Building An iPhone In After Effects

Building An iPhone In After Effects

on Jun 20th 2012 with 35 comments
Tutorial Details
  • Requirements: Just After Effects... enjoy
  • Difficulty: Intermediate
  • Run Time: 28:14 min
Download Source Files

Final Product What You'll Be Creating

Hey folks, today we’re going to be taking a look at a simple approach to building a basic iPhone model within After Effects. We will be designing the phone purely in After Effects with easily replaceable screen content, then we will extrude the phone to add some pseudo depth, and finally we will add some cool glossy reflections and shadows.

Tutorial

Download Tutorial .mov

File size: 180.7 MB

VinhSon Nguyen is VinhSonNguyen on Videohive
 
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Creative evangelist and host of CreativeDojo.net, a great source for motion graphics and visual effects tutorials. You can follow me on Twitter (@VinhSonNguyen)  

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  • Ratan

    Nice and cool…thanks !

    • http://www.creativedojo.net VinhSon Nguyen
      Author

      Thanks for the support!

  • http://www.alt-realities.com Chris K

    Nice job VinhSon, my compliments on an effective 2.5D technique.

    If I might suggest though, you’re duplicating your main screen comp so many times, which can be pretty taxing on the system, especially if it’s the users intention to animate elements on the screen. To keep things a little lighter on processing, I’d suggest only duplicating the bevel shape, not the entire comp. That way you’re only working with a vector shape, not bitmap data. Additionally, it chops a step off your process because the back of the phone will already be the light grey/silver of the beveled case.

    Additionally, you would do well to precompose your extrusion layers, rather than hiding them. You still have the one layer but retain the control over the levels by applying it to the comp, rather than 50+ individual layers.

    Finally, you could probably slip 4 solids, rotated and scaled to be the edges of the phone to help hide the gaps between each layer. It wouldn’t solve the problem entirely, because you can’t round the edges and bend it underneath, but unless you spin the camera in such a way that to look at a corner straight on, you’d never see it.

    • http://www.creativedojo.net VinhSon Nguyen
      Author

      Hey Chris, you make a very good point about the screen content comp, I guess I didn’t think about it too much since I was using an image instead of actual footage ;) Thanks for your suggestions and inputs, they were very informative!

  • Abhinav Rajput

    Great Tut

  • http://splaszfx.pl/ SplFX

    Nice tutorial and final effect but it would be much easier and faster if you would use little easy expression to didtribute layers in z to make extrusion. You can do it in several ways but for example like that:

    start = 0;
    diff = 0;
    [position[0], position[1], start + index*diff]

    Put that in position expression place and change “diff” value with number with how many pixel you need to distribute with. After that just duplicate layer and you will get really nice extrusion.

    • http://splaszfx.pl/blog/ SplFX

      Or if you don’t like expressions you can use some scripts f.eg. DistributeLayers or 3D Layer Distributor. You can find them on aescripts.com

      • http://www.creativedojo.net VinhSon Nguyen
        Author

        Hey man, thanks for your awesome input and feedback! I agree, the effect would be much simpler to do with expressions. If I were doing this commercially in my projects, I’d use an expression too.

        Personally, I’d use: [transform.position[0],transform.position[1],index-1 ]
        But same modified expression, good take on suggestion 3D Layer Distributor!

  • http://www.youtube.com/user/fromradom fromradom

    Quick time-saver from me: instead of adding 1px to Z position layer by layer You can paste this expression into Position of first Extrusion layer and then duplicate this layer:

    [value[0],value[0],thisComp.layer(index-1).transform.position[2]+1]

    Quick explanation: “Leave X and Y Position, then take Z position of previous layer and add 1px to it. :)

    • http://www.youtube.com/user/fromradom fromradom

      Argh! I’ve just made a mistake :-/ This was suppossed to be:

      [value[0],value[1],thisComp.layer(index-1).transform.position[2]+1]

      • http://4after.wordpress.com sandeman

        Or even this one, more simple if possible :

        [transform.position[0],transform.position[1],index-1 ]

        Very good tutorial, by the way.
        Thanks !

      • http://www.creativedojo.net VinhSon Nguyen
        Author

        Yes, definitely use expressions if you know them! I was actually planning to use an expression for the extrusion, only to realize that it’d be simpler for the audience to understand without it (plus I wouldn’t have to explain it too!) Thanks for your input!

        @sademan – Awesome suggestion buddy! Thanks for the kind words :)

      • MDahm

        Or you could just do “seperate dimensions” on position and just write “index” in the z-position..

  • Nick

    For some reason my volume buttons go crazy when I orbit. They don’t stay put on the phone. This is annoying and I am following EXACTLY what you are doing. Please help!!!

