If you’re an artist or illustrator, having some basic 3D skills opens a whole new world of possibilities. This class explores the ways in which 3D can add an extra dimension to your work.

As an animator, one of the first things that I wanted to do when I started to create illustrations was to find ways of adding motion to help bring them to life.

One of the easiest solutions is to add simple parallax moves to layers of artwork to give an illusion of depth. But, this doesn’t work for every image and, with the use of 3D animation software, we can go beyond those simple effects and actually project our illustrations onto 3D geometry. This gives us far more flexibility to add complex camera movement to our illustrations and even combine our illustrations with 3D elements or effects.

In this class I’ll be starting out with the basics for those who may never have touched 3D animation software before. We’ll then explore how to create multiplane, parallax camera moves using the provided artwork.

In the second part of the class, we’ll create a simple 3D scene based upon a sketch. This scene serves as a guide which you can use to create your own illustration or, alternatively, you can make use of the provided illustration for the next part of the class where I demonstrate how to project the illustration back onto the individual objects in the scene.

Finally, we’ll add a camera move and some 3D particles to add a little magic to our scene.