No plugins required for this tutorial.
In this episode I finally respond to a viewer request to show how to create Doctor Who 3D text quickly and easily in Adobe After Effects without needing to use any 3rd-party plugins. It does involve the included Cinema4D renderer, but if you are running an older version of After Effects, then I also show how you can use the Shatter effect to achieve the same.
The tutorial starts with the text tool and the font: 'Futura PT Book'. I then use the Geometry features available when you make the text a 3D layer. But rather than try to get accurate ray-tracing for the reflections, I show a shortcut using a backwards camera and an Alpha Track Matte to make things easier. One issue that I show how to overcome is that 3D layers using C4D Render cannot use transfer modes, so I use a precomp for the text layer to cheat that and retain control over the colours.
