This mini After Effects lesson teaches you the basic concepts of creating and animating 3D cameras, adding null objects, parenting
cameras and the power of mixing and matching both for smoother and organic
animations. So inside Adobe After Effects let's go ahead and set up our scene. First thing to do is to create a new After Effects Composition so I am going to click on the create new composition icon and for the purpose of this tutorial I am going to use width 1280 pixels by 720 pixels or alternatively you can click on this Preset drop down and choose one of these Presets. Click OK and then I'm going to click
and drag the semi-dome mosaic PNG image into the timeline panel. Now I'm going to also apply a stroke on this PNG image so I am going to right click, bring up the Layer Styles and add a Stroke and change the color. Open up the Stroke settings here and
choose white and up to size of the stroke to let's say six. In addition I am going to select After Effects Type tool and I am going to click once and give a proper name of the mosaic which actually exists in Hagia Sophia located in Istanbul. So that will be Hagia Sophia and
then I'm going to center this using the Align panel, that would be Horizontal
Center Alignment and Vertical Center Alignment and then click and drag this. Hold down the
Shift key as a I do to size this up. Now in this text layer also I am going to apply an After Effects Layer style and I am going to add a Drop Shadow and I won't do anything to it just leave it the way its default settings and then because we are working on After Effects 3D cameras we need to turn those two layers into 3D layers and the way you do it is to select the 3D layer switch and here's the switch. Now if you don't see
the switches here you need to probably toggle on and off these switches so you
can press you can toggle and see the other switches. In this case I can see
that, the 3D layer switch so I am going to click to activate it and do the same for the PNG image file. So both of these layers are now 3D layers but here is the thing... With this Active Camera view we
can really see how these layers are behaving and what I mean is...Click on this Active Camera and choose an Orthographic view, in this case i am going to use the Top Orthographic camera view and as you can see both of these 3D layers are on top of each other in this case because you're working 3D space you need to separate those in space so I'm going to select the semi-dome mosaic and then hover over this axis arrow and when you get the indication of the Z axis just click and drag this and separate the layer on 3D space like so. Of course last thing before we move
on we need to add a new After Effects Camera so go up the Layer menu, select New and then choose to add a new After Effects Camera. For this tutorial we are going to use a Two-Node Camera. Now when you get the Camera Settings window here you can select two
types of camera, you can have the One-Node Camera which is a camera that orients around itself or we have the Two-Node Camera which basically with Two Node camera you get the camera itself and a Point of Interest that you can point it
in different layers and orbit around around those layers. For Preset I am going to use the 35mm and then click OK. Alright and our scene is set up. I am going to Save that and going forward I am going to look into how the camera and tools work and how they behave. Adobe After Effects comes with several camera tools to help you work on 3D space and all of these are located up in the toolbar specifically right here
starting with the Unified Camera tool followed by the Orbit Camera tool, Track XY Camera tool and Track Z camera tool. First let's look into the Unified Camera tool. With After Effects Unified camera tool you can use a three-button mouse to
activate any other individual tools for example with the left mouse button you
will use the Orbit Camera tool. CTRL + Z or Cmd + Z to undo this action. With the right mouse button you will get the Track Z Camera tool and lastly
using the middle mouse button will activate the Track Z Camera tool. OK Now let's go ahead and talk about these camera tools in more detail. By the way if you want to jump from Camera tool to
Camera tool inside After Effects as you can see here a great shortcut is the Letter C on your keyboard so if you press that it will jump from camera tool to camera tool. Now we continue let me actually lock those two layers so I don't accidentally select them and then
inside the camera layer I'm going to the letter P for position to bring up the Position parameter and then Shift + A to bring up the Point of Interest. In addition from 1 View I am going to switch to 2 Views so I can see what I do...zoom out a bit using the scroll wheel. because the Camera tools behave
different for the Point of Interest and the position so let's go ahead and
demonstrate that. Again right now I am using the Unified Camera tool by pressing the letter C on my keyboard to jump to the next camera tool and that will be the Orbit Camera tool so let's see how the the Orbit Camera tool behaves with the Point of Interest and the Position. I'm gonna click and drag this around as you can see on the timeline only the Position property is changing and only the back of the camera is moving. Let's go ahead and reset that. Here is a trick to learn, first twirl this up and then down to get the Reset button but you can also isolate only these two parameters,
the Point of Interest and the Position and the trick here is to hold down the
Alt + Shift (Windows) or Option + Shift (Mac) click, click, click, and now you only have
