Adobe After Effects CS4 - Manual (Page 560)

554 USING AFTER EFFECTS CS4
Effects and animation presets
Last updated 12/21/2009
Ambient Light Distributes light over the layer. Increasing this value adds an even illumination to all objects and
prevents shadows from being completely black. Setting Ambient Light to pure white and setting all other light controls
to 0 makes the object fully lit and eliminates any 3D shading from the scene.
Material controls
The Material controls specify reflection values.
Diffuse Reflection Gives objects form-defining shading. Shading depends on the angle at which the light strikes the
surface and is independent of the position of the viewer.
Specular Reflection Takes into account the position of the viewer. It models the reflection of the light source back to
the viewer. It can create the illusion of shininess. For realistic effects, you can animate this control by using higher and
higher values to mask the transition from filtered to nonfiltered versions of the layer.
Highlight Sharpness Controls shininess. Shiny surfaces produce small, tight reflections, whereas duller surfaces
spread the highlight into a larger region. Specular highlights are the color of the incoming light. Because light is
typically white or off-white, broad highlights can desaturate an image by adding white to the surface color.
In general, use the following process to adjust lighting: Set Light Position and Diffuse Reflection to control the overall
light level and shading in a scene. Then adjust Specular Reflection and Highlight Sharpness to control the strength and
spread of highlights. Finally, adjust Ambient Light to fill in the shadows.
Card Dance effect
This effect creates the appearance of card choreography by dividing layers into numerous cards and then controlling
all geometric aspects of the cards by using a second layer. For example, Card Dance can simulate an extruded pin
sculpture, a crowd doing the wave, or letters floating on the surface of a pond.
Chris Zwar provides an example project on his website that uses the Card Dance effect and a shape layer with the
Repeater operation to simulate a halftone color separation for any image or video.
This effect works with 8-bpc color.
Original (upper-left), and with rotation adjusted using Camera Position controls (lower-left) and Corner Pin controls (lower-right)