2D Map Flyover with Depth of Field (NO PLUGINS!)

foreign [Music] sey.com if you're unfamiliar this is a fantastic collection of historical Maps they're all very high resolution and you can download them and use them in your projects they're really really great this particular map is of Sable Island if you want to download it I'll leave a link to it in the video description and the shape of this map really made me think that this is a great opportunity to show you how to create a flyover inside of Adobe After Effects that includes depth of field so if you're new to after effects or even at an intermediate level you might not know how to do this technique because it could be a little bit difficult controlling cameras in After Effects can be clunky so I'm going to show you a quick and easy way to get this done so first go to export and select extra extra large once the map is downloaded go over to Adobe After Effects and import it in now I'm going to create a new composition here call it Sable Island map and I went with an Ultra hd4 4K preset but you can do whatever you want once that's created I'm going to grab the map and drag it into the new sequence and you can see just how big this image is I love it now one shortcut you want to know and use for this tutorial is alt forward slash so if I hit alt forward slash it automatically fits your window to the panel here super super helpful for the next step I'm going to right click in the sequence here and select new camera you don't have to do that you can also go up here to the layer menu and select new camera and the most important parameter is type so you can see you have one and two node cameras the difference between one and two node is that two node will have an additional parameter called point of interest and if you're new or intermediate to After Effects trying to animate a two node camera can be very confusing so let's just keep it one node I'm going to go with the 35 millimeter preset but it doesn't really matter we can change all these parameters later on now to make this a proper 3D project I need to set my map layer to 3D and I can do that via this 3D switch right here if you can't see the switch just click on this little button down here once it's 3D you have this lovely colorful 3D widget here and this controls your layer and it's important pretty much imperative to know how to use this arrows represent position parameters circles represent rotation parameters and squares represent scale the green is the y-axis the blue is the z-axis and the red is the x-axis you also have two different axis modes up here you have local access mode and World access mode this has to do with the orientation of your layer your world access mode is not going to change if you rotate this will always stay pointing in the same direction local access mode these arrows will change and the position rotation of this will change based on what you do with it I'll show you the specifics of this in a minute first we want to change the view of our composition here you can do that via this drop down menu here I want to look at my composition from the left so I can see both the camera and my map layer so if you zoom out a little bit you can see the map is here if I select the layer I can see the widget and the camera is over here it's this little square and now we have the camera you can see where it's pointing so now what I want to do with this is I can grab the camera and I'm going to drag it closer to my map and then I'm going to grab the rotation here and we're going to rotate it and you want to do about 60 degrees so you can see it's doing negative but we want to go about negative 60 here and if you hit r on your camera layer you'll notice now under orientation this is set to 60. if you don't get it exactly to 60 you can manually type that in right here you'll also notice that since I'm in local access mode the orientation of my widget is facing with the actual camera layer if I switch it to World mode now the axis is facing the world and this is exactly what I want so I want to be able to control it in World mode so now I can move it like this I can move the position and now I can move this parallel with my map and that's exactly that's the key of this whole technique is you want to be able to move it parallel with the map and you do that by grabbing the widget in World access mode so if this was in local access mode check it out if I grab this widget it moves it away from the map if I grab this Arrow it moves it toward the map and now to see what we're actually looking at we can go back to active camera hold alt hit forward slash and now we can see what's going on here but you can't really control that widget anymore so we're looking through the camera we can't see the widget so one workflow is to switch this to two views and then on the right here you can zoom if my curse is over here I can zoom and look at the comp here so this is the active view if I click over here this is left View and you have the name up here in the corner so if I hold spacebar I can move around and we can see once again here's the camera here's the map and if I grab this widget now you can see a live preview of what's Happening Here so maybe I want to pull this off the map a little bit more so we got more of a view angle here and now for the depth of field you simply double click on the camera and make sure that enabled depth of field is selected and then right down here you have your f-stop and blur levels these are two big parameters that can help control how shallow your depth of field is so if you bring it down to like 1.7 and if we set the blur level to like 200 you're going to start to see we have some depth of field here if I zoom further in you start to see this is starting to blur out one other really important parameter is your Focus setting and to control that the quickest way I found is to grab the camera layer and do a keyword search for Focus this is going to show you focus distance now as I move this the focus distance is actually here and this represents your zoom level up what we want to do is we want to have the Focus right about here so you can see what we're looking at here somewhere around here is going to be the top of our frame and then down here is going to be the bottom of our frame so we want our plane of focus to be somewhere in here now if I full screen this you can start to see we have a little bit of fall off here into blur and then some more fall off up top here you can see actually it's getting much more blurry here now if you if you still can't tell and see the difference you can come back double click and really bump up the blur a lot so if I crank up the blur to 500 to exaggerate it now you can see there is our focal plane or our Focus distance if we just go ahead and go with this now watch what happens as I move the focus distance you're going to see it moves like this so this is one quick way that you could do a rack Focus animation is just by animating this Focus distance this looks pretty terrible so I'm going to go back and we want to set the blur to maybe 125 and the beauty of having this one node camera is that I can animate this just using the position parameter so if I go here to position and I grab this y attribute which is the second one here and I move this you're going to notice that it's just flying straight over we can do it via the widget here or we can do it just via this and once again this only works with a one node camera so if I grab this widget with a two node camera it's going to move the point of Interest as well but if I just try to control it with this position parameter the point of interest is going to stay in place and the camera is going to fly around and your point of view is going to change so the beauty of this workflow is that I can go back to one view now and I can have this whole view here and just control my flyover via this y parameter very very cool so I can bring it all the way back here you can set the keyframe back here take the playhead all the way to the end and then animate this y so that we're further down on the map here and now if we play this back it's probably going to be a pretty fast flyover no that's looking pretty good and say you want to add some rotation to it you can do that via the map just go grab the rotation of the map and you can grab the Z rotation so we can add a keyframe here and maybe pivot it this way and then at the end we'll have it kind of turn around back this way and now you can see we have a cool animation that looks like we're flying over this map that's the gist of it now if you want to start to style it you can go add a new adjustment layer and then you can add like vignettes and all kinds of things to the top here and you can even add a vignette to the actual layer so that the edges of the the actual map will have some fall off [Music]

Channel: Boone Loves Video

Views: 15,666

Keywords: boone loves video, boone, adobe after effects tutorial, make map animations in adobe after effects, how to animate maps in after effects, 2D map flyover with depth of field, how to get depth of field in after effects, control cameras in after effects, after effects camera tutorial, camera depth of field ae, camera depth of field adobe after effects

Id: MX2Gh8Fb8HQ

Length: 8min 51sec (531 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 20 2023