Animating a Vector City with a 3D Camera in After Effects
In this series of tutorials, we will go over the steps needed to create a rotating city animation in After Effects. Software required: After Effects CS6, Illustrator CS6.
What you'll learn
In this series of tutorials, we will go over the steps needed to create a rotating city animation in After Effects. We will start by going over some of the initial setup you need to know for how the Illustrator files should be saved and arranged. Then we bring those files into After Effects and learn lots of time saving tips and techniques for animating these layers. We go over some camera animation as well as 3D animation of individual layers. Towards the end of the training, we go over some compositing techniques that make our 2D illustrator layers look much more life-like, as if they had been filmed with a real camera. Software required: After Effects CS6, Illustrator CS6.
Table of contents
- Importing and Rotating Our Layers 7m
- Splitting up Our Illustrator File Onto Separate Artboards 12m
- Properly Saving Illustrator Files for After Effects 5m
- Importing the Illustrator Files Correctly and Beginning Animation 14m
- Animating the Camera 14m
- Adding the Marquee Sign 15m
- Fixing the Wind Turbines in Illustrator so They Can Be Animated 15m
- Importing the New Turbine Files and Animating Them 15m
- Hiding the Static Turbines in the Illustrator File 6m
- Animating the Sun Rays 15m
- Animating the Bird 14m
- Rotating the Flying Bird 10m
- Adding a Second Ring of Birds 9m
- Adding Some Birds Behind the Marquee Sign 8m
- Changing the Color of Our City 10m
- Adding the Slight Change to the Background 4m
- Adding Some Depth of Field Style Blur 6m
- Adding a Lens Flare and a Fade to White 7m
- Adding Grain 9m
About the author
Laura is a passionate visual effects and motion graphics author at Pluralsight. Ever since her first exposure to After Effects in college, Laura has had an eternal drive to learn more about motion graphics, and teach others what she has discovered. Laura began working at Digital-Tutors (now a Pluralsight company) as a motion graphics artist, creating visually-appealing advertisements and informative art for the site. Throughout her time at Digital-Tutors, Laura contributed greatly to both the ... more