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[Learn: The How To series from Adobe]
[♪Chimes♪]
Hey there, folks; Brian Maffitt here with Total Training.
After Effects CS6 added a lot of controls
for reflections,
and they can really improve the effectiveness of the 3D scene,
especially when objects or the camera are moving,
but a lot of times, elements are facing the camera
and anything that would be reflected in those objects
would have to be situated behind the camera,
which could be really tricky to set up.
Well, to make this process simple
After Effects CS6
allows you to take any 2D layer
and transform it into an environment layer.
Let's select this tree photo, for example,
which is an imported JPEG file.
It's also much larger than the composition
as we can see if I open up this layer window.
I'l right click and choose Environment Layer.
Immediately, we see the layer get stretched a bit; how come?
Well, an environment map is basically
a texture mapped onto a large sphere
with the sphere perpetually centered on the camera.
If we move our camera around,
you can see that the environment map moves with the camera
and if we move far enough around, we can actually see a seam
where the right side of the map meets the left.
If this seam bugs you--
if it shows up in a reflection,
it's easy to fix or at least reduce.
It turns out you can apply effects
directly to environment maps,
so in this case, there's a very useful side core effect
called reptile
that will assist us;
just apply reptile, ignore most of it,
and at the bottom,
adjust this bland border slider
to a value that looks good to you.
In our case, about 10% gets ride of the hard edge
which is all I really wanted to accomplish.
Let's spin the camera back around to the front
and turn on our text layer here.
I have the reflection properties set up for this text layer
so that the reflections are slightly soft
and there's a front color cast on our text
and on the extrusion.
I also have the camera animated a bit.
Now for this scene, I want to see the trees reflected in our text,
but I don't actually want to see the environment map
in the final scene,
so if we twirl open our properties for the environment map,
you can see that we can adjust its rotation and its opacity,
but if we crank down its opacity,
we can no longer see it in the reflections, so that's no good.
But it turns out this last option,
Appears in Reflections,
is not simply an on-off switch;
it cycles through 3 options:
On, Only, and Off.
When set to on, it appears both as a background
and reflected in our text.
When set to off, it appears only as a background.
But when set to only,
the background disappears,
and our reflection just appears on our text
which gives me exactly the effect I'm looking for,
as you can see in this final render.
