Merging 2D and 3D animation is one of the most popular styles in motion design these days. With this pro-level workflow, learn how to merge your Adobe Animate animations with your Cinema 4D renders in After Effects.

A thought that often crosses my mind these days is how will 2D animation styles change over time as strictly 3D tools seem to be growing in popularity in a big way. One thing I’ve seen a whole lot of is 3D and 2D being merged together in ways that would have never been dreamed of before. The Spider-Verse films along with things like TMNT: Mutant Mayhem and even The Mitchells vs. The Machines are pointing towards the future of animation, finding every way to inventively merge the two styles.

Now is a great time to learn how to add hand-animated 2D elements to your 3D renders. There are a number of ways to do this, but you want to make sure to set things up on both sides of the animation to make sure that you’re able to make the best use of your assets when compositing. This above video really runs through what is a very functional and efficient workflow for getting these effects right. 

Creating A Reference Animation

Any designer will tell you that when possible and applicable, using reference imagery to get your started on the right foot will always yield much better results. In this example, using After Effects, Andrew sets up a nice little 3D version of the bottle he aims to create, and makes the nice little looping animation to create the animation on top of in Adobe Animate. 

Even leaving little lines and reference points for the liquid’s high and low points as it swishes around the bottle, having these reference points makes it so much easier to match a frame by frame animation to something that’s already in motion. 

Using the Cinema 4D native renderer that’s already inside of After Effects, you can create basic primitives and lines that you can use for reference in your 2D animation software. This also allows you to export a C4D file directly from After Effects, which saves time once you get to the 3D side of things. 

Using Adobe Animate

Adobe Animate is a piece of software I’ve actually never used before, but after watching this—It definitely seems like a really nice useful tool for frame by frame animation. It has everything you need to start adding cel-style animation to your work.

Namely, it has onion-skinning, which is really the main thing you need to make this type of animation work. It allows you to see your past and future keyframes in a lower opacity view, so you can see what you need to do on your current keyframe to get the effect you’re going for animation-wise. Aside from that, it allows you to paste in your reference imagery and keep that in the background as well, so you can match your animation to it. There’s obviously a ton of different uses for this, even for more abstract VFX work.