The first thing you need to do is create nine solids with varying opacity. These are the building blocks of our 3D structure. To start with, make a red solid that’s 300 pixels wide by 800 pixels high. Create a yellow one and an orange one. Set the opacity for all three solids to 75 percent.

Duplicate all three solids and set the opacity of the duplicates to 50 percent. Duplicate the three solids again and set the opacity of those to 25 percent. You should now have our nine layers. Select them all and turn on the 3D checkbox.

Use the Cubic Distribution Lite keyframe assistant to create your 3D structure. This ships with Adobe After Effects 6.0 and 6.5 PB, but if you don’t have it you can go to www.digitalanarchy.com and download the 3D Assistants Demo which will work just fine for this tutorial. Select Windows>Cubic Distribution Lite (beneath the Wiggler) and that will pop up a dialog box.

Cubic Distribution works by creating a virtual cube and then distributes all your layers within that area. You set the dimensions of the cube, tell Cubic Distribution how you want the layers distributed and then just click apply. It then randomly distributes the layers within the area of the cube.

In this case, you want a tall column of randomly jumbled 3D layers. So the first thing to do is set the Cube Dimensions to x: 500, y: 5000 and z: 500. This will create a tall, thin virtual cube that you’ll distribute the layers within. The cube itself will not be created in the Comp. It only exists as a boundary for where the layers can be placed.

Since you want the layers to be randomly rotated, creating a "jumbled" sort of look, change Layer Orientation to Random. You’ll also want more than nine layers; nine layers would hardly create much of a 3D structure. So turn on Repeat Layers and set it to 10. This will repeat the nine layers 10 times, giving you 99 layers (9 * 10 = 90 + the original 9 = 99).

Click Apply.

Ta da! A screen full of jumbled layers. Amazing! But wait, there’s more…

Step 3 arranged your layers randomly in 3D space. You now need a camera to move amongst all these 3D layers. In this case, you’re just going to pan down the column of jumbled layers, creating an interesting motion background. However, the layers exist in 3D so if you want to do more complex and interesting 3D moves, it’s a simple thing.

First, go to Layer>New>Camera and add a default camera. When the camera dialog comes up, just click "OK" to select the default. Select the Camera Zoom tool and zoom out a bit so that the width of the column fits into the Comp window. You shouldn’t have to zoom out much, just enough so there’s a little room around the edges.

Now select the Pan tool and move the camera to the top of the column. Your settings for the Point of Interest and Position should be similar to what you see in the screenshot above.

In the timeline, twirl down the camera’s properties and set keyframes for "Point of Interest" and "Position."

Move the Time Marker to Time 08:00. Take the pan tool and move the camera to the bottom of the column of layers. This will create an animation over eight seconds of the camera moving down the column. This will finish your background animation.

To give it a little spice, add some motion blur, directional blur or a glow. You could also put the camera’s "Point of Interest" in the center of the 3D structure and have the camera rotate around the structure as it moves down.

That’s it! Check out a future issue to see how to make the animation loop.

Jim Tierney
President
Digital Anarchy

Jim Tierney has worked on numerous award-winning products from companies like MetaCreations, Atomic Power and Cycore. After working on Adobe After Effects plug-ins for almost a decade, he thought it was finally time to get out there and do some of his own. As “Chief Executive Anarchist,” Jim conceptualizes and designs Digital Anarchy products and heads up business development.

Digital Anarchy
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jim@digitalanarchy.com