the Point of Interest, the Position and a Reset button. We looked into the Orbit Camera tool, press the letter C on your keyboard to switch to the Track XY and see how this After Effects camera tool behaves. With the Track XY you are moving the camera and the Point of Interest, left, right, up, down, and in the Timeline watch as I use the Track XY camera tool only the X and Y value is changing for both Point of Interest and the Position but not the Z. I am going to Reset the camera again, press the letter C on your keyboard to jump to the next camera tool, that will be the Track Z Camera tool and also pay attention to the Point of Interest and the Position as I do that I'm only moving
the back of the camera in and out and only changing the Z value. Let's reset that as well and basically this is how the different After Effects camera tools behave in relation to the Position and the Point of Interest. Before we start animating our After Effects 3D camera let's go ahead and learn how to use the camera tools both in the Orthographic
views and in the Active camera. Camera tools operate differently depending which View
you're working in. If you're using any of the Camera tools in the Active
camera as indicated here or here you are moving the actual camera and changing the values for both the Position and the Point of Interest. So let's go ahead and bring up
one of the camera tools by pressing the letter C on the keyboard, right now I have the Track Z so if I click and drag this I will be changing the back of the camera and
change the Z position. Now switch to another camera tool, now are on the Orbit camera tool and I am changing the Position of the back camera and if I use the Track XY camera tool I am changing both the Point of Interest and the Position. Let's go and Reset the camera...The story changes though when we are using After Effects camera tools in one of the orthographic views, here we are
only changing to Preview and not the actual camera as we do in the Active
camera so before I demonstrate this to you we need to optimize the orthographic views in this composition preview window. Orthographic view refers to the Front view, to the Left, to the Top, to the Back, to the Right or the bottom view. The orthographic views show layer positions in the composition but they do not show Perspective. So now the challenge here is to set the
magnification ratio to 100% and still be able to fit the entire camera
into the composition panel. Right now as you can see the magnification ratio I am using is 25% but the size of the camera is so small especially the
individual axis arrows are hard to select, for example using the Selection tool. So
what's the solution, well the solution is actually to leave the magnification
ratio 100% and then bring up the camera tools by pressing the C key, in this case I will start with the Track Z camera tool and I'm gonna try to fit everything into the composition window. Zoom out a bit using After Effects Track Z camera tool, hold down the Spacebar on the keyboard to pan up and down or left and right, I will
release the mouse, continue using the Track Z camera tool, switch to the Track XY camera tool, like so and kind of position this in the center and then again use the track Z camera tool to kind of zoom in. As you can see here now I have the individual axis arrows
quite visible in using the Selection tool and it's quite easy to select them. All right, now what about the Orbit camera tool? We used the other camera tools, the Track Z and Track XY but we did not use the Orbit. Now the Orbit camera
tool will not work in any orthographic views because as I mentioned before in
orthographic view it does not have perspective, in this case what we need to
do is to use one of the Custom views After Effects provides us, these
views are actually great for to be able to see your states in different angles. In this case I will use Custom view 1. Again I am going to use the Track Z camera tool to position this. You can use the Orbit camera tool and if you notice here still I am not changing any of the Point of Interest or the Position. In other words this is how the camera tools work in different views
whether it's the Active camera view, the orthographic camera view or the custom views After Effects provides us. So we talked about how the camera and tools work in different views inside After Effects and now we are going to actually
start animating our camera. OK the way we are going to do this is use the Selection tool and drag any of the axis arrows and show you how the camera actually behaves. For example I am going to start dragging the X axis arrow and notice that both the Point of Interest over here and the Position is changing, same dragging the X axis arrow and the same dragging the Z axis arrow. Reset the camera. What we are looking for is actually to animate the camera that orbits around the scene and this can not happen with the Point of Interest animating at the same time. So make sure we are at the Position of the camera and you need to hold down the Ctrl key or the Cmd on the Mac and now we can start moving any of the axis arrows and only the back of the camera is changing and the Position value. Same
