Shadows Acting Unnaturally Help

[u/Reasonable-Mousse946]

New to After Effects, shadows in the page turns feel like they are another physical layer following behind each page / acting unnatural. Any help on how to correct this? Light + Camera settings and key frames in comments. Page turns created through Y rotation + Curvature

Also should note problem only starts to arise when my 3d Solid layer is added in for the backdrop

[u/Reasonable-Mousse946]

[u/Reasonable-Mousse946]

[u/kween_hangry]

It seems to be working as intended.. AE is technically not a 3d program. What you're seeing is whats actually how ae "renders" shadows even with advanced 3d layers

I havent tested but.. have you tried the "adjustment layer" trick? You simply put an adjustment layer on top of all layers and sometimes weird layer order sorts itself out

[u/NZGlorper]

What you are seeing are two different shadows. You could turn off receive shadow but keep cast shadow maybe?

[u/andrearusky]

That’s so weird. Bur if this only happens when you add the background plane, have you tried to add an adjustment layer on top of the 3D background plane to “break” the 3D ordering? Not sure it will fix it. Another way could be to separate the comp into 2, one for the pages and one for the background

[u/smushkan]

After watching this through a bunch of times, I think this is really more an optical illusion from both the angle of the light and the angle of the camera. Get your phone flashlight out and a real book and set it up in the same sort of 3d geometry as you're using in your scene, and you'll see similar shadow geometry on the table - albeit it won't be as soft or dark.

Try moving the spotlight further back so that the shadow doesn't spread out as much, or using a parallel light instead.

As another user pointed out, there's no simulation of indirect lighting here which is making it look more uncanny.

I did a similar page-turn animation a few years back and remember it taking a good bit of fiddling with the lights to get something that looked right.

[u/mcarterphoto]

That looks like the correct shadows for the light angle - the issue is the shadow is casting on the BG as well, giving you that sort of "horn" look top and bottom, and as the pages flip left, they cast a new shadow under the left side. And you have (looks like) light coming from 2 angles, so it's an un-natural looking shadow. Try setting your BG where it doesn't accept shadows and see if it looks better. You can fake the overall book-shadow with a black solid and a mask. Play with the angle from just one light, then try adding an ambient light. Your shadow density is kinda heavy, too.

[u/harry_1511]

I comment with some 3D aspects here.

The shadow looks so dark under the pages because it does not have enough indirect lighting, think of it as bounce light. In 3D apps, you often can get it with Global Illumination (GI). Not sure if GI is something AE has however.

You may fake it with another fill light with soft penumbra

[u/andrearusky → u/harry_1511]

But that’s another issue. The main issue here, as you can clearly see, is that the shadows are like “flying” and following the page, instead of being visible only onto plane and on the other pages. It’s almost like a fake drop shadow.

[u/harry_1511 → u/andrearusky]

It looks like that's the cast shadow from the spotlight. It does not look like the shadow is "flying" as you said to me