In order to make the animated book, I needed to figure out a way of getting the pages to turn convincingly. There was a built-in preset in After Effects called CC Page turn that I experimented with (below). I found that with some tweaking this did a good job of rolling the edges of the pages, but I couldn't find a way of making one page fold over into another. The other problem was that this effect was really flat, only really simulating 3D with lighting. This wasn't really good enough for what I was hoping to produce.
At this stage I did some googling and found that After Effects is actually very good at creating these 3D effects without a plug-in. I was used to moving and rotating along the x and y axis, but by making a layer into a '3D layer' it enabled you to rotate in the third dimension as well. I was suprised at how quickly I was able to get the hang of this, moving the center point to where the spine would be to create a page turn:
This was much closer to what I was hoping to achieve, so I tried stacking pages behind one another to simulate whether this could work for a book format or if the pages would overlap one another. This worked fine, although the back page did poke through the front one, this is something that I could tweak later down the line.
Final test with 2 pages:
From this, it is clear that this method has great potential and should allow me to build the 3D skeleton of the animation which I can map all of the 2 animations to. This is more complicated than anything I have attempted with After Effects before, so should let me really push myself for this project and develop some new skills.
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