How To Make A 3D Cube In After Effects

An Apple Magic Mouse may have been harmed making this post

Why a cube? It is a primitive object you can use to represent other things.

Even if you have no interest in making black and white cartoons in the specific style I have done for BowTiedBull, this is a good technique to know because it will teach you about a useful built in AE script, Null objects, and how you can connect elements to build up a more complex structure.

Tried to be as clear as possible, but AE is still old bloated software with a lot of bad manners so its easy to miss a detail or discover yet another odd bug that appears every time, some of the time.

Go through this slowly and expect to do some troubleshooting as you go.

And keep in mind that some of the best learning in any tutorial is when you have to go dig in Google to solve some unexpected problem. Forces you to think and function independently which is the ultimate goal here.

The Basic Problem:

Making a basic 3D cube in AE is surprisingly annoying and some of the methods I’ve seen demonstrated in tutorial land use overlapping edges which I can never get perfect.

There are paid plugins around to make 3D primitives, or you can also fire up Cinema 4D Lite for a better experience, but that is not without its compromises. Using the C4D renderer makes using certain After Effects features more tedious.

For example, if you like to put Glow Effect on everything (guilty), you still can, but you need to put your C4D rendered stuff inside Pre-Comps which makes refining timing more tedious or you can render it out as a video file, but then you need to re-render anytime you want to go back and make adjustments.

There’s a time and place for these techniques, but today we’re going to add another method to your toolbox.

What Not To Do

I don’t like any of the methods a lot of folks teach on YouTube that involve drawing a square in 3D space, duplicating it, then rotating and positioning to form each side of the cube.

Every time I do this there’s always some janky edge somewhere that doesn’t line up exactly.

Can you get away with it sometimes and hide the flaws? Sure.

But there is another way.

We can trick AE into making 2D objects look 3 dimensional and the magic sauce is a built in jsx script.

Let’s Cook

I’m going to go through each of the steps and assume you know how to do basic, Googlable things like draw lines and shapes.

Make a fresh Comp

First, make a new Composition in a fresh AE project. Start with a 2000 x 2000 resolution.

Draw A White Square

Very important to draw the square using this method due to weird AE quirks:

Select the rectangle option from the Shape Tool. Then double click the icon. This creates a square the size of your Comp. Next, scale this down to 25% using the global Transform, not Transform: Rectangle 1. Delete the Fill and set Stroke to 40px.

The other ways I tried all resulted in the Nulls not getting placed correctly.

Inside the Stroke settings, set everything to be rounded as follows:

-Line Cap: Round Cap
-Line Join: Round Join

If you can’t find these settings, the usual path is to expand your shape layer, then Contents, then Rectangle 1, then Stroke 1

You should have something like this. Make sure you leave some room to move things around and position the sides of the cube.

Convert To Bezier Path

If you create a shape layer and draw a shape like a square, AE creates a fixed shape. It can only be one thing. You can’t take the edge of a rectangle and make it curve or morph it into some other abstract shape.

But if you make it Bezier path, it can do whatever shape you want.

We will need this ability to manipulate the perspective of our square and this will create the illusion of a 3D object in AE’s “2.5D” environment.

Go to Content > Rectangle 1 > Rectangle Path and right click. Choose “Convert to Bezier Path”