    • http://www.creativedojo.net VinhSon Nguyen
      Author

      It is because you “think” its on the phone but it’s actually not. With the lens youre using and the optical illusion, it’s hard to tell whether or not you’re actually placing the layer on the side of another layer. I’d recommend switching to the Left or Right views or even switch to a “2 view” mode to get precise control. Also make sure your Z position is acceptable, you don’t want it at 2000px when your phone is at 50px in Z space :)

  • Sam

    This is not original tute. This is copy paste. I saw same tutorial somewhere b4, i am not finding that right now but i will soon post about that tutorial.

    • http://www.vimeo.com/everettoptions Adam Everett Miller

      Many tutorials on the web look similar. Be sure to actually watch through it rather than just looking at the end result. Inspiration comes from all sorts of places, but this tutorial is original work.

    • http://www.creativedojo.net VinhSon Nguyen
      Author

      Hey Sam, this is actually my original work and demonstration, this is how I would’ve constructed a 3D iPhone. If you do know another tutorial elsewhere, please do point to it as I would love to see and possibly learn something new.

  • http://www.zebravideo.ca video service toronto

    After effect is missing some 3d capabilites thats for sure . But it is a nice workaround. Thanks fo tutorial

    • http://www.creativedojo.net VinhSon Nguyen
      Author

      Yep, but it should be interesting to see people create stuff like this using CS6′s ray tracing engine. Thanks for the support!

  • http://www.akfilms.nl/ Angelo

    amazing tutorial! I really enjoyed watching it.
    2 weeks ago I needed to design a similar animation like this for my internship company in Shanghai all by myself without a tutorial.
    but for me,I forgot about the buttons on the side of the phone. I also duplicated the layers only 20 times instead of the 60 layers you used, but luckily the motionblur covered some of it up as you can see in the animation:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KaTHxYzlEU at 01.20 minutes
    Again! like always an amazing tutorial, I hope you could give me some tips and i can learn more from you in the future.

    Keep up the good work!

    • http://www.creativedojo.net VinhSon Nguyen
      Author

      Hey Angelo, nice animation! Yes, motion blur definitely does cover up a lot of imperfections using this method of pseudo extrusion haha. Thanks for the support and kind words!

    • JJ

      Hi
      nice animation you done there
      can you tell me how long it took to make it?
      also are there any tutorials on the web creating this kind of animation?
      and nice tutorial here

      • http://www.creativedojo.net VinhSon Nguyen
        Author

        Hello, thanks for the kind words! It took me about 20 minutes to design the whole animation. Once you make the phone model, it’s fairly easy! Just duplicate the same composition and animate the camera at different positions, then bring them all into one master comp and make final adjustments.

      • http://www.akfilms.nl/ Angelo

        My animation took me about 5 days. 2 days to figure out the content and design the script and storyboard (which is very important for this type of motion graphic). The last 3 days I spend on designing the graphics in Photoshop and animating them in AE. I could have put more effort into this project, But unfortunately I needed to finish this because the iOS version of the app was launching by the end of the week. So people needed to understand what the app did (I hope it did :P!).

        As for the tutorials on the web.. I just looked for inspiration on the web. combined things and put my own effort into it. That’s why I am glad people like VinhSon show and share there talents with others. so they can learn from it and try to create there own styles. Thanks JJ

        Thanks again VihnSon!

  • Mohamed Mostafa

    subtitle please

  • smik87

    믿기지 않네요 에펙으로 3d를 만들어 내다니

  • Mr. Palmer

    Great tutorial! Nice job Vinhson! The most impressive thing about it is that you kept it simple, avoiding complex methods. I get scared by expressions. Ive done lots of great ads and promos with AE over the years but Ive never used expressions. I wonder if u could help me with a quick start guide on expressions. However, great tutorial there! Ure a genius!

    • http://www.creativedojo.net VinhSon Nguyen
      Author

      Thanks Mr. Palmer, appreciate the awesome feedback! A great place to learn expressions is Dan Ebbert’s site: http://www.motionscript.com/

  • http://www.lakekover.com Lakekover Films

    Nice tut man. Thanks for the info, I used expressions or scaling before I got cs6 to do any kind of extrusion business. Now you could even just get a 3d model online of an iphone and bring it right into AE using Video Copilot’s Element 3D plugin…

  • Ammar

    Thank you very much .. Really you are awesome !
    but i have a question:
    how could you make the shadow under I-phone as shown in your preview ?

  • ammar
  • skyler

    hey, very good tutorial thank you soo much. i do have one question though, when i am doing the volume button i parent them to control but when i rotate the phone the volume buttons dont’ stay. how do i fix this please help!!!

  • http://twitter.com/devilzzzrock +

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrB6cw4w9xg. Complete 3d model . Please check

  • Philipp Sokolov

    Hey, thanks a lot for the great tutorial!
    It helped me to build an iPhone simulation for my indiegogo campaign video:
    https://vimeo.com/66182960