Reuben Lara on bringing 3D into motion design

You can bring 3D into motion design without becoming a 3D specialist. Blender, a free 3D program, works well alongside After Effects: you build and render the 3D pieces in Blender, then composite, add type and finish the piece in After Effects. In this interview, illustrator and motion designer Reuben Lara talks about using Blender this way, and why versatility matters across a creative career.

Watch the interview

Who Reuben Lara is

Reuben has spent twenty years as an illustrator, designer and art director for television, film and print, and now animates for advertising and social. His interest in art and design goes back to elementary school. Along the way he has worked in storyboarding, concept art, package design and motion graphics, taking on new tools as the work changed.

At Jumpstart he brings 3D and illustration into motion work. You can read more about him on the teachers page.

What he talks about in the interview

• Blender as a motion design tool. Many motion designers stay away from Blender because they think of it as a program for 3D modelling and character animation. Reuben's focus is how Blender can add to an After Effects workflow without deep 3D expertise.
• 3D for storytelling. He discusses how 3D elements bring depth to projects that would otherwise stay flat.
• Versatility. Across illustration, storyboarding and motion graphics, he has kept growing beyond his main craft, and he makes the case for other creatives doing the same.
• Curated learning. He points to how much learning material is online, how hard it is to sort, and why a curated path helps.

How Blender and After Effects work together

The common split is simple: Blender makes the 3D element, After Effects makes the piece. A first project could look like this (these steps are our own notes, not a transcript of the interview):

1. Build a simple 3D element in Blender: a logo extruded into depth, a product shape, a few basic forms. Light it and animate it there.
2. Render it with a transparent background. In Blender, turn on Transparent under Render Properties, Film, and save a PNG image sequence with RGBA color so the transparency comes through.
3. Import the image sequence into After Effects and treat it like any other layer. Add type, 2D shapes, color correction and effects around it.
4. When you want more control, render separate passes from Blender (shadows or depth, for example) and adjust them in After Effects without rendering the 3D again.
5. If 2D layers need to follow a 3D camera move, Blender's camera can be exported to After Effects with an add-on, so both programs share the same move.

For illustrators, Blender's Grease Pencil lets you draw 2D strokes inside a 3D scene, which is one more way drawing and 3D can meet in the same shot.

AI tools and the Blender workflow

Some AI tools now turn a picture or a line of text into a rough 3D model. Blender already leans on a trained model of its own: the denoiser in its Cycles renderer, which lets a render look clean from fewer samples.

Both sit on the Blender side of the split described above, where Blender makes the asset and After Effects makes the piece. A generated model is a starting shape. It often needs cleanup, and it still has to be lit and composited so it sits with the type around it.

Staging is where 3D earns its place. Depth helps a story when one light tells the eye where to go and the camera moves for a reason. A tool that builds the mesh does not make those calls.

Versatility has always meant taking on new tools as the work changes. These are new tools of that kind, and our one condition is to take them on without letting them pick the look.

Pick an evening this week and bring a generated or downloaded model into Blender. Light it with a single light and render a transparent PNG sequence as in step 2 above. Put it behind a line of type in After Effects and ask one question: does it belong in the frame?

Start with After Effects

This workflow assumes you know After Effects, and After Effects has its own 3D layers to learn depth with before you open Blender. Motion Design Crash Course covers After Effects from the workspace to keyframes, layers and the 3D switch: see Motion Design Crash Course.