Adding a drop shadow in after effects how to#

Or open the effects and preset then type Drop Shadow.

In the menu bar, go to “Effect” > “Perspective” > “Drop Shadow.” This will apply the Drop Shadow effect to your layer.

Select the layer to which you want to apply the drop shadow effect.

Import the footage or create a shape layer to which you want to apply the drop shadow effect.

Create a new composition by clicking on “Composition” in the menu bar and selecting “New Composition.”.

Adding a drop shadow in after effects how to#

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to achieve this: Step1 : Using the Drop Shadow Effect The original layer is added back at the very end using CC Composite set to ‘Behind’.How To Create drop shadow In After Effects, you can use the “Drop Shadow” effect or create a custom shadow using other techniques. And, the rest is extra detail - the majority of control is derived from the Drop Shadow distance, the Simple Choker amount, and the Roughen Edges settings. At this point, it looks pretty rough, so we can use Roughen Edges to control the smoothness of the overall shape. We then use Extract to key out the black, leaving solely the white shading. Still using ‘Shadow Only’ and Solid Composite, and CC Composite, the next effect is Simple Choker, which shrinks the preceding shading in from the edge, creating the offset look. Similar to the noise shading preset, we start with a Drop Shadow effect to set up the initial edge shading. While this flat shading preset isn’t a bulletproof replacement for bespoke design, it can certainly get you pretty close, pretty quickly. This type of shading is typically characterised by being slightly offset from the edge of a layer and is great for indicating glossiness of a surface.

The next challenge was finding a similar procedural method to create flat / cel shading inside AE. Fractal Noise on top as described above, and that’s basically it. We can then adjust the softness of the Drop Shadow effect to control the falloff of the black white gradient.

Then we use CC Composite with ‘Stencil Alpha’ to use the layer’s original alpha to cut through the black and white. We apply a pure black Drop Shadow, set it to ‘Shadow Only’, then we use Solid Composite to fill the background with white. This is solved by using Drop Shadow and some compositing effects. The next step is finding an effects technique to mimic an ‘inner shadow’ layer style, as for the above to work around the contour of a layer, we need a black white gradient that follows the edge of the layer with an angle control before the Fractal Noise is applied. After that, it’s easy to adjust contrast with curves, levels or the not so often used Brightness and Contrast effect. Fractal Noise also has a random seed controller which is perfect for animating the noise at a custom frame rate. If you start with a black white gradient on any layer, then apply Fractal Noise, scale the noise, really small and set the internal blending mode to ‘Overlay’, you have grain right where the greys between the black and the white fall. I wanted to control noise size, contrast, softness, frames per second and more, so I was on the hunt for an effect combination that would do this procedurally.Įnter Fractal Noise, maybe AE’s most versatile native plugin. Layer styles and other effects lacked the control I was looking for. When I built the initial preset, I was looking for a better and more versatile way to control gradient noise without relying on layer styles or masking manually for edge shapes.