After Effects CS6 Tutorial - 107 - Create a Reflection without Plugins Part 1 Video Lecture | Adobe After Effects CS6: Complete Course from Novice to Pro - IT & Software

hey everybody welcome to another After
Effects cs6 tutorial
I'm your host buddy Blackford and in
this tutorial I want to go over how to
create some fake reflections without
using plugins in After Effects
now these reflections aren't going to be
as cool as some of the plugins you can
find on the internet but if you don't
have any of those or you can't find any
plugins then just you can use this
technique and it'll get the job done to
pretty much a satisfactory result so
what we need to do is we have a comp
made here and I need to import some
stuff so I'm going to come here to my
images I'm just going to import my image
of the floor that I have if I can find
it wooden background there we go and I
need to create a camera also because
this is going to be in 3d so here's my
camera and I want to set it to 50
millimeter because that's what I like
and hit OK and now I've got this wooden
background I'm gonna make it 3d and I'm
gonna rotate this so it's a floor so I'm
gonna go to my orientation and rotate it
on this X on the first axis here the
x-axis
I'm gonna go 180 and see what that gives
me nope not that much about 90
and then drag it down and now we can see
that there's a floor there you know it's
a little too big so I'm going to scale
it down a little bit so it looks kind of
more real there we go so now we've got a
floor going on here
I'm gonna drink it down a little more
scale it down a little more all right
I'm gonna turn off my transparency and
actually I'm gonna throw just a black
background in there just for looks go
all the way in the back okay now what we
need to do is bring in something to
create a reflection off of so let's just
select any picture here and let's see if
I can find one this is halfway decent
there we go
drag this in and we're also gonna make
that a 3d layer and what I want to do is
set the anchor point of this layer to
the very bottom so what I'm gonna do is
press a for anchor point and click on it
the anchor point here and press right
click and click on edit value' and I
want to change my units here to percent
of source and set the X to fifty and
then the Y to 100 and that's gonna put a
rate at the bottom and that's a quick
way for you to get right to the bottom
if you're trying to do that there so I'm
gonna drag this down to where it's rate
intersecting with with the ground I'm
gonna check my views to make sure this
is in like nope this is in a good
position so it's right in the middle
which is what we want
unfortunately lights and after-effects
they don't cast reflections so this is
why I'm teaching you how to make the
reflections in like a fake way so what
we're gonna do is we're gonna duplicate
this a picture that we have and we're
gonna go to the scale property
unlike the scale and make this negative
100 and all that's gonna do is flip the
image so I'm in my custom view now and I
can look down here and the image is just
flipped so there we go for that and
being in your custom view helps a lot
for this so now we have the problem that
the wooden background is over top of
this picture that we have here so we
need to put the wooden background our
wooden floor here in between and then
we're gonna go to toggle switches and
modes and we're gonna set that to screen
and now you can see how this might be
able to show off as a reflection now
what I want to do is make sure that when
I animate any positions or anything like
that for my picture here that it pretty
much is it's parented to the other
picture so first of all I need to rename
my objects so that they don't get
confused so I'm going to change this one
to bush reflection and then I'm going to
parent this bush reflection to the
regular Bush there and then I'm going to
switch these so the reflection is
underneath the wood the next thing I
need to do is set the track mat of the
reflection here to alpha mat and now the
wooden background is gone so I need to
turn it back on
and it's just going to cut out the Alpha
part over where the the reflection is
and now since the reflection is probably
too long and doesn't really totally look
like a reflection we need to add some
effects to it so let's go to effect and
we're gonna add a transition called
linear wipe we're gonna set that linear
wipe to 180 for the wipe angle so when
we wipe it's gonna just go straight up
and down and transition complete we're
gonna make that so it's not as long and
then we're gonna feather it out so it
looks like the reflection is fading off
so we have that going on there and let's
check our camera to see what it looks
like looks like we need to zoom our
camera out a little
so if I can't zoom it out too much
because the floor is too far so let me
bring the floor forward using this wine
here