3D Tracking in After Effects: Step-by-Step Tutorial for Beginners

3D camera tracking is essential if you want to add some V effects to your scene I've got this awesome shot of our friend George here running towards camera I want to add some nice explosions spark bursts lasers all these awesome VFX from footagecrate.com this is a beginner tutorial so I'm not going to cover normalizing your shot but I am considering doing an advanced 3D tracking tutorial in the future so if you want to see that leave a comment down below I already have my shot here imported into after effects and a composition already set up all I have to do is right click on my layer go up to track and stabilize and select the track camera we can see the progress up here in our effects controls tab where it says initializing we can see what percent is done in what frame we are on this is going to take a little while so I'm going to go ahead and just fast forward through this part okay our track is all done if I skim through our timeline here we can see all these colorful little X's pop up each one of these represents a tracking feature in our scene and if we look at one let's just look at this red one here and move forward we should see that it stays in place as if it's tracked perfectly into our scene the first thing I always like to do is to Define my origin point this is the center point of my 3D scene anytime I add new layers or VFX Clips I want to make sure they end up in the same place it might track shot this is just going to really simplify the process of building out an entire scene since my shot here has a lot of movement I think I'll just go towards the middle of the clip and I can find a nice center point I want to make sure that that big red target is laying flat with my ground plane I can also select a number of these points on the ground and see that I have a nice flat looking Target the next step is to right click on it and then go to set ground plane and origin then I can right click again and create a solid in a camera we'll see that that solid is now tracked into our scene and if I select my solid and hit P for position we'll see that the position is zero zero zero so this is now the origin of our 3D tracked scene I'm going to add some VFX from footagecrate.com I found this awesome spark ground burst effect so I'm just going to drag that into my composition and then to align it to my playhead I could just hit the left bracket here and then I want to make this a 3D layer now if you don't see the 3D icon just go to the toggle switch mode down here at the bottom and we want to find that 3D cube and just check it on for our new VFX shot and now it is sitting in 3D space but it's not aligned to our origin point this solid here so if I hit P for position we'll see that our position for that layer is 1920x1080 so let's just change it to zero zero zero and we're still not seeing it but we are seeing that our Anchor Point or our axis is sitting in our center point so what do we have to do well we have to make sure that the bottom of our spark burst effect is aligned with that Anchor Point so I'm just going to hit Ctrl z a couple times so now our layer is no longer 3D and the position is just 1920 by 1080. this is a 4K composition if you're working in let's say 1920 by 1080 your default position would be 960 by 540 but since I'm in a 4K composition my position default Is 1920 by 1080. now here is where we actually want to change the Anchor Point of our VFX shot I can selected this little icon up here for the pin behind anchor tool or I just use the shortcut why that's going to let me select this Anchor Point and drag it to the bottom of my VFX shot now if I make it a 3D layer and I change the position to be zero zero zero we'll see that it aligns perfectly with the origin that we set earlier just so we can see everything better I'm going to disable the visibility on this blue solid and let's just scroll through and make sure that that spark tracks into our scene now I am seeing an issue where it is not oriented towards camera this is an issue with 2D layers tracked into a 3D shot they will look 2D if they are not directly facing camera now there are a couple ways to solve this if we had already normalized our scene this layer would be facing camera directly but we'll cover that in a later tutorial for now let's just use a quick trick with our layer selected let's go up to layer transform and find where it says Auto Orient and then select the Orient towards camera and hit OK and now our spark effect is facing camera and it no longer has that 2D card look then to bring back my selection tool because I still have that Pan behind tool selected let's hit V and I can move it over in the x-axis I don't want to move it up in the y-axis or down in the y-axis because I don't want to look like it's floating or drifting below the ground but I can move it on the z-axis to move it towards camera or away from camera as well let's actually find a good place for this spark effect to go off so right here George kind of ducks down so maybe there's a laser flying over his head or some bomb whizzing by so again I'm going to hit