Motion design made faster: The impact of native 3D in After Effects

Motion designers and video editors have been blending 2D and 3D elements in Adobe After Effects for years, through the use of third-party applications. With the 2024 3D workspace upgrades in After Effects, creators now have a streamlined workflow allowing them to combine these assets natively within the application.

Of course, visual quality is paramount in motion design projects, and incorporating 3D assets provides a boost in visual quality — photorealistic materials, notably, can play a huge part in bringing a project to life, and making it stand out.

To showcase the possibilities available in such a blended motion design workflow, Wes McDermott principal director of Substance 3D Worldwide Evangelism, brought the teams from Adobe Substance 3D, After Effects, and Maxon together to create the animated scene, “Got You Covered”.

Step 1: Asset Creation

McDermott: For this kind of 3D motion design project, the first stage in the workflow is asset creation, where you essentially assemble all the elements of the scene you want to create. For this, you can find resources online, in places like the Substance 3D Assets library, or you can go ahead and create your own. For this project in particular, we partnered with Maxon to highlight their approach to asset creation, particularly focusing on their launch of ZBrush for iPad, earlier this year.

Our team partnered with Ian Robinson from the Maxon team, who played a pivotal role in sculpting the character. We provided Ian with initial concepts and block-outs created by our artist, Giovanni Nakpil, which served as a starting point. Using ZBrush on the iPad, Ian refined and sculpted the character into a fully realized 3D model.

Asset creation laid the groundwork for the entire project, demonstrating how concept sketches evolve into detailed, production-ready models.

Initial concept images.

Character Modeling

Ian Robinson is a Master ZBrush Trainer at Maxon Software, developers of software tools such as Cinema 4D and ZBrush, among others. For Got You Covered, Robinson modelled the scene’s central character.

Robinson: The character concept for this project began with a blockout provided by Gio. Once I had that rough shape, my job was to refine it and bring the character closer to the final design. We had a fantastic concept, which made the refinement process smooth and efficient. Then I added smaller details, such as the character’s clothing and accessories, and added secondary and tertiary details like wrinkles and skin tone adjustments to ensure everything matched the concept. With this approved, I retopologized it to make it ready for animation. This step ensures that the geometry is clean and can deform correctly — this is vital in later steps, when texturing in Substance 3D Painter, or when the character is rigged and animated in Cinema 4D.

I sculpted the entire character using ZBrush for iPad, which was a key part of this project. As we were working on this project, ZBrush for iPad was a fairly new tool, and this project gave me the opportunity to put the iPad version of ZBrush to the test in real-world scenarios. I could take my work with me to airports, coffee shops, and hotels, and continue sculpting on the go. I could keep the momentum going, regardless of where I was physically, ensuring that work never slowed down.

For me, this flexibility is a big step forward for digital sculptors. In the past, it often felt like there was a limitation in terms of mobility, as traditional sculpting tools were more portable than their digital counterparts. With ZBrush for iPad, we're giving artists that same level of creative freedom. It's one of the things we wanted to achieve at Maxon: to allow artists to break free from the confines of a workstation and take their work to new places. It’s not just about creating art — it’s about unlocking the potential for creativity, no matter where you are.

Step 2: Texturing

McDermott: After asset creation, the workflow moved to the texturing phase, where we added realistic surface details and materials to our models.

First, you have to find or create the textures you want. Again, you can find plenty of these online at places like the Substance 3D Assets library, but for this project we decided to create our own. Notably, in this case, team member Laura Vitolina found some real-life material samples, and used an HP Z Captis scanner to capture incredibly detailed scan data, so that we could create a 3D material in Substance 3D Sampler.

We further refined the character design, focusing on the shapes and forms of the character’s clothing and accessories — like the heavy-knit sweater, and the bold, red bag. With these modelled, Laura sourced real-life material samples, like knitted fabrics and denim, aiming for textures that matched our concept. We found a heavy knit for the sweater but couldn’t find the exact color we wanted. But this is the beauty of working with Captis and Substance 3D Sample — we scanned a cream-colored knit to capture the height and curvature details, then used Sampler to adjust the color digitally to get the perfect green.

The HP Z Captis scanner uses the same image-to-material functionality as other tools, so you don’t necessarily need specialized equipment. You can use a photo you find online, or one you’ve taken with a smartphone, and get a great digital material in Sampler. That said, Captis takes things to the next level. It captures higher-quality images with precise measurements for height, normal maps, and more. It’s like comparing a basic phone camera to a professional-level camera — the image quality and detail are just a step up. Plus, Captis has advanced features like cross-polarization, which adds even more accuracy. So, while a smartphone is a great way to capture material data, a Captis scanner delivers results that are outstanding.

