After Effects has long been considered the Adobe tool for creating motion graphics. Usually these were 2D compositions made up of Photoshop layers or video footage, but 3D has been sneaking into After Effects little by little. With the arrival of the advanced 3D capabilities in Photoshop CS4 Extended, you can now import a 3D object directly into After Effects as a PSD composition.
In this third part of our extended workshop, we create a full-blown CS4 mashup as we revisit our robot from the first Photoshop project, and bring him to life in After Effects. We then animate the character in 3D, and have him interact with the magician character we met in the earlier Flash project.