind of together.

I'm going to animate them all so they're taking about five seconds of animation in the beginning of the timeline. And then I'm just going to move them around in time, move their layers around in time, so it'll like kind of better time with where the camera is from moment to moment. So I can't just grab all the layers and animate them at once because they all move differently.

So I'll just do that. Pufferfish, I'll turn it on. I'm just going to pull it so it's like a little bit between the second and third layers.

And I'm going to start it off screen. So I'm just going to top viewport, grab that little red arrow and move it along the x-axis, which is actually left and right when you're looking from the camera view. And I'm just going to animate position.

So it'll start here. And then at five seconds, I'm just going to animate it so it goes to the other side of the screen. Go to five seconds.

I can either drag it in the top viewport. I could zoom out an active camera or I can adjust the first number, the X position in properties. Either way, same difference.

You get that movement. And I just want to make sure it ends off screen. I'm not even looking at what the active camera is showing you because the camera being at the beginning, I'm only going to see it for a part of time.

So I'll do the same thing with the other ones. I'll turn back on shark. Highlight him.

All layers when they get their 3D switch first enabled, they actually end up around... I'll put it over there. I think actually over here. They all end up at zero on the z-axis.

So you've got to move them around wherever you like. The shark is going to go from left to right across the screen. So you're going to want to move it so it starts off screen inside of the camera's view.

Go back to the beginning of the timeline, turn on the stopwatch for position. And I'm also going to press K to jump to that next visual keyframe I have right there. That way I don't type in 500.

And then I'll just drag the layer across the screen so it moves over there. And again, my goal is to have it start and end off screen. I might be wrong because I'm kind of estimating it based on like what I can see in the top viewport.

But if I need to change it later, I can always adjust that. No problem at all. Now the whale, the last one, I'll turn it on.

I'm going to shove it really far back here. So it's pretty much like lined up like right between almost the last two, actually right between the last two rings. I need to scale this up large enough so it can cover this.

So I'll take the scale back to maybe 75 or something like that. But I need it to be big enough to cover the entire text. I'm going to pull it down a little bit too like that.

So my goal is to have it cover the text. So when the text appears, it'll look like it wrote it on. Again, I'll just go back to the beginning.

I'll pull this to the right of the window. And again, I'm trying to start that. So it's off screen like so.

And then again, position stopwatch on. I'll jump to five seconds and over there. Now it's over there.

Okay. And basic problem is that effectively the camera is moving along 10 seconds. So that's what happens.

Okay. What I need to do is this. I want to line up the vista.

That's the top of the triangle of the camera with each layer. Right there, PowerFish. And then I'm just going to drag the layers position.

So it ends up closer on the screen. That's actually the way. That's not what I wanted.

Sorry. PowerFish is what I wanted. So in this case, I'm going to drag it back.

So it starts a little bit more in the middle. And now what I end up with is that. So the camera doesn't move.

And as the camera moves over where the fish is, it lines up right in the center. That's my goal. I'll do the same thing to the others.

So again, some of this I'm going to have to estimate because I can't exactly see the lineup. I'll take the shark. I'll drag him over.

So he starts later. I got really lucky with that positioning, by the way. Really lucky with that positioning.

Okay. So now, again, as that comes in, the shark's hanging out over there. PowerFish is hanging out.

The fish is hanging out. They're both hanging out. And one.

And then two. And this is why I needed to be careful about starting them off screen. You're actually going to see the layer appear.

Just like pop on or be holding in place before the animation. So if the shark was too close inside the view of the camera right now, instead of being hidden behind one of those rings, it would look weird because you just see a graphic just hanging there before it moved. So that's not what I wanted.

The same thing with the whale. Again, estimating its position. I might need to change that.

I'm going to drag it over a little bit till it lines up in the center. And that's my goal to have it covering the text in the middle of the animation. I'm just dragging the layer over so it starts a little later.

And again, I got to preview that to make sure I did not have anything sitting on screen before the camera gets to it. Like that. Pretty good in this case right now.

Looks pretty good. Hey, looks nice. I like that.

So one of the reasons I wanted this lined up with the edge of the camera, the camera's view, the vista, that line at the top of its triangle, is because for the camera, I'm going to enable a property called depth of field. So I've got the camera layer highlighted. I'm going to find the camera options and properties.

And it's going to click on depth of field. Depth of field is an illusion. It basically makes things appear more or less blurry depending on how far away from the camera's focus distance they are.

And by default, the focus is that line at the end of the camera. It's actually right there. Focus distance.

Okay, I'm going to raise the aperture a little bit. It's about 200, I'm thinking. And you can see as I raise it, things become more or less blurry.

So the fish that's lined up with the focus distance right there, fully, fully in focus. Everything else is more or less in focus based on how far away it is. So if it's too close, it's out of focus.

Too far away, it's out of focus. Okay. Blur level is simply how blurry it is.

So if you want, you can raise that if you want this to be more blurry or less blurry. It's up to you. Maybe I only want them 90% blurry.

