Create Your Own Flourishes… Now in 3D!

Create Your Own Flourishes… Now in 3D!

on May 29th 2012 with 32 comments
Tutorial Details
  • Requirements: After Effects CS6
  • Difficulty: Intermediate
  • Run Time: 37:38 min

Final Product What You'll Be Creating

Download Source Files

Using the new powerful 3D options in After Effects CS6, we will use Adobe Illustrator to create a flourish style design, animate the growth of the design in After Effects, and then extrude the paths into 3d space to give an “old” look some new life. The idea is to feel like animated strips of paper in 3d space.

Tutorial

Download Tutorial .mp4

File size: 59.3 MB

 
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I am a self taught freelance motion graphics designer. I continuously push myself to learn new techniques and styles to keep me mentally active and bring new life to my work. I have learned a lot from the online community and I look forward to being able to give back.  

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  • http://www.youtube.com/ianhfx IANH

    Now we talking!! Nice one, great tutorial! Very usefull.

  • 서우찬

    너무좋아요 ^^ㅋㅋ

  • ah shang

    adobe CS 6!!!!awesome!!!i want it …..but i can`t afford it

  • marc

    Well, now I know what technique we’ll see in everyone’s reel next year!

    Very cool, thanks!

    • http://www.youtube.com/ianhfx IANH

      Nice preview! haha

  • Rick

    Nice. i like it. Still need to get my copy of AfterSex CS6 though!!

  • http://www.parasuniversal.com Parasuniversal.com

    So far my fav tut. I wanted to know about flourishes and how to switch it if it started from the wrong side and also about using multiple cameras. Thank you sir.

    • http://www.cmimagery.com Kevin Snyder
      Author

      If your flourish starts from the wrong side, you can change the direction in the custom shape options under the path parameter. What did you want to know about multiple cameras?

  • Tharu

    Nice one. Thank you very much..

  • http://www.facebook.com/TuhinBagh TuhinBagh

    Guys guys those who don’t have Ae6! don’t be sad, you can even do this with any 3d application like Cinema4d
    Here see my quick render..!!
    tps://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=441765305843435&set=o.55970928033&type=2&theater#

  • http://www.facebook.com/TuhinBagh TuhinBagh
  • momac

    Great Tut,I,ll have a go

  • jason

    why when i create a shape from a vector layer, they disappear completely, even when the shape is not hidden?

    • http://www.cmimagery.com Kevin Snyder
      Author

      Make sure the width of the stroke is not too low… If you post a project file I would be happy to take a look.

  • Casper

    Can I do it using cs4 ? ;)

    • http://www.cmimagery.com Kevin Snyder
      Author

      Sorry, AE CS6 only.

  • coldlogic

    Great tutorial I am actually working on in at the moment :) I am having some difficulties animating the shapes: Ive converted them to outlines as you showed… then added the trim paths option…. then I key framed the start op but instead of animating the shape itself I am animating a square shape surrounding the swirl…nothing happens with the swirl. Could you help me? I think I am skipping something and I do not know what !
    Thank you again for sharing this tutorial with us

    • http://www.cmimagery.com Kevin Snyder
      Author

      The box that you are seeing may be the overlay drawn by AE. After Effects draws a box around the shape object as the path is animated on. I would suggest to make the stroke width really wide to see if it is animating. You can use the keyboard shortcut “CTL + SHIFT + H” to hide the overlays in the comp view to get a good look at the strokes only. If you want to post a project file, I would be happy to look at it for you. It’s hard to guess what may be wrong.

      • coldlogic

        Thank you Kevin ! Yeah after Ive hid the overlays it worked thank you :) Could I ask you a huge favor? I am conducting some design research for an Master`s dissertation I would love to get a chance to get your opinion – my research is about stimulating the creative thought. Do you think you would have time to fill in a questionnaire?
        Thank you again for sharing this tutorial with us :)

  • http://www.cmimagery.com Kevin Snyder
    Author

    If you want to convert your Illustrator files to shape layers much faster, check out this brand new script from redefinery.com: http://www.redefinery.com/ae/view.php?item=rd_BatchVectorToShape

    Huge time saver for a lot of layers.

  • Firdaus

    Hi. I am using After Effects CS6 trial version. May I know why the geometry option doesn’t show in my CS6? Is it because it’s a trial version??

    Thanks!

    • http://www.cmimagery.com Kevin Snyder
      Author

      Make sure you switch the 3d renderer from “Classic 3D” to “Raytraced” in the upper right hand corner of the comp panel.

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

    Nice one ,really enjoed watching this video

  • luo

    hi

    im using the cs6, but it doen’t have the geometry option, i already turned on the 3D.

    • luo

      omg, sorry about that, i didn’t see Firdaus’s comment…..now the problem is solved… thanks.

  • 81 Design

    Nice work Kevin, thanks! here’s what I did…

    http://youtu.be/D2OD1w5RU_M

  • Rich

    Brilliant tutorial! So clear and easy to follow. Thanks!

    Got any recommendations for rendering this out? Mine seems to be stuck in time somewhere trying to export at 720 Motion JPEG B.

  • Epel

    Hi Kevin, what kind of VGA card did you used for this project? Mine (GTX460) is very slow to preview.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Hugo-Cuellar-Rodriguez/1152014235 Hugo Cuellar Rodriguez

    Hello Kevin, I was able to follow through your awesome tut and previews just fine but at the time of rendering to HDTV 1080p @ 29fps my computer used up all of the CPUs and took about half hour to render 2 seconds of the video…
    Is it my processors? graphics card?
    I have a 2009 Mac Pro with 2-2.26GHz Intel Xeon processors and only 6gbs of ram and 512mbs on some cheap nvidia GPU

  • http://www.facebook.com/Minina.Kawiwi Vanezza Guerra

    Thank u so so much!! it was so clear every step! :3 thanks very much

  • Hannah

    Hi Kevin, your tutorial is great, however when I came to render it HDTV 1080p @ 29fps it seemed to be extremely slow to render approximately 100hrs! my computer is Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU W3520 @ 2.67Ghz 2.66 GHz with a 16GB RAM, do you have any suggestions? Many thanks.

  • vdBMatthijs

    When i set my shapes to 3D and change the renderer to Ray-Traced, the paths disappear. Changing the extrusion depth doesn’t change anything. Please help :(