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3D text looks amazing and really elevates your work, but some artists find it too complicated to approach. Luckily, we’ve figured out three easy ways to create 3D text in After Effects using only the included toolset.
SOM Teaching Assistant Sara Wade demonstrates how to create 3D text through stacking layers, extruding, and jumping into Cinema 4D Lite.
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Auto-Generated Transcript Below 👇
Sara Wade (00:00): Today, I'm going to teach you three ways to make 3d texts using only the tools available with after effects.
Sara Wade (00:14): Hi, I'm Sara Wade, freelance motion designer and teaching assistant for school of motion. 3d text looks really cool and MoGraph, but it can be time-consuming to learn and render 3d with the big complex 3d applications. I can show you three ways to make 3d texts using only the tools available inside of after effects. No fancy additional software required. First, we're going to look at stacking 3d layers in space. Next, we're going to take a look at how we can use the built in extrude portions of the text tool. And finally, we're going to take a look at how to do this in cinema 4d light, which is included with after effects. Also, you can download the project files I'm using in this video to follow along or to practice this technique. After you're done, watching details are in the description.
Sara Wade (01:06): The first way we're going to make 3d texts is we're just going to take a plain old text layer. Let's go ahead and write 3d. I'm going to position that let's put it just in the middle for now, and I'm going to just make this a 3d layer. Now it doesn't look any different right away, but if I hit the R it opens up all these rotations and then I can see if I rotate it in the Y. It is in fact 3d. Now I don't want to actually rotate this layer just yet. What I want to do is make copies of this layer that are at a slightly different position in Z space. So I could duplicate this layer and change the Z position. If I hit the Peaky, you'll see that my position has 1, 2, 3 values. And this last one being the Z position.
Sara Wade (01:55): I don't want to do this manually because it's simply going to take more time than I want to spend. If you're not an expressions person, don't worry. This is a very easy one. It's going to be super simple. What I'm going to do is I'm going to I'll click the stopwatch that's option, click on a Mac, and that's going to open this expression for the position. Now, what I'm going to put in here is left bracket value zero. And what that's telling it is that I want the position to be whatever the first position value is here. In this case, it's the exposition. And then going to type comma value one. Now I'm telling it to use the first value. And the second value that this layer already has, here's the really useful, tricky part. I'm going to type index times. Let's say 10, and that's telling it to use the index of this layer, which is zero, because the first layer is zero.
Sara Wade (02:49): The second layer is one, the third layers, two. That's just how the index of the layer works in after effects. So we are going to make the Z position, the index of this layer, times 10. So in this case, it's going to be zero times 10, which is zero. I'm just going to close it up with a right bracket at the end. It doesn't do much right now, but when I duplicate the layer, each copy will have a different index and a different position. For this example, I'm just going to duplicate it six times so that we can leave some space here at the top of the layer stack. Okay. It doesn't look very different right now. What I'm going to do is I'm going to create a new normal layer. I'm going to put this down at the bottom. This doesn't really matter. I'm just being really nitpicky here.
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