You could be forgiven for thinking that to illuminate 3D layers in After Effects, you just add one or more 3D lights and edit their parameters to taste. But that just controls how a light is cast – if you want to also control how a layer receives that light, it’s worth a dive into the layer’s Material Options.
You could be forgiven for thinking that to illuminate 3D layers in After Effects, you just add one or more 3D lights and edit their parameters to taste. But that just controls how a light is cast – if you want to also control how a layer receives that light, it’s worth a dive into the layer’s Material Options.
For example, using default settings with a white light, a layer’s surface color is in essence added to itself as the layer is illuminated, especially as total illumination goes over 100%. However, if a layer’s color is black, adding it to itself will still result in black, no matter how intense the light is. That’s why it can be difficult to illuminate darkly-colored layers – there’s little or no color value to add:
This is where a layer’s Metal parameter comes into play. The idea behind Metal is that at high settings, a surface would react as if it was made of metal, where the specular highlights in particular are created from the layer’s underlying color. Metal defaults to 100%, which looks sexy for colorized layers, but it also means they don’t get illuminated when their color is dark. At lower Metal settings, the light’s color comes more into play, resulting in specular highlights that look more like the glare on a plastic surface. However, this also means darkly-colored layers will get the light’s color added into them, making them lighter and therefore more visible. In the example above, you can see where black text looks particularly nice when its Metal parameter is set to 0%.
For a more in-depth explanation and examples, watch this week’s free movie in our After Effects Hidden Gems course on lynda.com. It also dives into the Material Options for Specular Shininess and Intensity. After the week of July 13, it will only be visible to their subscribers (along with all of the other gems to date). If you’re not already a subscriber, you can get a 10-day free trial before your credit card is billed by using the link http://www.lynda.com/go/ChrisAndTrish. We’ll be adding a new gem each week; all of the previous gems will remain online for subscribers.