Build a 3D Room to Display Recommended Videos in Youtube

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Hello, everyone. My name is Joseph Robidoux, and welcome to another AE Tuts+ tutorial. In this tutorial, we will be creating a 3D room and have a camera rotate around all four walls with video footage on the walls. This will let you, at the end of your YouTube videos, have a recommended video slideshow type of effect, which will be unique to the already static one-
frame ones that people are using nowadays.

Without further ado, let’s begin. The stuff you need for this is the Create 3D Room script, which will be in the project files, and you want to install that in your After Effects folder. Go to Support Files and then go to Scripts and just place it in there. Restart the program, or you can just click File > Open. You can just go to File > Scripts > Run Script File, if you don’t want to restart, although you may need to restart, because we also need a plugin.

This is not required. This is going to be at the end of the tutorial, but you want to get track code particular, or at least just the trial version. You can get the trial version. Then, you want to put that in your Plugins folder, I believe, and now you would have to restart After Effects. Now, you don’t need trap code if you already ran out of the trial version a while ago, or you don’t want to buy it. It’ll just make it more visual, I guess you can say. It looks perfectly fine without the particles.

Let’s go to Composition > New Composition > Create 3D Room, and I’m using the preset HDTV 720 down here. I’m also making the duration 25 seconds long. Now, let’s import our files. I want to import my wall, my floor, and my floor molding, and the logo. Now, I don’t think I’m going to be using the floor molding. I really only use it when I have a wooden floor. And, by the way, I’m sorry, I didn’t bring this up, but you can get these textures at 3DXO.com. Go to 3D Texture section, and look for textures you want, if you want to have your own customized wall.

If you want to have a brick wall, you would download this one and save it, okay? Now, since the textures are different sizes, the script may bug out, so I will go over what to do, if it bugs out a bit. It won’t give you any errors or anything, it just might align them differently. After you get those files, I’ll show you exactly where I go, where my files are, I guess.

For my wall, I use the sandstone blocks, which is right here, and then for my floor, I used the floor slabs ornament, right here. We’re done with that. Let’s import our footage. You need four videos, at least ten to 20 seconds long, maybe even 30 is good enough. One of these I think are two minutes long, but that’s only because I cut it and it was around the same size, so it didn’t really matter that much, the cutting it.

Now what we want to do is we want to put our wall and floor in. Because these have weird names, I’m just going to rename them to Wall and Floor. The other ones have unique names, like I can tell that this is the floor molding. Now place your wall down and put your floor in, and you want to have your wall layer above your floor layer, at least for right now. Select Wall, and then shift and click Floor. You don’t want to select them both. The script, I guess, won’t work that way. I’m not sure why, but then you go to File > Scripts, and then you run your script. In this case, it is Pre 3D room.

Then, I’m going to go to Custom View One, and I’m going to press C, which brings up the camera tool, and move around. As you can see, it creates a 3D room. At some point, you can see that it’s not perfectly aligned. This is coming out a bit, so if you want, and I’m not going to move the floor, I’m going to move the walls up. I know it seems convenient to just move the floor down, but I want the floor to stay at the zero axis of the composition.

You can move these up, like this. It doesn’t need to be perfect because the camera’s not going to be outside the room at all. They wouldn’t have even noticed, okay? Now, if, after you’ve run the scripts, you get something like this – I’m going to show you right now – the floors and the walls all got the effect motion tile. When you ran the script, they all got the effect motion tile, so do not go here and scale this if it’s not right.

Go to the motion tile effect, and then move around the width. If the width is wrong, move around the width. If the height is wrong, move around the height. Motion tile just basically tiles the actual image, instead of stretching the image. Now that we have all four walls and our floor, you want to select all of them. We want to go toggle this mode, so that we can get the actual layer mode.

We want to go to Alpha > Add. I’m told that this will stop Z-fighting later on, from other past experiences. I’m not sure if it’s that big of a deal, when you’re doing it with textures but not solid colors, but I still do it. I’ve haven’t had a problem since. Now that we have our whole room set up, let’s actually go to the top view, so we can get a better view at the center.

I’m just going to fit it and zoom out so we get the whole room. Okay. The walls you can’t see, but they’re right here on the corner. I’m going to add the camera and the light. You can just right-click > New > Camera, and I’m just going to call it Camera, Room Camera. Preset 35 millimeters and click Okay. Now, you want to right-click the camera, because we want to remove its auto orientation. You just right-click the camera, click Transform, go down to Auto Orientate, and turn off.