It's entirely up to you. Have fun with that. The iris shape actually controls how that looks, of course, kind of the quality of it.

So if I wanted to, like, kind of like toy camera, if I had to get a triangle or something, that's more like a toy camera's like depth of field. And if I want to go to a really high-end camera lens, I can go to Decagon. So the problem with this is that the higher it is, the more time it takes to build the preview.

So fast rectangle is kind of like, looks decent and previews pretty quickly. But again, it's up to you. No problem at all.

Have some fun with that. The other settings like iris rotation, iris shape, highlight gain, they basically affect how things like the brightness of the colors affect the look of the depth of field effect. So you can tweak these to get like different looks at a depth of field.

It's actually pretty cool, by the way. But that is by default what it does. So now I got my depth of field effect.

And the reason I wanted the camera to line up with that back wall is because I wanted it in focus when it finishes to hang on the message text. Now, there is one more problem with the text that I have. It should not exist until right about here where the whale is covering it.

Okay. So all I'm going to do is find the text layer, slide down until I get text layer. And it doesn't animate.

I don't have any keyframes to worry about. All I got to do really is just like trim it over. So I'll click on it.

Option left bracket or alt left bracket is the keyboard shortcut. You could also just hover over the beginning of the layer itself and drag it over. That little double arrow.

Hold it down shift will snap it to the current time indicator line. And now what I have is I'm going to go back to one view. I'm going to fit this back in the window option slash or use the magnification menu to fit up to.

And this is the animation I've built. Like so. Using the native 3D features in Adobe After Effects.

It's fairly cool. Now. You could add more stuff.

Um, this was not built to have the sea marine life. Um, the, well, I don't know what they are. They're vines, the plants and stuff moving, which means they were imported as a single layer.

If I would have had all of these vines and like this other, like undersea, like foliage and stuff, I guess I'd call it. I wanted it to move. I would have basically made it a separate layers in Adobe Illustrator.

Right now, because they're imported as one layer, they're basically flat. There's ways of moving them, but in general, the best way is to simply make them a different layer before you import them. Or basically make them a new layer in Illustrator right now and then re-import just those layers.

And that way you can position them however you like. Okay. So like everything else, you are not necessarily limited, but influenced by the way you've built it.

When I built this and designed this animation, I intended it specifically to be animated a certain way. There were things I just didn't think I'd want to animate. So I didn't make them easily animatable.

Okay. So keep that in mind. And that is the end of this lesson, it looks like.

Okay. Now there's other things I could do. I'm gonna highlight all my layers and collapse them with command tilde.

And then deselect them. You could change the light or animate it. You could rotate the cameras it animates.

I didn't do that because when you rotate, it looks a little weird because the sea life is actually kind of lined up properly. But there are other things you could add to make this animation, again, more appealing or pop depending on what you need. There is an issue you may run into sometimes with layers like this.

If you're not careful, you may actually see the outside edge of the layer inside the shadow right here. This is a little bright area I think is. So what I'm gonna do is actually, I'm gonna go back to the two views for a second.

I'm gonna go back to the beginning of the timeline. I'm gonna zoom out in the top view. I'm just gonna grab the, yeah, right here.

You can see it now that there's actually an edge. And it's literally the edge of that layer being cast to the left. So I'm just gonna grab the light at the beginning.

I'll move it a little bit more towards the camera right here. So I don't get any of that background edge, that outside edge visible here. And again, that has no other effect on the animation.

It's fine. If I wanted to, I could animate the movement of the light. I could take the light position, for example, start over here.

And then as the animation progresses, it was 11 seconds for my animation, by the way. That was not 11 seconds, that was one second. Okay.

I could animate the light just moving over to the side. So it basically moves from left to right. And what'll happen is now that it's moving, the shadows are gonna be shifting from being, coming from the left, coming from the right.

Like so. So you can animate just about anything in this program. The intensity of the light, the color of the light can all be animated.

This thing to keep in mind. So many things can be animated. Merely because we didn't do something in a particular lesson, because we were trying to show you something else, doesn't mean you can't do it.

Also keep in mind that if you wanted, for example, the shark to be bigger, the shark's position is animating, but its scale isn't. Which means I can go into that shark and change that scale whenever I like. Maybe it should be 75%, so it's bigger.

No problem at all. And you have this animation now. Okay.

Now there is one thing else that's interesting. I'm gonna press U to reveal the keyframes of the shark. If you want, it is possible to move an entire animation.

A position animation, if I try to move it around, usually what's gonna happen is I'm gonna end up with new keyframes. But I can modify and move an entire animation. And I'm actually gonna zoom out a little bit in the active camera view to do this.

I need to have my current time indicator at a keyframe. I need to click on the property's name position to highlight all the keyframes. And then I'm gonna use this little arrow to slide them down.

So now it's moving like here. Because they were selected, because it was on top of a keyframe, what I did is instead of moving a single keyframe, I'm making a new one. I modified the vertical position in this case of all keyframes.

Like that. Just really cool. Like so.

And that concludes this lesson. Hope you enjoyed it.