Adobe After Effects Tutorial: Camera Animation with Null Objects

hello and welcome to with something welcome to another spectacular tutorial about After Effects today we're going to talk about no objects and cameras if you are like me you have at one time tried to animate a camera from point to point and gotten some really weird artifacts got some weird movement and what you thought you're animating and the points end up doing something really weird and crazy so have you ever been working on a project and you had a camera in the space and when you're animating the camera when you moved along your line you were getting some funky movement that didn't seem to line up with how you had animated it so in this example I have a couple I have some movement through it in this 3-dimensional space we'll build that here in the future part of this tutorial can I let you see how I did it obviously this is not it for production this is just for example purposes so if I select those keyframes here and then go into our graph editor view you'll see the graphical representation of those points but you'll see that these are locked together so in a camera to position and the x y&z axis is locked together so you'll see that if I move one of the points it's going to affect all of them so if I wanted to say a smooth change on the x axis and try to change it that actually caused all the other axis movements to change to the same rate which obviously doesn't really help you out when you're trying to animate same very precisely it comes at X or movement so the solution to around this is called null objects so you're pricing what it's a null object well it essentially is a nothing object so null nothing and what that means is that it has no actual like renderable attributes it has position and has rotation and has those and other similar basic you know anchor points so I had some basic attributes to it but nothing and it is actually renderable so if you render this scene you'll never see it it is available in 2d and a space which will be important so we'll create this null here and then we will create a camera one is a OneNote camera and we can just make this a 20 millimeter camera click OK now to create those 3d objects in there we'll create some simple layer things but if I do that I'm going to go over here to my camera control comp and show you an example of it working so here I threw some rotation on it and some movement and these are all separate in the space so now I can create more complicated movements without doing wonky things so go back over to our copier and we can rename this pushing return there and call it no camera and then whatever you want we need your main project you can do whatever you like so we'll put the camera here we're gonna bring in some shapes suppose to a shape here duplicate that and put these in the 3d space move it around move it back and then we're due couple more shapes here pink and change the color something different in this case it's really more about just allowing you to see what's happening so we're going to the top view we can do two views you'll go to horizontal top you push these one back farther grab this one push your father back as well [Music] grab this one was it last one made right there no do click that one and just move them all back so for some reason you do 3d space there there we go and push your back way way back so we have some level you can add more but obviously it's just to give you an idea so we're going to our single view camera there so now we have our objects and our camera so I'll pull us back to the top of the stack just for organizational here we go so all I can do is if you go type into effect some pre-sex pics Y C and you'll pull this transform and you can drop it on to the knoll then you can link using the little pick whip here to that null so we'll call this camera control and now if you move this you'll see it move your camera so what I like to do actually I'm unlinked that's really fast and pull up cameras position and CLUP this is positioned come on copy that number and put it into the hill so now let's go to be here a knoll is on the exact same spot as the camera this will be useful because when we go into some of the animal relink these this is useful because when you go into the null object you'll see that it actually now moves exactly the same spot but what's cool is you can actually add in some extra controls here so if you've never saw this kind of extra step you can actually create kind of a nice camera control here so you go into expression controls and we'll do a angle control you can actually take the rotation here put this into the rotation and grab the and actually you can actually take the let's just call this the X rotation and actually tie that to that so if I click on the camera control again and we'll say X boom now watch won't change this number and this will actually rotate this so what is this XY Z position do rename that camera mission perfect well what this does is so we're gonna put the camera here we're going to adjust our Z position only so put the Z at zero got a keyframe move to our five-second mark and move this through the shapes and now if we click you on that layer selected you'll see whoops two separate points but now the only thing that's being animated is the z-axis position I go into the graph view oops select these two you know the graph view you'll see the only two points that have been animated of these so if we were to add another point in here [Music] and animate that we're only animating that single point we aren't now changing other ones if we go in here now and select the control and add let's say it wife is an exposition and then go down a little farther and add another one and then we go on to this view so we can see it better at the exposition and we'll just move this on the x-axis just to left there so now we have this and then doesn't take effect oh right there and but it continues to go right so now these points are independent of each other so now we'll go here and select these and go to that view and you can see now I can actually move any of these points around independently of time so if I don't want something to change or move I can allow it to do that when I want it to which is very useful for more complicated things and what's great is using these expression controls you can actually add in more control on your camera so you have to dig into the settings so if I went into here and said oh I want to adjust my zoom you could actually grab that and drop it onto the slider there and now you know went wonky cuz technically went to super wide zoom but now you can actually have a zoom control on here so you can see now using this slider to control your zoom which is very helpful because say you want to do a move and zoom shot now you have an easy way to change your zoom so we go here and now I'll play that really fast and you can see it creates that weird effect now obviously we're kind of smashing our own settings but that allows you to create independent links and you can also create your own tie-ins to accept the angles here so you can create very complicated camera movie animations using only this null object that way technically you can reset your camera if you needed to and you still have all that animation data inside of this null object it's a relatively simple tool but by using it in this way you can create a really complicated animations this is just one of the many uses for null objects in the Dobies After Effects I hope this was helpful for you today and hopefully you will please like and subscribe on the video and look forward to sharing more content with you and I hope I have also left you with something have an excellent day

Channel: Westfox Creative

Views: 8,692

Keywords: aftereffects, adobe, tutorial, camera, animation

Id: NLYWIDX93KI

Length: 10min 57sec (657 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 09 2020