After Effects CS6 Tutorial - 100 - Spotlights Video Lecture | Adobe After Effects CS6: Complete Course from Novice to Pro - IT & Software

hey everybody welcome back to another
After Effects cs6 tutorial
I'm your host buddy Blackbird and today
I want to go over a spotlights with you
and let's just bring in a spotlight here
we'll go up to the layer we'll go to new
light and the hot keys for the for some
of these lights is a ctrl alt shift L or
command option shift L but I mean I
don't really like pushing all those
buttons at once I find it faster to just
come up here and click and bring in a
light and then if I ever need any more
lights I'll just duplicate this light
and then change the settings so I'm
going to name this a spotlight and we're
going to change it to spot here now
we've got some settings going on here
I'm going to create the light first and
we need it
I wanted to illuminate this layer of
this guy standing around so I'm going to
need to change some of the settings
settings that are on here now the last
settings that you use are going to be
the next default settings for your
spotlight so the last time I used a head
and a head and intensity of two so I'm
going to turn that up so you can see
what the hell's going on and we got our
spotlight here I'm going to put that at
100
OOP don't hit enter because then it'll
go right back down like I just hit enter
so I've got me at my intensity at 100
and if you click on this checkbox here
or says preview you can see what what
you're doing in real time there you can
change the color of your spotlight to
create different types of moods so now
if I look at this now there's a
different type of mood going on here in
this picture I can change my cone angle
to change the width of the spotlight and
how much it's illuminating so if I put
this up to maybe like 90 it's going to
illuminate a bigger area there now the
feather here is going to determine like
the outs
how it's feathering out of the of the
comb so if I turn that to 100 it's going
to be a lot more feathered in if I turn
it to zero it's not going to be
feathered at all just going to be a
straight hard circle which I might be
cool at some times but most of the time
you're going to want to have a certain
amount of feather I'll put that on 50
the fall-off here is going to affect how
the light feathers out or how the light
diffuses out at the edges of your
lighting here so if I turn this fall-off
on to smooth or inverse-square clamped
these are both just different types and
they just give you different different
looks you don't need to know what they
mean
just here's smooth and if you I'll I'll
hit OK real quick and up or just bring
this into a one camera view so we can
see and zoom it in and bring up my light
options again so we can see a little
better so this is none if you look at
the edges you can see it gets darker
when I go into smooth and then if I go
to inverse-square clamped it gets even
more darker so that's just what you need
to really know and when you have the
smooth here you can increase the radius
or the fall-off distance so if I you can
also decrease it also obviously if I
decrease this to like 200 you can see
that it gets darker and if I increase it
it's obviously going to get a lot
brighter the fall-off of how the light
falls off the edges is being affected by
this radius here in the distance is the
same thing so if I put the distance down
I'll use my shift here you can see
what's going on here
so that's the radius of your fall off or
the distance of your fall off from the
from the cone angle there and then if I
go past it just comes out a little
farther and the lights don't go past the
cone angle they'll just go to the edge
there so if I type this on really high I
typed it on 5400 it's not going any
farther than the edges here so I'll just
back go back to the basic 500 and I'll
just turn the fall-off down casting
shadows here is if you have another
object in front and that object accepts
and the object except shadows you can
cast shadows on the object this one
doesn't have anywhere to have anything
to cast a shadow on or anything like
that so I can't show this right now but
I can bring up some text and show you
how that works so I'm going to hit OK
here and we're going to bring in some
text so I'll just go or actually I can
bring in these uh vector images that I
actually have see if one's in front
alright we got that one let's bring in
this black black one here and I have to
check in 3d space where it is alright
it's in front of the light I'm going to
rotate it better put it back to zero
rotation here and move it just back a
little bit now this hat this vector has
transparency so the light will penetrate
through the transparency here and cast a
shadow onto the back object so the first
thing I need to do is come down to this
picture here that I have in the
background and allow it to accept
shadows by turning down and coming to
the material options and cache shadows
is on the vector that I have needs to
have cast shadows on also
except shadows on okay except lights on
okay make sure I have everything right
on this one again except shadows on
except lights on so we turn that stuff
on and make our light now cast shadows
and there we go now we have a shadow
going on here I can turn the shadow
darkness down a little bit and as you
see when you start casting shadows it
renders a lot slower so if I uncheck a
shadow cast shadows you should be able
to see like the shadows in the
background
turning off there you go so that's how
you cast shadows and it's got this
little note down here in case you forget
that shadows are only cast from layers
with cast shadows enabled two layers
with cast except shadows now all those
options can be found again under the
light options here so if you twirl down
on the spotlight and then come down to
your light options you've got all those
options again so these are all the same
ones that you can find in the in the
pop-up menu when you double click it was
just it's easier for me to show you on
this screen because the words are bigger
and you can see a little better so just
remember that that's it for spotlights
we can now use those in our scenes mess
around with them if you would like
rotate them around animate them and
that's pretty much all there is so I'll
thank you yeah thanks for watching this
one and I'll see you the next one
goodbye everybody