Building a 3D iPhone Completely in After Effects

Pseudo 3D iPhone in After Effects?

Hey folks, today in this tutorial I did for AETuts+ we’re going to take a look at how to build and construct a 3D iPhone completely using After Effects. We will construct all the elements in After Effects from scratch, although you’re free to use PSD templates and images as well.

Watch the tutorial here

After creating all the elements, we’re going to take a look at how to extrude the phone into a pseudo 3D model, composite all the elements onto the phone, and finish the phone off by adding some nice gloss reflections. The phone will be very easy to control and you’ll be able to replace the screen content very easily.

Bonus Tutorial: Basic Animation & Shadows

Originally, I made a version of the tutorial that wasn’t very efficient in creating the lock button/volume buttons. In this tutorial, I included a few tips and tricks to create some interesting ’3D’ shadows and polish up the animation a little with a basic animation. After re-doing the tutorial over again, I left this part out because the additional stuff took up too much time.

Suggestions & Tips

As some of the viewers stated on the AETuts+ page, the use of expressions would make your life a lot easier. To be honest, I would’ve used expressions if doing this kind of work commercially, but the manual way was a more straightforward way to demonstrate essentially what we were doing. (and I didn’t have to explain the expression!).

Apply this expression to the phone layer’s position:

[transform.position[0],transform.position[1],index-1 ]

When duplicating the layer with this expression tied to it, it’s going to keep the X and Y positions the same, but offset the Z position by the index number. (essentially offsetting the Z value by 1px)

Christopher Kirkman also suggests to extrude just the phone body, then bring in the screen content last and put it on top of the extruded phone. This way, you won’t have to render dozens of instances of the screen content (which could be very intensive if using footage).

These are some great tips from the AETuts+ community that I simply didn’t think of, so check out the comments page for some additional info!

Keep in mind that this is my method for creating a 3D phone, there are plenty of other methods to achieve the same end results. If you think or know of another way to achieve the same results more efficiently, feel free to let me know in the comments below! As a side note, you could even try to extrude the phone using 3rd party plugins like Mettle’s ShapeShifter or even CS6′s ray tracing engine. If you guys enjoyed the tutorial, leave a comment or rate the tutorial on AETuts+, I’d greatly appreciate it!