This will make it so it doesn’t follow the person of interest, the point of interest. Now let’s actually move it to the floor. I’m just going to click P on Floor, and copy the floor’s position, and then paste it for the room camera. Now the camera is centered in the floor and in the center, so we’re going to actually have to go to a left or right view, and just put it up a bit for now. It doesn’t really matter at the moment.

Now we’re just going to go New > Light, and we want to create a room light. Now, I use a bit of off-yellow, off-white color, because it shows a little bit of grunge, but you can choose white if you want. Intensity is 240. I’m just going to call this Lamp, actually, or Room Lamp, give them unique names. Radius: 500. You want to make the falloff inverse, square clamp, and I’m not sure if I pointed this out, but we need the light type point, so that it hits all four walls, and there’s not really that much darkness in the room.

We want to cast shadows, we want shadow darkness, and for shadow diffusion, let’s just put 10 to 50 pixels for now, although, I don’t know exactly how good it looks, so I’m just going to put 10 for now, and in the future, I’ll update it. Now we want to actually paste the position again, for the room lamp. We’re going to go to Custom View One again.

I’m just going to rotate it by using the camera tool that we made – well, not that we made, but pressing C. We’re going to put this up until I feel like there’s enough room on the floor and on the wall, but I think right here is good. Now, let’s go into our actual camera. You want to switch to the room camera that we made, and as you can see, it’s zoomed in too much. What you want to do is you want to click Room Camera, or whatever camera you named it, and then go to Camera Options and turn the zoom down.

I usually put it around 400, because you have to put the camera up some. Let’s leave it around 501 for now, and you want to put this – is it this?
Yes, it’s this, and then you want to drag it by its Y-axis up some. Now, I leave the floor a bit, so they actually know it’s a room, and that seems pretty good, right there. I’m going to zoom it in a little bit more, and pick it up a bit more.

Right about there is good. Yes, that looks good. Okay. Now that we have the camera set, let’s create the rotation for the camera. To do that, we’re just going to go every four seconds to start the rotation, and then the rotation will end on the fifth second. Let’s zoom on this, so we can get actually odd numbers. For second four, if I can get to it right, we want to click R for the room camera, because we’re only going to mess with the orientation.

Go back to four seconds, and I’m going to rotate to 0. I’m just going to type in 0, and then we have to lock it. Then, on second five, we put it to 90. Then second nine, we put it to – we just click the keyframe button right here, to leave it at 90. Then, at ten seconds, we put it at 180. Then, at 14 seconds, keyframe button. I’m not sure why I’m saying hotkey, maybe because it says “key” in it.

Fifteen seconds, you want 270, and 19 seconds, keyframe button. Look at that, I didn’t say hotkey. Well, I just did now. Twenty, you want 360, or just zero, because it’s the same thing. I put 360. It’s going to say zero anyway. Okay. Now, since I was a little bit sloppy, because I wanted to save time, I did not make these precise. Can I? I can’t. Okay. I’m just going to move them until they’re precise, and there we go. I saved a bunch of time making it precise, speeding it up and making it precise.

If we look at it, it goes wall one, wall two, wall three, wall four, back to wall one. What we’re going to be doing, if you saw the preview of the video already, is it’s going to go to wall one with the video, wall two with the video, wall three with the video, and then wall four with the video, and then back to wall one, and when it goes back to wall one, it’s going to be a logo, although you can make wall one a logo, and then when it goes to wall one again, make it a video. It’s all up to you.

Now what we want to do, since we have the camera and everything set up, let’s create the text, okay? I’m just going to go to the text tool and type in Text. Now, you can change this to O, or you can leave it as Text until you’re ready to edit it. It doesn’t matter. I’m just going to put Text for now, and I’m going to make it 3D, obviously.

We’re going to find out what wall this is, so this is wall three. I’m going to press P, copy wall three’s position, paste it on Text One. Now, I want it to push it out some, because I want shadows to work. First, I’m actually going to go in here, Material Options, and Cast Shadows is going to be on. I don’t want to change the position, because I’m going to copy the text. I want to change the offset position.

I believe I press A – yes, anchor point. Press A on the layer to bring up the anchor point, and now we’re going to make it so that the center of the text is on the center of the wall. I’m going to actually go to View and Show Rulers, so that we can pull out a grid line and place it right in the center. Is that perfect? I think it’s one off. Yes, there we go. Okay. Mr. Perfectionist here.

