Been doing a bunch of motion-based work over the past month. Haven’t had much time for personal work, but no  complaints.  I really like it in this type of stuff even though I’m probably not the most savvy at it. But where I may fall short on technical expertise, I can make up for it with ham-fisted slapdash digital painting :D.

AfterEffects is awesome, because while it can get pretty deep, fundamentally it’s pretty much moving photoshop, so if you have a basic understanding of photo editing the learning curve isn’t too bad.

Thought it might be cool to make a quick little tutorial of a space environment fly through using a layered PSD file painted on my iPad and then animated in after effects. This is a surprisingly effective technique thats cheap but does a decent job creating the illusion of volume and depth. You could use this approach with pretty much any environment, but space is a nice quick colorful example that doesn’t require a ton of planning to get something sort of cool looking.

I started by painting some clouds and stars on separate layers in art studio pro. I make sure there’s a Good amount of transparency happening and also that nothing extends to the borders of the image. This gives us a little more freedom to move and rotate the layers.

Once I had something put together that I felt pretty good about I exported the PSD into after effects.

Once I had it loaded up, I changed the layers to 3d objects, and staggered them back in space.

Then I placed a few point lights depth-wise in between the cloud layers.

Made a camera layer, and animated it to fly straight into the frame.  Animated the layers slightly to fly toward the camera, and put a slight rotation on some of the layers. Lastly, I faded out the opacity on each layer just before it passed through the camera to eliminate popping.

heres a quick little 15 second render:

 

And that’s it! You could basically keep layering, copy-pasting the same layers and just rotating them to avoid any obvious repetition.  Pretty cool!