[Jack Hamilton]

Hi again Tom,

One way you can get your your page to appear to have a front and a back is to keyframe the opacity of the front page so that when it is at 90 degrees, it’s opacity goes from 100% to 0%.

One way to eliminate the darkness of your page while it’s turning is to go into that layer’s Material Options, which you can find right below it’s transform properties. So, if you turn it’s Shininess property down from 5% to 0% it will look a lot more like the example you are basing your effect off of.

And to have your movement ease in and out, all you have to do is select all of your keyframes for the page’s rotation, right click on them and select Keyframe Assistant > Easy Ease. That will give you that easing in and out of the movement look you need. 🙂

I hope this helps you get the effect done the way you want it!

Jack Hamilton
http://www.j-ham.com
critstrike@gmail.com

[Jack Hamilton]

Hi again Tom!

First of all, don’t worry about being a noob in AE. Everybody is a noob at some point. But I’m glad you are headed in the right direction with the effect you are looking for.

Now, I’m not sure which way you went about getting your page to turn. If you went and used the ‘Basic 3D’ effect, then it will be hard, if not impossible, to get the depth you are looking for out of the page. Basic 3D doesn’t operate in 3D space, so it looks very flat and…basic.

But, you can turn the page into a 3D layer and have it operate in 3D space very easily. If you look in your timeline window, you’ll see your layer (It’s probably named ‘White Solid 1’ for you). So if you select that layer, you’ll see to the right of it’s name are a bunch of switches that look like checkboxes. Above each switch is an icon that will tell you what each switch does if you hold your mouse pointer over them for a moment. The last switch on the right is the 3D layer switch. If you check this on, you’ll enable your layer as a 3D layer. Once you do that, if you twirl down the ‘Transform’ properties of the layer, you can rotate it on any of it’s three axis.

(By the way, if you already knew all this, i’m sorry for the redundancy)

So now you have your ‘page’ in 3D space, and a quickk way to create some depth for the page would be to create a light to generate some nice shading on the page. So go to Layer > New > Light and create a new Point light. I would just keep the default settings. Now you can manipulate the light in 3D space. So if you move it back on it’s Z-axis, away from the page and towards your ‘camera’ so-to-speak, it will create a very nice looking bit of shading on the page while it rotates.

Also, the motion blur switch you are looking for is in the same area that the 3D switch is. It’s 2 boxes to the left of the 3D switch. However, turning this on won’t make your page have motion blur, it will just enable to page to generate motion blur while the master motion blur switch is on. The master motion blur switch is located in the timeline window above the area where your layer information is. It has an icon that looks like a ball with trail behind it. So as long as you have those two switches turned on, your page will have cool looking motion blur while it’s turning!

I hope this has helped you out Tom. Feel free to contact me if you need any more help!

Jack Hamilton
http://www.j-ham.com
critstrike@gmail.com

[Jack Hamilton]

Hi again,

Well, I did a quick search for 3D bullets and found a site that has some models that could suit your needs. They offer all sorts of models, some cost money, but some are free, including some 9mm looking bullets.

3D Bullet Models

Hopefully you find what you need here. Again, if you need any more help, feel free to ask!

Jack Hamilton
http://www.j-ham.com
critstrike@gmail.com

[Jack Hamilton]

Hey Darryl,

Without knowing what kind of footage you have, I can’t really give a detailed suggestion of what could be done for your effect. But I will give you some ideas.

If your camera is stationary during the shot, it will make things simpler for you. All you really need to do in this sort of scenario is lay in the proper explosion from your Action Movie Essentials folder on top of the car, and have the car disappear as the explosion occurs. Obviously you will have to customize what you do to the car to achieve your desired effect.

If you just lay in a shot of an explosion, however, the effect will not be very believable. If it were me, I would mask off the car so that fire comes out of the windows and out from under the hood of the car. That would sell a lot better than just fire over a car’s image.

Now, if you have a moving shot, check out Andrew Kramer’s tutorials on motion tracking at http://www.videocopilot.net so you can just pickwhip your masks and explosions to a null object that is tracked to your car.

Good luck with your effect, feel free to contact me if you would like more in-depth assistance.

Jack Hamilton
http://www.j-ham.com
critstrike@gmail.com

[Jack Hamilton]

Hi Tom

It’s likely that the guy who did this page spin simply created a white solid, made it 3D, and rotated it on it’s Y-axis.

I also noticed that the shading of the white solid changes slightly as it turns. This could indicate that he made a single point light in his composition and pulled it back a bit so that it isn’t to close to the white solid.

The only effect I can think of right now that would give you a similar look would be to go to Effect > Perspective > Basic 3D. This will make an object appear 3D, but it won’t actually take up 3D space, nor will it’s shading be affected by lights during its rotation.

This stuff is really basic, but if you are new to After Effects it can be hard to figure out if you have no instruction.

P.S. Don’t forget to turn on your motion blur switches!

Jack Hamilton
http://www.j-ham.com
critstrike@gmail.com