Now we’re just going to move the Z-axis until the red dots are centered with it. Okay, right there. Now we want to push it up until we feel it’s high enough for eye-point view, but we also want to have room for the video. I’m thinking we will set the text right here, like make this the line it’s on. But first, we want to pop it out a bit, for anchor point. We actually did not change the anchor point at all. We changed the positioning.

We have to restart all over again. Move it by anchor point this time. That sounds stupid, if you already didn’t. Okay. And then, we’re going to move it up. Two up. Now we want to move out 90, 90 out, so +90, and now that we know where the shadow is compared to the light, we want to move the room lamp, based off that.

Click P for the room lamp, and we want it so that the shadow is about right there, not too much, not too little. We’re going to lower this again, and I think the text will be good right there. Yes, that’s good, the text on that line. You can change the shadow or whatever, depending on what you like. It really depends on what you like.

Now that we have the Text One done, let’s close all these. We don’t need them right now. We actually have to go back to the room lamp, before I forget, and do the pixilation thing, the shadow diffuse. That looks good, right there, although you choose whatever you want. I chose 33, and you could choose whatever.

Now what we want to do is we just want to copy the text, and I’m going to paste this four times, Control + D, just duplicate the text four times, and we’re going to put them on each wall. What you’re going to do, because we copied the offset, so watch this. This wall is Wall Four. I’m going to click P, copy, paste text four on wall four, and I’m going to do that for each wall.

Let’s see. This wall is wall one, so I’m just going to click P, copy, and paste text one. That was the first text we actually had, but I want the numbers to be matching, so I know later, in the future. This is wall two, so P, copy, paste it for text two, and the last wall, back here, text four. This is wall three, text three. We must have – yes, we have everything working, I believe. Let’s just double check, because I feel like I missed something. No, everything’s perfect.

Okay. Now let’s rotate the actual text on the wall that needs to be rotated, meaning this one right here needs to be rotated 90 degrees. I’m just going to click R. Let’s go here, and R or W – W, so that we can actually rotate it visually, and then click the Y axis. We’re going to have to move this away.

We actually don’t need the grid lines at the moment anymore, so I’m going to just move the grid lines away and take off Ruler. Press W for the rotate tool, and then hold the Y-axis, and I’m holding the actual wall, and I deleted the wall. Okay. Click the text. In this case, it’s Text Two, W tool, like I said before, to rotate. Hold shift, and it’ll lock to the degree you want.

That rotation is done, so now we have to figure this one out. I think this one’s been rotated too much. Yes, right there. Go in, press W, hold the Y-
axis, hold shift, and rotate it. Oops, I rotated it too much. There you go. I’m just going to see if that’s right. That’s 180, so that’s good. That should be it. Well, there should be one more. Yes.

The W tool, hold it, and there we go. I’m just going to click on Layer. Okay. Ninety degrees. Our text is perfectly fine right now. Now let’s add the video footage. We’re going to add the fake rainy day first. We’re going to add them all – sorry, just add them all together, and work on them all together at the same time. Turn them all 3D, so let me select them. Turn them all 3D.

Press S on one layer, and then – oops, I made a mistake. Select the layers, press S, get the scale, set them all to 50, and now we just need to paste the location. I’m going to paste the location of fake rainy day, though, from wall one – well, not wall one. I’ve got to press V to get to my selection tool, wall three. P, copy, and paste. Let’s go in, click anchor point. Oops. Let’s put this in 90, so don’t forget.

Accept Shadows. The video here starts off black, so I’m just going to push this a bit forward, so it doesn’t start off black, and now I’m going to go and change the anchor points, so that it’s down a bit. Now, we already know this is centered, as you can see from the text. I’m just going to keep lowering this. I think this is good, right here, and is the shadow that noticeable? It’s good enough noticeable.

Okay. Now that we have that, let’s just copy all the settings we did. I’m just going to copy these two, and paste it on each one. Okay. They’re actually all right here now, but now I’m just going to go to each wall. I’m going to go to wall four, copy this and paste. I don’t know, just anything. Wall three, we’re at wall three, so I’m just going to click P for wall two, copy, paste it here and wall one, P, copy and paste it for this one.