my left bracket to align my spark clip with that playhead and let's just align the spark on the ground kind of where we think that impact would happen and because we adjusted our Anchor Point before we can adjust the scale if we want and it's still going to stick to the ground and then I'll select the toggle switches and modes down here and let's change our blending mode to screen and let's see what happens when we play this out that's pretty good now there is just this one small issue George should be in front of the Sparks here but the Sparks are actually appearing over him we would have to rotoscope him out for the Sparks to appear behind him we did Cover rotoscoping previously and another compositing tutorial I'll put a link to that down below and in a card above here you can either select this Roto brush tool here or I'll give you a little sneak peek of a tool we have coming up called rotocrate rotocrate is a plug-in for production crate it's not available yet but it's going to be available soon and just look at how fast it is so right here I just have his pants selected but we're going to add some range controls now look I have his entire body rotoscoped out in seconds I'm probably not supposed to be talking about this just yet because there's a lot of work that needs to be done on this plug-in but it's so cool I just had to share with you all right enough of that sneak peek I'm going to delete rotocrate and for now let's just move our spark effect over let's say that the aliens have been attacking us for a while now and everything's a little bit more destroyed I want to add a little fire to this building here let's scroll forward in our timeline and then select our footage shot and the 3D camera tracker effect again let's just find a Target that's very flat on our wall here that looks pretty good I could select it right click and create a new solid and if I scroll around that solid should stick perfectly to that wall I can see that it's not lined up perfectly if I just look at the edge here so I can just rotate it a little bit until everything looks nicely aligned and now back in my project window I can find some fire effect I got this effect from footagecrate.com as well they could just select my track solid layer this blue solid on the wall and then click and hold with Alta selected I can drag right on top of that solid and we'll see that that fire effect replaced our solid here in the composition I could just change my blending mode to screen I can hear why and I can adjust my Anchor Point in 3D space and then V to bring back my selection tool and let's just Orient this onto the ground here and maybe scale it down a little bit and if I zoom in we are seeing that the fire does look a little two-dimensional that's just an issue you're going to run into no matter what when you're using 2D layers that aren't oriented towards camera in 3D space for example I can duplicate my fire effect and since this is a looping effect I could just find a frame that doesn't match up perfectly and I could just move this layer around in my timeline so they don't look like clones of one another and I could just pull this second fire clip a little bit away from that first one maybe change the scale down a little bit and then I can rotate it a little bit towards camera let's see how that looks and now we have fire tracked into our shot one thing I am noticing is that we have some motion blur in our shot here there's a lot of movement happening with our camera but these assets that we have tracked in like this fire have no motion blur that's okay that's very easy to fix we have to enable motion blur for our entire composition if you come down here and you see these three circles just select that and that's enabling motion blur and then we want to find these three circles again for each layer that we're enabling motion blur for so hit the toggle switches and modes if you don't see it and then just enable motion blur for each VFX asset that you have added to your scene so here's with motion blur and here's without and that looks way more natural and way more integrated into our shot I'm gonna go through this shot and add a ton of additional VFX from footagecrate.com and then Nico is going to do some final sound effects using sounds and music from soundscrate and here is our final shot thanks craters I hope you enjoyed if you want a more advanced 3D camera tracking tutorial please let us know in the comments below there's a lot more to cover that's it for today make it awesome

Channel: ProductionCrate

Views: 312,225

Keywords: productioncrate, footagecrate, rendercrate, soundscrate, vfx, vfx artist, visual effects, visual effects artist, free vfx, free music, royalty free, royalty free vfx, royalty free music, after effects, adobe after effects, adobe ae, 3D, 3D modeling, free 3d models, after effects script, free after effects script, film, filmmaking, independent filmmaking, 3d tracking, after effects 3d, after effects 3d tracking, 3d tracking tutorial, after effects beginner, vfx 3d tracking

Id: zCtK2wN18X8

Length: 10min 20sec (620 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 02 2023