are you ready to step into the world of 3D and harness the power of the blender to After Effects workflow in a few moments you'll be able to utilize blender to create shapes add textures to them and use after effects to create a work of art whether you're curious about using blender or you're new to this workflow let's get started we're going to be using blender to create a set of 3D objects that we can use to make a scene like this and after effects it's very simple even if you haven't used a 3D modeling software before we'll start out our tutorial in blender and the first thing that we're going to do is make a basic sphere this is super simple all you need to do is go to add mesh and then UV sphere at the bottom left you're going to see a customization menu for the sphere and what we'll do is set the segments to 128 and Rings to 64 basically increasing these will add more detail to the sphere that way it looks smoother when we bring it into After Effects next right click on the sphere click shade Auto smooth to smooth it out then we'll go to materials and set the sphere to the default material or just create a new one here you'll see some basic options for the default material you can change its color you can make the material more metallic rough or you can make it see-through by reducing the alpha or adjust the I which is how the light falls off of the material if we select the viewport shading icon up here we'll be able to see how the material affects our object in real time like this for this object we want a custom texture so what we're going to do is click on base color select image texture click on the open file icon then select the texture that you want to use I'm just using a basic marble texture that I got from a stock image site you can see that the custom material is now applied and our object is done so we'll go to file export gltf 2.0 which will export it as a.gb file this is what works best when importing into After Effects next we'll swap over to After Effects but before we import our object go up to composition composition settings 3D renderer and then set the renderer to Advanced 3 D this is what lets us use the blender files properly this renderer is only available on the most recent versions of After Effects though so if you don't see this option you need to do an update now we'll add our model that we just made and when you add it to the composition a menu is going to pop up select make comp size and then hit okay you can see that our sphere we made is now inside of After Effects and it's ready to use we'll start by reducing its size a bit so that it doesn't fill up the whole screen next we'll get some lighting going so first open up the objects layer open compositing options make sure that casting and accepting Shadows is on then select layer new light and choose environment light environment lights are unique to the advanced 3D renderer because they can use something called an hdri to produce high quality lighting for your composition an hdri is a high dynamic range image and you can find them for free online just by searching for free hdris once you have one that you like add it to the composition open the light and set it source to be the hdri and we now have highquality custom lighting for our objects if you open up the light you can also open transform and mess around with the direction of the light to get a unique effect that's the basic workflow for getting an object from blender to After Effects and this works with any model that you make inside a blender if you like highquality visual effects and you want an easy way to add them to your projects in the click of a button check out our epic VFX pack it features a variety of fully customizable templates that can be used to elevate your footage to the next level for an all-in-one solution to all of your VFX needs check out our epic VFX pack visit sundu film.com for more details thanks for your support it helps us out a ton I also want to quickly show that you can use the same workflow to import Advanced blender projects into after effects as well here we have a much more advanced model in blender with a ton of detail and it's fully textured if you're an advanced user of blender and making models like this you can bring them into After Effects the same way that you did with the sphere just go to export export your model as a GB then swap over to After Effects import the glb of your model bring it into the composition and now this Advanced model is fully usable in After Effects and it's being affected by the lighting setup that we made for the sphere next I'll show you an example of how to make another custom object that's a bit more advanced just to see how you can iterate and add more objects from blender to build out a composition we'll keep our sphere in this project and then go to add mesh Cube so now we have this basic Cube to work with next press s for scale and move your mouse to increase the size of the cube until it's about twice the size of the sphere and then left click to confirm then press s again press X to lock it to the X AIS then shrink it down so that it's a thin square like this now we're going to cut a hole in the Square so let's hide the sphere go to add mesh cylinder and set the vertices of the cylinder to 128 so that we have a lot of detail press R for rotation y to lock it to the Y AIS type 90 to rotate at 90° and then hit enter then we'll add a modifier to the square so make sure it's highlighted then click on the modifier icon and search for Boolean set the target object of the Boolean to be the cylinder that we just made then click on the drop- down icon select apply and now if I delete the cylinder you can see that it cut a hole in our square that matches its shape we could have used the sphere that we made to cut this hole but since we gave it so much detail the hole that it cut would have had a bunch of unnecessary geometry so we used a bit of a simpler shape instead now that we're done making the custom shape go to object apply and select all transforms to confirm all of the changes that we just made to this shape for the material we're just going to set it to be the same material as the sphere and now we can go to export and under include set it to be visible objects only that way it won't export the sphere a second time since we hit it and then confirm the export we're back in After Effects now and we're going to import the new shape shape the same way we did with the sphere just add it to your composition set it to comp size and click okay we'll adjust the scale and rotation of the square so that it lines up well with a sphere like this and now we're going to want to get a camera set up go to layer new camera I'll choose a 50 mm camera and click okay now we have our camera set up and we'll do a cool trick to set up some camera movement start by creating a null object then enable that null object as a 3D layer parent the camera we just made to that null then open up the null's rotation alt click the stopwatch for y rotation type in time asterisk 50 and now we have a constant spinning movement for our camera our scene is basically set up now so all we need to do is just duplicate the shapes reposition them resize them all around the composition just to fill things out until we create something that looks cool experiment with all of the different shapes and blender or you can try importing some of the models you've already made if you're more experienced to see what kind of cool stuff that you can make before we're done the last thing that we'll do is add a depth of field effect to the entire composition we'll start by highlighting all of our layers and then precompose them into one single comp after that highlight the pre-m go to effect 3D channel 3D channel extract and effect 3D channel depth of field set the black point of the channel extract to around 6500 the white point to around 2800 enable invert depth map and for the depth of field will set the maximum radius to 160 now duplicate the pre-m delete the effects from the top precom then go to layer new adjustment layer and add the camera lens blur effect to the adjustment layer set the blur map layer to be the original pre-m we put all of the 3D effects on change it from source to effects and masks then set the blur radius to around 10 and we now have a nice depth of field effect play around with all of these settings to make it better fit your own composition be sure to subscribe and always be creating