How to Add Soft Lighting to Cartoon Animation in After Effects

This content originally appeared on Envato Tuts+ Tutorials and was authored by Jonathan Lam

What You'll Be Creating

Adding glowing lighting effects to your cartoon animations can help brighten an area of your scene and add emphasis. Thoughtful lighting is also a way to stylize a compositon. In this tutorial, you will learn how to create subtle areas of light within a cartoon project using Adobe After Effects.

What You'll Learn in This Tutorial

After Effects has many different tools that allow you to create lights in your composition. Using a ready made project from Envato Elements, we'll show you step-by-step how to using lighting to enhance the scene. You'll learn:

How to create a light in Adobe After Effects
How to apply and edit lighting and glows to a scene
How to use glow lights for different light sources (e.g. laptops and lamp)
How to enhance the animation even further using Adobe After Effects, controlling lighting effects and how it effects different objects in the scene

What You'll Need

To follow along with this tutorial you will need your own version of Adobe After Effects installed on your computer. If you've been following our character animation series and want to swap out or adjust the characters further, you might also want Cartoon Animator installed. Check out our tutorial on how to rig characters for animation for that part of the workflow.

You will need a scene. We used the following animated scene from Envato Elements. Click on the link below to download it:

Animated Scene Situation

1. Preparing The Composition

Step 1

We'll start by choosing the composition that we want to work in. The project from Envato Elements have nine scenes that you can choose from. Double click on each composition to open them up and to see an image preview of what they all look like. Try and pick a scene that has a few different light sources.

Step 2

For this tutorial we will be using Scene 08. Notice that it has three different light sources in the scene. This includes:

1x Ceiling Lamp
2x Laptop Screens

Step 3

Next we will need to create a background for the image.

To do this we must open the Background Elements Scene by double clicking on the layer with your mouse.

Step 4

This will open up the Background Elements composition in a new tab for you to explore.

Click on the Shy Switch button to reveal the hidden layers inside the composition.

Step 5

Now we need to create the colour for our background. To do this we need to create a new solid by going to Layer > New > Solid.

Step 6

Rename the solid to Background

Step 7

To change the colour of the background, click on the colour box at the bottom and choose a suitable colour. For this tutorial we will be using the colour with code 3F3061.

Step 8

We can also change the colour of the background by adding a Fill Effect. You can do this by going to Effect > Generate > Fill. This will apply a fill effect to the solid layer which will allow you to change the colour of the background whenever you like.

Step 9

Next we will need to change the colour of the shadow so that it suits the rest of the image. Find the layer for the shadow by investigating each layer. In this example, the shadow is represented by Layer 9.

Step 10

Make sure that the Layer 9 is still selected by clicking on it with the mouse. Add a fill effect to the shadow layer by going to Effect > Generate > Fill. This will allow you to change the colour of the background layer easily by going to the Effect Controls Panel.

Step 11

Navigate to the Effect Controls Panel which is usually located on the upper left of the screen. You can also open it by going to Window > Effect Controls.

In the Effect Controls Panel change the colour of the shadow so that it is slightly darker than the colour of the background. In this example we will use the colour 332554