Anyone know how to achieve this look?

[HaroldDurnez]

Seen 38 secs into this incredible piece of work by Eli G
Any suggestions / tools / plugins / techniques welcome 🙂

[Rick Gerard]

A comp with multiple copies of the layers with blurs and different blend modes is the key to this kind of look. If you want to do it all inside AE you'll need 3rd party plug-ins to distort the layers in 2d artwork that simulates the 3D look by using gradients as fills.

You could also use C4D lite in AE. There is no magic plug-in or effect to create this without some compositing. 

[HaroldDurnez]

Thanks Rick_Gerard. 
As expected I managed to somewhat achieve the look using shape layer & repeater with opacity settings. 
But was wondering if anyone had any other or more nailed on techniques for this. 

Looking forward to any other suggestions from the community 👍

[Rick Gerard]

If you want curved 3D layers + effects and blend modes you need 3rd party tools. The C4D rendering engine will let you bend 3D layers and have them interact with each other but you lose a lot of options when you do that would make it easy to duplicate the look you are after.

[Mylenium]

This is going to be some extra work one way or the other. The scene is not in itself plausible in 3D terms, i.e. it's an illusion/ hack. I'd likely just render a bunch of passes in a 3D program and then tweak them in AE. If you're trying to do this natively in AE, plug-ins like Freeform 3D or Plexus might be of use, though for such a short segment it would be overkill to shell out the cash when you have a free C4D Lite in your arsenal already...

Mylenium

[HaroldDurnez]

Yeah I'd prefer to avoid the 3d / c4d routes and keep this execution native AE.

[Mike_Abbott]

I think you can do something close to this pretty simply:

A stroked path-only shape layer, set to be a 3D layer.

Apply trim paths and amimate that.
Extrude that path using the Cimema4D render - within AE.

Add a camera with a longer focal length to view the extrusion from an angle.

Light appropriately with fall off.

Duplicate the path, change it's colour and remove extrusion to get the 'top edge'.

Gives this:

[HaroldDurnez]

That's a great solution, thanks Mike. 

One (big and unnacceptable) downside to this though is that it requires it to be on a solid black background, else you see the fall off of the light. Thanks nonetheless.