Subtitles of the Movie

Now it's time to bring the 3D object from Photoshop right into After Effects. Once again, as a friendly reminder, you have to have Photoshop CS4 Extended to be able to work with 3D objects in that fashion. So make sure you have that version, but if not and you want to upgrade, I have a tutorial on Photoshop CS3 which will give you enough information on how to use those 3D tools and work with the textures so that you'll be able to work with that in After Effects CS4 as well. So definitely check that out. OK. So what I'm going to do at this point is I'm going to import that cube from my Desktop. So I'm going to go to File, Import, File and then I'm going to grab the PSD file. So that's the important thing. After Effects is not going to import the OBJ file; only the original Maya file. It's going to work with the Photoshop file. If you change your textures and all that kinds of stuff in Photoshop, you'll be ready to bring this in. So I'm going to click Open and then in a minute the Box.psd Dialog Box will open up, which is of course the name of the file we're bringing in and we have the option to bring this in as footage. But if we choose this, we will lose the ability to work with this object in 3D mode. So it's pretty important to keep it on composition because when you choose the import kind as composition, you'll notice that we have this Live Photoshop 3D little checkmark. We kind of need this on so that the object is able to be manipulated. So make sure you have this on and choose Composition. Now I'm going to click OK and there it is and here's the box just like it looked inside of Photoshop. And we also have the layers. So here's the Box Layer with the artwork on it and everything and here is a solid. This solid is how you're going to manipulate the box when you want to animate it. It says Box Controller and it's pretty much a null object that allows you to move that object around. But for now I just want to show you how to bring this box into the application and then see it and move it around. So I'm going to simply double click on the box and now I'm going to zoom out. I'll put Fit here and here it is. We have our box that can fully be manipulated. I'm also going to go to my Camera Tools now and I can use my unified camera and click and rotate. And just a second; it'll update. So as you can imagine, you can do a really, really cool things. One more thing though before I end this particular lesson; the resolution or your mode as far as draft or fine or whatever you have in Photoshop will affect how you bring it into After Effects. So if you want better performance, you might want to choose the draft mode when you have your Rendering Options in Photoshop. Also, you can also get better results if you drop your resolution down inside After Effects as well instead of going to full. So on full, when I try to manipulate it, it would take a little bit longer to move around. So you might want to just drop this down and then you'll be able to move it more quickly. So I hope you think about bringing 3D elements into your After Effects composites because it'll give you a whole new way of thinking about the things you can do in this application.