thing with Y axis arrow, and the same with the Z axis arrow. Reset the camera and let's go ahead and create our first animation. I'm going to create the first keyframe by clicking on the Stopwatch icon, hold down the Ctrl key or the Cmd key on the Mac and start to find a position. Use the Z axis arrow to bring in a bit and after 3 seconds, hold down the Ctrl key or Cmd key on the Mac to find another position of the camera. Something like that.. In the meantime I am using the spacebar on my keyboard to pan up and down, left and right and bring it in using the Z axis arrow. So let's see what we got...press the spacebar on your keyboard for RAM preview. We have a nice animation here but here is the problem...I am looking at this in Custom view 1 and I am seeing a motion path, a straight motion path. In another Custom view we see the same motion path, a straight motion path but if you look at the preview animation... we see a straight motion path getting closer to the two layers in the middle of the animation as well as the
camera swinging at the back in a nice curve but the question is where is the curve? There is no curve is just a straight motion path so as you can see this is quite deceiving...so what we need to do is is actually pull out those two handles each keyframe in order to get the motion hypothetically we are seeing. Now if I play the newly changed motion path we going to get a different animation. So that's actually not something that
you opt doing inside After Effects, having motion paths sticking out in
different directions with handles and so on, instead you want to create a camera
that's perfectly orbits around your scene. Creating a camera that perfectly orbits
a scene it's actually quite simple. Besides creating a camera we will also
create a Null object in which we will parent the camera to it so let's go ahead and
do that. I'm going to twirl this up on the Camera 1 and also make the Camera 1 invisible, then to the Layer menu, choose New and create a new Camera. I am going to use the same Preset I used before which is the 35mm and the Type will be a Two Node Camera. Click OK. Return to the Layer menu, select New and choose to create a new Null object. Now we need to parent Camera 2 to the Null 1 and that's actually quite easy. First you need to have this parent
column available to you and the shortcut for this is Shift + F4 on your keyboard. Couple of ways you can do this...You can either click and drag this
pick whip to the Null 1 or you can just click on the drop down menu and
parent Camera 2 to the Null 1. Now because we are working on 3D space inside After Effects we also need to turn on the 3D switch for the Null object like so. OK let's open up the Transformations on the Null 1 and all I want to focus is on Y Rotation so press the R key on the keyboard, now I get all these rotations and then I'm
going to focus only on the Y Rotation so press Alt + Shift or Option + Shift on the Mac and click to isolate only the Y Rotation. Let's go back to the very beginning, click on the Stopwatch like so to create our first keyframe. Play around with the axis arrows to find a position of your choice, change the rotation degrees... Move the cursor of the timeline to the 3 seconds and kind of reverse the degrees of Rotation and move to the other direction. So let's play this
animation by pressing the Spacebar on your keyboard. It's a nice animation and it's a smooth animation. As you can see here we don't have any motion path sticking out in any kind of
directions instead we have a smooth animation that
perfectly orbits those two layers. Now that we've learned how to create a Null object and parent a camera to it we can go ahead and take this even further
by mixing and matching between the Null and the camera but before I do that let
me show you a quick way how to create a Null object and parent that to a camera. So just for a second I will make those layers invisible, go back to After Effects layer menu to create a new Camera. Click OK and then instead of creating a new Null object, go back to the layer menu, scroll all the way down in the Camera option and then choose Create Orbit Null. Here we got three things happening, After Effects went
ahead and created a Null object, it turned on the 3D switch for that Null object and parented Camera 3 to the Null 2. So keep that in mind next time you want to do the same. Revert to the last changes and then continue. This time I am going to animate Camera 2 so go back to the first keyframe I'm going to click on the stopwatch in
the Position and find a position to start. Bring in this a bit... sync this to the next keyframe and then kind of do the opposite. OK. Let's play this (press the spacebar to do a After Effects RAM preview). What else can we do? Well we can mix and match and create a new Null object. Go to the Layer Menu, choose New and then Null Object. This time I am going to parent Null 1 to Null 2. So again you can click and drag this pick whip of Null 1 and drag this to the Null 2 and now Null 1 is parented to the Null 2. Twirl this down, I am going to make this an After Effects 3D layer so turn on the 3D switch for Null 2 and then for the Position value I am going to change from Top view to Custom view 1, on Null 2 use the Y arrow axis, place it and then sync the next keyframe to the frame below. Take the Y arrow axis and place it. Return to the first keyframe and for the X Rotation I am just going to rotate it and place it... Perfect so as you can see we have a very
nice smooth organic After Effects animation by just mixing and matching Null objects and cameras. Combining Null objects with cameras is an extremely powerful tool inside After Effects. I would suggest to kind of plan this ahead and think about the motion you would like to have, then use similar After Effects techniques that would yield smooth and organic animations for any of your projects. This concludes this tutorial and thank you for watching with Elias Sarantopoulos!