So, each wall should have one now. I’m just going to click the rotate tool by clicking W, holding the Y-axis and shift, and having it pop to 90 degrees or 180, depending on the wall we’re at. This one is in the wall, this one right here. What did I just do? I’m messing my own stuff up. Okay. And then let’s go to – I pressed Control + Z, because I thought that selection goes in history, like in Photoshop.

Rotation tool, there we go. I’m actually going to turn this to third, so we can work faster. Okay. That’s perfectly fine, and that’s perfectly fine. Everything looks fine. Now we’re just going to go and edit the audio settings, so that the audio fades in and out, and we have to trim the video to the point where it no longer exists. Once this video comes out of frame, we have to trim the video to that point.

Let’s do that first. The video leaves around here, and it’s fake rainy day, so I’m just going to go to layer – I think it’s file, or edit. It’s edit. Split layers, and then I’m just going to take the top layer and actually just delete it. This way, it’s the fastest way to actually mess with stuff. Magnifying Glass, to split the layer, is the fastest to truncate, I guess you can say.

Now I’m just going to go here, split layer, delete the top layer that was made, and the same thing for this one. Select this layer, when it gets off-
screen, delete it. This is because you can’t actually fully mute these layers, so take the top layer, delete it. The last layer here, and Layer, Edit > Split Layer. Delete the top layer.

Now, you don’t really need to mess with the text, but for this layer, we do. I mean, for the first text layer, we do, because that’s when the wall is going to change. About right here, we want to split the text layer, or because it’s just text and not actually video, you don’t actually need to split that layer. You could just truncate it. Oops. I deleted the wrong one. There we go.

Now we should work on the audio, because if we actually mess with it before we mess with the audio, it would be off or something. Click Audio for them all, I guess. We can just go to all these. Select them all, click Audio –
oh, they don’t open like that, or do they? No, okay. I’m not sure the hotkey for audio level, so I’m just going to go Audio Levels, and set them to -48 for all. I’m just going to copy this and paste them for each one.

Then, we’re going to start messing with the audio levels. You want to click the stopwatch, and from second zero to one, we want to turn it from -48 to 0, so it’s a fade-in sound. Then from one to four, four you just create a hotkey, a key frame. I said hotkey, look at me. Then from five, you want to set it back to -48. I’m going to make these precise now, because I know I didn’t.

Now you want to select these four keyframes. Right-click them. Make sure you have one clicked, to right-click them. Keyframe assistance easy ease, and then copy the frames. This is the cool part, because it’s pretty easy. You copy the frames, you go to the next video in the line, so it’s this video, and then you open it up and make sure you have this open, too.

Right here, at the five second mark, where we stopped the first one, you want to go to Audio Levels and paste. It pastes the beginning, where you are, and then the ending here. Now we move this to this part, to the ending here, which is right there. Select this layer, which is Football Screen. Go to Audio Levels.

Did we paste the wrong one? Yes, I feel stupid. We pasted the wrong ones this whole time. For fake rainy day, just paste audio levels at zero. Just go to zero and paste, and then here, I’m just going to delete these and paste it here. Then for these, I’m going to delete these and paste. I can’t believe I made a mistake like that.

Then here, this is the only one that didn’t break, the last one. Open up the retro thing, go down to Audio and paste. Well, you actually don’t have to go down to Audio and paste, you could have just pasted it. That’s done. Now what should happen is the audio eases in, right when the camera moves to fit. It stays in for that long and then eases out and then goes to this wall.

This wall is going to have our logo, so let me just close these layers so we have room. Let’s place down the logo and make it 3D. We know that this is wall three, so I’m just going to copy the position of wall three and paste it here. I’m going to click A so I can change the anchor point and set this to 90. I’m going to go inside of it and change the shadow settings to on.

That’s that. Let’s see how it looks at full real quick. Yes, that looks really good. I’m not sure if you want to scale it or not, but that’s your choice. Your logo, your choice. Then I’m not going to rotate, I’m going to actually click V, so I can push down the Y-axis, so it’s centered. Let’s actually change this to 70, to fit, which is 75-ish.

Right there is good. Okay. Now, for the logo, we actually need to make sure that it starts – let’s zoom this out – around here. It can start right around here, okay? That’s the finished product. Now we’re just going to add the actual particles. You see I have trap code. Just right-click > New >
Solid. Let’s call this Dust.

