Create Any Planet in After Effects

The Advanced 3D renderer in After Effects makes it really easy to import 3D objects … but unless you know 3D software, you’re stuck using what others have built.

For a planet (real or imagined) it is kinda nice to have that control for yourself. In this video, I’m going to show you just how easy it is to make a basic sphere using Blender ‪and then export that as a Wavefront OBJ model which means you can do all the texturing and animation directly in AE. We can do this because OBJ models use a separate MTL file to link to textures – which means it is incredibly easy to update the textures without needing to learn Blender or other 3D software.

Once we have a textured planet, I then show how to create a clouds layer and then an atmosphere layer – all without ever going back into the 3D software. In fact, if you don’t want to use Blender, then you can download all the files you need to get started right here:

3D Sphere, textures and AEP download: https://ko-fi.com/s/3bac105534

Text version (PDF): https://ko-fi.com/s/5696151e32

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