IgorSchmigor's extrusion-tutorial for After Effects 1) Preparing the extrusion in Photoshop Hi, here is a little something for the novice motion grapher. I'll show how to create and animate extrusions in Adobe After Effects. Something like in the pic on the right. First you'll have to create the text in Photoshop. I added an outline by ctrl-clickingthe layers thumbnail in the layer palette, then in the menu clicked on select > modify > expand. This makes the selection a little bigger than the text. Create a new layer underneath the text and fill it with a color of your choice by pressing alt+backspace (fills with foreground color) or ctrl+backspace (fill with background color). Next i skewed the text (ctrl-t to transform and click-n-move the middle handles). When you've finished editing the text you'll have to create the extrusion in Photoshop. This is best done by creating an action, so you won't have to go through repetitive steps over and over again. Select the outline layer. Then create a new action. Recording starts automatically. Duplicate the selected layer, either by right-clicking it and choosing "duplicate layer" or by dragging it onto the "create new layer" button in the layer-menu. If you want a shaded look like pic 4 then add a layer style "bevel and emboss" (layer > layer style > bevel and emboss). Send it backward behind the original layer by choosing layer > arrange > send backward or by pressing ctrl+[. Select the move tool and move the layer one pixel to the right and one pixel down by using the arrow-keys on your keyboard. Press stop on the actions palette. You have just created an extrusion with the depth of one pixel. As you can see, this could get quite painstaking if you want to create a real deep extrusion, but with your new action you just have to press play a few times. You'll end up with lots of layers for the extrusion. To turn them all into one layer just link all the extrusion layers together and in the layer-palette's context menu (click on the little black arrow on the top right) choose "merge linked". The result will look like in pic 3, or if you used the bevel-and-emboss layer style it should look somewhat like pic 4. If you created outlines like i did then merge them with the text layer too. So at the end you should have two layers: one with the flat text and one with the extrusion. Save it as a Photoshop document. Pic 1. Pic 2. Pic 3. Pic 4. 2a) Animating it in After Effects the easy way Now that you've prepared it in Photoshop all you have to do is animate it in After Effects. There is an easy way and a not so easy way. Which one you have to use depends on wether you start growing the extrusion from a very small depth or not. Pics 5 and 6 show an example. If the extrusion starts growing from a depth like in Pic 5 you can choose the easy way, if you start from zero or a small extrusion like in Pic 6 you'll have to use a different approach. You'll see later why. Pic 5. Pic 6. So if you're lucky you can chose the easy way and that's real easy. Import the Photoshop-document as footage. Choose "merged layers". Create a new composition and place the layer somewhere on stage. Place another copy of it on top. For better understanding i have filled the top layer black and reduced it's opacity to show you how the layers should be placed (Pic 7). If you change the bottom layer's track matte to "alpha matte" it will already look like Pic 5. Now all you have to do is animate the bottom layer's position, so that it moves upwards (Pic 8). That's it, you've just created a growing extrusion. Pic 7. Pic 8. Pic 9. 2b) Animating it in After Effects the "not so easy" way Like i mentioned before, it gets a little tricky if you start from a very small extrusion or no extrusion at all. If you try the above method you'll realize that the result will look like in Pic 10. As you can see it doesn't look quite right. So here comes Plan B: Start a new project and import the PSD file, but this time as a composition, so that both layers will be imported as seperate layers (Pics 11 and 12). Place them on top of each other like in Pic 13 and animate their position together along the direction of the extrusion. Now duplicate the top layer (the flat text). Place that new layer between the other two and turn it into a precomp (Layer > Precompose or Shift+CTRL+C). Select "Move all attributes into the new composition". This will move the position-keyframes into the composition instead of making them become keyframes of the composition-layer. Now apply an echo filter on the precomp-layer (effects > time > echo). In the settings for echo chose a time distance like -0.02 and Number of Echoes about 50 to 100. It really depends on your comp's frame rate and the speed and duration of your animation. If you hide all other layers it should look like Pic 14 (here the method in the settings for the echo effect was set to maximum, but it really doesn't matter - all we want is the alpha channel). Unhide all layers and for the bottom layer (the extrusion from Photoshop) change it's track matte to alpha matte "insertnameoftheprecompedlayerhere". Pic 15 shows what the final animation should look like. Pic 10. Pic 11. Pic 12. Pic 13. Pic 14. Pic 15. 3) Fake 3D Text in After Effects without Plugins You can also create extrusions directly in After Effects. It works pretty much the same way as the method i showed for Photoshop. Pic 16 shows the result. As you can see, this is a 3D composition viewed through a camera. The camera can rotate around the text, it will still look like a solid 3D object. Pic 17 shows what the extrusion layers look like. It's a duplicate of the text layer with a bevel alpha effect applied to it. Create many duplicates of it and place each one a little deeper in z-space than the previous one (Pic 18). That's it. Pic 16. Pic 17. Pic 18.