Then for the solid, just go to Effects > Trap Code > Particular. Now we’re going to go to top view, because we need to see something, so Top View. Disable the lighting for now. There we go, Top View. Disable the lighting for now, so just go here, and now we want to start the particles. I put this around 300 to 200. Let’s just do 250 for now. It really depends on your preference, like I said before.

You want it to be a box, the metatype box, so it’s not coming from one point, it’s coming from everywhere. Then we want to increase the X, Y, and Z letter size to about a huge number, so let’s just copy and paste this for now. Okay. Am I missing something? Let’s see, because I can’t see the actual particles at the moment. I feel like I’m missing something.

I paused it for a while, because I was really confused at why it wasn’t actually working, and then I realized something. We were at frame zero, where the actual life of all of them is – well, we were at frame one, which is the life is zero. Then the life picks up. For the actual layer, push it out a bit, and then towards the end of the layer, drag it more, so it starts already alive, so like this.

That looks okay. Now we just want to drag the mirror size until it reaches the wall. Do that and like this, and this is going to be the same size as them, around 1,000. Okay. Now velocity should be, actually, around two to three. Let’s see how this looks in room camera. Turn it to half. They’re not moving at all, so I’m just going to pick it up to ten. That size looks pretty good.

Particles is a bit too much, so I’m just going to put it to 200. We actually want to change the particle type, but for now, it’s just for view. Now we can enable the room lamp again, seeing as it won’t hurt. The particles depend on your preference, but you can just follow mine, if you want.

Then we’re going to go to the Particle tab, and we’re going to put the life
– well, the life can stay around 3, but we don’t want it to pop like it’s been doing. When new ones come up, they just pop out of nowhere. You want to click Opacity Over Life, and click the preset that looks like – let’s see if I can find it. It looks like this, so it actually fades in and then fades out, okay?

Color, I’m going to choose a dark brown. I’m going to actually change the particle first. The particle I want is cloudlet, and as you can see, they’re really big. I’m going to change the size to I think 2. Yes, that looks good. We also want to click the dust and make the mode add, so it’s actually added in. Even though we picked brown, it doesn’t look that brown now. The darker we go, the lighter it gets, and the lighter we get, the lighter it gets.

Yes, the darker you go, the more transparent it gets, so you want to keep something around here, but you still want to go a darker color. I’m just going to mess around until I find a good color. Let’s see. I think that’ll work for now. In my actual preview, I made it a bit off-white, so it looks like paper, but you can do whatever you want. Because of how much there is, we should change the life to about 5, and increase the emitter amount.

Go to Emitter and increase this to 300, or anything between. Let’s see how this looks. Yes, it looks good. I still think it’s probably too much clutter, so 250 is good, and now you’re done. You just render the video. Once you render it, upload it to YouTube, attach it to your actual video, and from there, we’ll go to that tutorial.

After actually editing the text to say what I wanted it to say, so this is fake rainy day, so I put fake rainy day, and retro pixellar animation –
this is the retro pixellar animation video. I did decrease the pixels and the rendering took about 30 minutes. It was actually 36 minutes, which is pretty good for a 25-second clip.

In fact, in this preview, I put it to 31 seconds, so that the exit, the logo lasts quite a long time. It lasts ten seconds, the logo scene, because you might want to put other stuff, like more text down here and not just the logo. You might want to put credits down here, because that’s where credits can fit, at the end. Yes, you could do whatever you want towards the ending.

This is how I had mine. And let’s go to editing the annotations, so right here. I’m going to go over what I did. We can actually exit out of the trap code. I’m going to delete this and just redo it, just to show you. You want the videos of the clips, and start where the clips start.

Here it is, and spotlight, and you want to drag it so it fits the video. Is it supposed to be spotlight? Yes. We’re going to drag it, if I can click it right. There we go. This, here, and this, here. Oops. We weren’t supposed to move that. You can change this text here. Let me pause this. Click to go to this video, and you can make it bold or bigger.

Do I have to actually select it? I don’t know. Click Link, put the video link in there, and, yes, that’s it. You want to go to the end of it, when it starts to move away. Oops. I should have played it. Let’s play it. Right here is where it starts moving, so I’m going to drag the exit of it to here. Then you can customize the annotations however you want, by moving this to the center or making it bigger text, like this.

It really depends on what you want. Then just click Save, Publish. Do that for all four videos, what we just did here, and it should be perfectly fine. When you click the video, it’ll go to the video, and that’s how you create it. Thanks for watching.