Rich Young at AE Portal put together a series of tutorials on the Ray-traced 3D Renderer. Read the article here. To expand on Rich’s articles, here are a couple of tutorials from Adobe TV.
This reminded me of an article I wrote in August 2013 titled In Depth: Optimizing After Effects for the Best Performance. Here are a few things you need to know.
- The Ray-traced 3D Renderer was introduced in After Effects CS6. If you’re using an older version of AE, this article is not pertinent to you. See
After Effects CS6 (11.0.2) update: bug fixes and added GPUs for ray-traced 3D renderer - To use GPU-accelerated ray-traced 3D renderer you will need CUDA on specific graphics cards. More on Graphics Card (CUDA, OpenGL)
- You have to have CUDA enabled. See How To Enable GPU CUDA in Adobe CS6 for Mac
Introduction to Ray-traced 3D
Brian Maffitt gives an introduction to Ray-traced 3D. Learn how to activate it and about the 3D layers it adds and the many options that are available in those layers.
Ray-Traced 3D in After Effects
London, England based digital artist and animator, Birgitta Hosea, shows the powerful Ray-traced 3D engine in After Effects, including how vector shapes and text can quickly be extruded in 3D. She also demonstrates the new materials options for translucency, refraction and reflection.