The Secret to Making Real 3D Text in After Effects

Adobe has added a new and more flexible way to integrate 3D text into your After Effects projects.

Aharon Rabinowitz here for School of Motion. Adobe has added a new and much more flexible way to create and work with real 3D text and in After Effects. In this video I'll show you how to use it.

In After Effects in a really simple 3D composition I've got 3D Text in After Effects, some basic 3D text if I rotate the camera around you can see there's a flat layer that I'm using as a floor this is basically your typical 2.5 d project. Now I want to turn this into 3D extruded text so to do that the first thing I have to do is go into my composition settings and choose 3D renderer. From there it sets a classic 3D by default if I click on that I can choose Cinema 4D.

I'm going to get a whole bunch of new features that were not available in the standard 3D renderer such as extruded in bevel text shapes, reflections, curved layers, things like that. I'm also going to lose a bunch of stuff like motion blur and layer styles and track mattes so I just want you to be aware of that you are definitely losing some stuff in this process and you're gonna have different reasons for wanting to do it this way.

For now let's just focus on the 3D properties for this layer and work with that okay. I'm going to select my 3D text layer and I'm going to roll this down now if you've worked with 3D text or 3D layers before you probably are noticing that there's something new here 3D Text Geometry Options, these are not available to you when you're not using that Cinema 4D renderer so I'm going to twirl this down and inside I'm going to see now that I've got bevel depth whole bevel depth and extrusion depth.