Modifying lights and rendering

- All right, so this was the basics, and now we are ready to address those titles, add some lights, and render a final quality version that we can later animate inside Premiere Pro. So to do so, I'm going to make sure that the main title is selected, the Vintage Cars Show. Then I'm going to head to the 3D panel, which will show you a bird's eye view of all the 3D elements that you have in the scene. So we can see two cameras, our text element which I'm going to collapse because we already finished and modified in the previous movie, and then of course the Infinite Light. I'm going to click on it, and in order to see the light in the scene, we need to return to the Selection tool. So press V in order to activate the Selection tool, and over here, we can see this light which is represented by this ball with a crescent above it. So we can modify the direction of the light and you can also raise the intensity. So I'm just going to maybe go to 113%, and what I'm trying to do is to match the light direction that I'm seeing on those 3D car models. So something like this, but I do want to warm it a touch and also make sure to control the shadows. Now, the appearance of the shadows can be modified from the object itself. So if I'm going to select our text and then I'm going to turn off Catch Shadows and Cast Shadows, we can see that now we are eliminating the shadows from the slide and the object only shades itself. But I do want to cast those shadows, and I also may want to play with the quality of them in terms of their softness. So you can raise the softness value over here, and I'm just going to stick with 32% in this case, but I do want to warm the shot just a touch, so there will be a connection between the color of the letters and the background. To do so, I'm going to add another light, and you can do it from these Light options over here, so we can add a new Infinite Spot or a new Point Light, which is what I'm going to choose over here. And now I want to change the default color of the light, which is white, by clicking on this color swatch and sample this beige color from the background, and then I'm going to click OK. In order to make it more effective, we need to move the light to a better position. So you can do it manually by returning to the Selection tool and then choosing the Drag tool over here, and then drag the light to a better position. I found it is a little bit difficult to control it like this so once again I'm going to head to the Coordinates tab, making sure the light is still selected, and I'm just going to give you my numbers. And by the way, just so you know, I've reached those numbers by trial and error. So 100 for the X, 300 for the Y, and 700 pixels for the Z. And now if we're going to switch back to the Marquee tool, we can see that we have a better integration between the title and the other elements. Once again, if you do want to change the shadow softness, you can go ahead and raise them, and we'll see the result of this softness once we are going to render the scene. But before we are going to do so, I just want to briefly talk about those cameras that we are seeing here. We have the Current View as well as a Default Camera, which is also going to allow you to choose between different presets. I'm not going to animate the camera over here in Photoshop, we'll do all the animation inside Premiere Pro, but just so you know, you can actually animate 3D titles here inside Photoshop and then render the result to a movie. It will take a lot of time, and I will demonstrate what I mean in a moment, but just so you know how to do it, you need to make sure the Timeline is activated and then create a video timeline. Now you can open up the title itself, and if you scroll down, you can see that you have properties for the 3D position as well as other 3D stuff that you can animate and then render a full 3D movie from Photoshop. But in this case I'm just going to step back. I don't need this timeline, I'm not going to render anything except one frame, and this frame is going to take a wide render. And in order to render it, in this case we'll need to do it in two separate steps, meaning that we'll have to render each one of the 3D title that we've created separately. We can select both of those elements, and under the 3D menu, merge the layers together, and if I'm going to choose that, we can see that now both titles are living, are occupying the same 3D space. It means that we can see nice shadows on the floor, and I must admit that this is an interesting look. But in order for this one to work, we do need to continue and work on those layers here inside Photoshop, and I don't want to over-complicate this task. Also, I do want to animate them inside Premiere. This means that at the end, we'll need to render each one of those 3D layers individually. So once again, I'm going to step back by pressing Command + Option Z, Control + Alt + Z on the PC, and I'm going to click on the Render button under the Properties menu, or you can go ahead and from the 3D menu, also Render 3D Layer, or use this keyboard shortcut which is Command + Shift + Option + R, Control + Shift + Option + R on the PC. And then you need to let Photoshop think about the progress. So you can see there is a progress bar over here, and this render can take some time, and this is, to my opinion, the main drawback of using Photoshop 3D type. Currently it is a very slow process, and although the result will be worthwhile, sometimes you just don't have the luxury of waiting for this process to end. The good news, however, is that if you see a decent result on the screen, you can press the Escape button, and this is what I'm going to do now, and you'll get the intermediate result, and then you can save the document and move to the animation stage, and then if you have time at the end of the day before rendering the finished result, you can return to Photoshop and continue to render, and it will pick up from the same place. So if I'm going to press on the Render button over here, you can see that it will continue from the place that it just stopped. So I'm going to let Photoshop finish the process and also fast-forward the recording so you don't have to sit here and wait for it. And so after a few moments, the Render process for the first title has been finished, and this is the result, which looks very good and smooth. And then of course we need to repeat the same step for the lower title. So select it and press on the Render button, and let Photoshop work on this title as well, and this should be much quicker since it's occupying less pixels on the screen. And once this process was done, we can go ahead and save a multi-layer document in the native PSD format, and now we are ready to import this version to Premiere Pro and animate it over there.