In this in-depth tutorial, we’re going to explore how to quickly create a motion graphics style mountain titles using primarily After Effects and some Cinema 4D. We’re going to cover all sorts of things, from creating a basic landscape, to creating camera rigs and incorporating 3D elements within our scene. This is one of the longer tutorials I’ve done which was a rough run through, so I hope you’ll take your time and tweak it to perfection!

We used a simple camera rig to easily achieve the movements we desired. Learn more about keyframe interpolation here. You can also grab some cool HDRi skies from this article.

Preview

Some Tips

We used the camera’s built in DoF, which is extremely slow. Since we already have a Z Depth pass, use it with a plugin like Frischluft’s Depth of Field to achieve fast and clean blurs. Trust me, it’s a lot faster and looks much better! Also, try normalizing the scene. In the tutorial, everything was shrunk and animated in a tiny space (which can cause a lot of issues with effect values).

Spend much more time fine tweaking the keyframes and graph curves. With a bit of tweaking, you can get some really smooth and organic movements. Color correction and grading is important, but definitely play around with the lighting! The lighting in this particular animation can drastically change your scene, so have some fun. Turn on some ambient occlusion, turn up the samples, and tweak the lens flare to get a clean and finished look.

Lastly, focus on the material and bevel of the text. I slapped on a preset for demonstration purposes, but it definitely needs some adjustments. Also, try to get a clean shadow using AO (Element V1.5 makes it easy to adjust the AO of individual materials)

Overall, this was a pretty fun mini project to create. It’s a quick and easy way to create a terrain and you can use this technique for almost any landscape scene. Definitely experiment, tweak, and have fun! If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them down below.