With the 2024 3D workspace upgrades in After Effects, creators now have a streamlined workflow allowing them to combine these assets natively within the application.

Of course, visual quality is paramount in motion design projects, and incorporating 3D assets provides a boost in visual quality — photorealistic materials, notably, can play a huge part in bringing a project to life, and making it stand out.

To showcase the possibilities available in such a blended motion design workflow, Wes McDermott principal director of Substance 3D Worldwide Evangelism, brought the teams from Adobe Substance 3D, After Effects, and Maxon together to create the animated scene, “Got You Covered”.

Asset Creation

For this kind of 3D motion design project, the first stage in the workflow is asset creation, where you essentially assemble all the elements of the scene you want to create. For this, you can find resources online, in places like the Substance 3D Assets library, or you can go ahead and create your own. For this project in particular, we partnered with Maxon to highlight their approach to asset creation, particularly focusing on their launch of ZBrush for iPad, earlier this year.

Our team partnered with Ian Robinson from the Maxon team, who played a pivotal role in sculpting the character. We provided Ian with initial concepts and block-outs created by our artist, Giovanni Nakpil, which served as a starting point. Using ZBrush on the iPad, Ian refined and sculpted the character into a fully realized 3D model.

Asset creation laid the groundwork for the entire project, demonstrating how concept sketches evolve into detailed, production-ready models.

“Good design is not decoration alone. It creates meaningful, functional, and intuitive experiences that help people interact effortlessly, confidently, and purposefully every day.”

Ethan Carter

Character Modeling

Ian Robinson is a Master ZBrush Trainer at Maxon Software, developers of software tools such as Cinema 4D and ZBrush, among others. For Got You Covered, Robinson modelled the scene’s central character.

Robinson: The character concept for this project began with a blockout provided by Gio. Once I had that rough shape, my job was to refine it and bring the character closer to the final design. We had a fantastic concept, which made the refinement process smooth and efficient. Then I added smaller details, such as the character’s clothing and accessories, and added secondary and tertiary details like wrinkles and skin tone adjustments to ensure everything matched the concept. With this approved, I retopologized it to make it ready for animation. This step ensures that the geometry is clean and can deform correctly — this is vital in later steps, when texturing in Substance 3D Painter, or when the character is rigged and animated in Cinema 4D.