With our materials in place, we used Substance 3D Painter — our precision texturing tool that offers a familiar layered workflow similar to Photoshop — to apply these materials to our characters, as well as to the various buildings and objects that fill the world around her. Painter's non-destructive approach to texturing allows artists to build up materials layer by layer, adjusting properties like roughness, metallic content, and surface detail with incredible precision, and its integration with After Effects enables a streamlined workflow where artists can send textured 3D models directly to After Effects compositions. However, for this character-driven piece, we chose to move the character model into Cinema 4D as a next step to take advantage of its rigging and animation capabilities. This flexibility to work between various 3D and compositing applications is key to supporting the diversity of motion design workflows while maintaining the highest quality texturing results.

Step 3: Animation

The third phase of the workflow focuses on animation, using the powerful tools in Cinema 4D to bring the textured character to life. Here, you create dynamic movement; for Got You Covered, we showcased a character performing a walk cycle with additional actions integrated into the sequence.

Rigging was the first step, where we used the Cinema 4D rigging tools to build a skeleton for the character, enabling it to move naturally. For the animation itself, the team leveraged the motion capture data included with Cinema 4D. Pre-existing motions, such as a walk cycle and a tripping sequence, were selected and applied to the character, ensuring fluid and realistic movements.

It was seamless to integrate the textured model into Cinema 4D with the software’s Substance Painter integration. We could export the textures created in Painter directly into Cinema 4D and easily apply them to the character.

Step 4: Compositing and Rendering

The final stage of the workflow fully embraces Adobe After Effects and additional tools from the MAXON suite. It’s here that you really see the value of the new native support for 3D in After Effects, as it allows you to choose the most efficient way to build your scenes — that is, it’s no longer necessary to render everything in Redshift as image sequences or movie files in advance; with native 3D support in After Effects, and the smooth workflow with the Substance 3D and Maxon tools, you can make any tweaks or changes on the fly. For instance, imagine you’re preparing a motion design sequence for a client who asks you to change some background colors — in a more conventional motion design workflow, this might require you to re-render a bunch of movie files, which would eat up a lot of time. But using this workflow, such a tweak is no more complicated than moving a slider and checking the results in real time. It’s a huge time-saver.

For Got You Covered, the key steps here included:

Bringing 3D files into After Effects

Thanks to the new native support for 3D models in After Effects, we could export the textured and animated GLB files from Cinema 4D directly, maintaining all material and animation data.

For example, I could adjust the walk cycle created in Cinema 4D in After Effects, using time remapping. This allowed me to precisely synchronize the character’s movement with the rotating ground plane, so it didn’t seem like her feet were slipping about. And, as mentioned above, this was very quick and fluid to accomplish, in real time.

Building the scene.

The scene included a dynamic rotating ground, background street, buildings, and atmospheric clouds. Much of the environment’s animation, including the parallax effect (where closer objects move faster than distant ones), was set up directly in After Effects. The team layered multiple elements to create depth and motion.

Matte painting of background buildings.

One standout example was wrapping a line of textured buildings into a circular layout to rotate like a record. Using Cinema 4D’s MoGraph tools, the buildings were warped and rendered as stills with global illumination. We imported these high-quality stills into After Effects, where additional 3D elements like scaffolding and scattered props were added without the need to re-render assets. As mentioned above, if we’d needed to go back and add these elements into the scene at the animation stage, this would have added a not-negligible amount of time to the project. Instead, we could do this quickly, in After Effects, with a fluidity that allowed us to maintain creative flexibility — we were free to test out whatever additional elements we wanted, without this requiring extensive forward planning or eating up lots of time.

Real-Time Adjustments and Effects

This is another area where this workflow allowed the use of computationally heavy processing effects, like the application of depth of field and atmospheric perspective directly within After Effects. The team leveraged a depth map, easily extracted using After Effects’ 3D Channel tools, to add fog and subtle color shifts that enhanced the scene’s realism and immersion. A more conventional workflow would require taking the time to carry out multiple render passes in Cinema 4D — carrying out this step in After Effects saved time, as well as providing more flexibility

Mixing 2D and 3D Content

After Effects’ ability to handle both 2D video assets and 3D models made it a versatile compositing tool. An example of this hybrid approach was adding birds to the scene. These were simple video assets from Adobe Stock, layered into the 3D composition and seamlessly integrated using masking and compositing techniques.

Yet again, this is a great example of how the new native integration of 3D in After Effects can save a huge amount of time. We could make revisions quickly, with the flexibility to swap assets, without going back to the previous step in Cinema 4D. It’s hard to understate how much smoother this makes this stage of the project workflow.

Finishing Touches

Once the 3D scene was complete, the composition was flattened and post-processed. We brought the final renders into Adobe Premiere Pro, where we added music and additional edits to finalize the presentation. Here, we also used Maxon’s Red Giant Magic Bullet plugin for color grading and processing the final render, to achieve a polished aesthetic.

This seamless integration of 3D and compositing tools in After Effects, as well as the ability to mix 2D assets with dynamic 3D elements, created a powerful and efficient pipeline. The result was a visually rich and technically complex project completed in record time, with flexibility and creativity driving the process.

In all, this is a great little scene for showcasing the possibilities available in this kind of 3D workflow. We’re already talking about expanding this scene for future events — more news to come!