Casting Shadows In Adobe's After Effects

 

Recently I wanted to create a few simple movies in Adobe After Effects and wanted to create some depth using shadows. I ran into a few problems and after some research I discovered that if you don't apply all of the necessary steps you simply won't ever see your shadows. View this presentation for all of the little details, but in a nutshell:

  • Create your new composition, use whatever settings you desire for your final movie.
  • In our movie we built 3 different layers: a wall (to receive the shadow), a text object (to cast the shadow) and a light source.
  • Select the wall layer in the layers section of After Effects and click the letter "A" twice on your keyboard quickly. This opens the layer's attributes section. The wall will need to Accept Shadows, so make sure that option is set to "On".
  • Select the text layer in the layers section of After Effects and click the letter "A" twice. In the layer's attributes you'll need to turn on Casts Shadows (by default this is turned off).
  • Select the light object (double click the layer to bring up a dialog box with the light's properties). Be sure that you've checked the Casts Shadows checkbox or you won't get any shadows!
  • Finally, open up a second Comp Viewer window and leave one in Active Camera view and set the other to Top view. If you're still not seeing your shadows appear in your Active Camera view chances are your layers are piled on top of one another. Try grabbing the text layer and move it in "Z" space; this will create space between the text object and the wall, allowing the shadow to appear and grow as you move the text layer away from the wall.
  • IF YOU'RE STILL NOT SEEING YOUR SHADOWS: You've more than likely got something set up incorrectly with either the way you're viewing your After Effects movie or perhaps a layer is in the wrong position, you missed a shadow selection on one of the layer's attributes.... drop me a line and we can troubleshoot your movie.

 

Comments

Rich Leach

Please keep your posts relevant to the topic: Casting Shadows In Adobe's After Effects. All non-relevant postings and/or spam will be removed. Thanks!

February 25, 2011, 2:32 PM
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TM

Thanks for the tutorial it cleared casting shadows up for me. One note: You can select the 1 View drop down and make it 2, 4 etc. which will put multiple windows along side of each other, instead of having to duplicate the window as you did. Thanks for the tip - hope mine helps you as well :-)

May 20, 2011, 7:14 PM
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Rich Leach

Thanks TM!

May 20, 2011, 7:24 PM
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