Complex Tracking Techniques in After Effects

[Applause] in the last tutorial we talked about the basics of solving a 3d camera using the camera tracker in this tutorial we're going to continue on with that effect and we're going to explore how to apply different objects like null objects solids or text layers to specific tracked planes and to do this we're going to use these colorful tracking points that we see on our screen now i'm going to use our track city through file go ahead and right click on that and let's make a new composition to match this is a lovely shot of a drone shot kind of flying through the city looks like it could be detroit although i've never been to detroit and i'm sorry if i've offended people from detroit i want to now solve this camera same thing as before we don't have to do any heavy lifting we can go to tracker and click on track camera do that now and let it do its process now as it's going through this keep in mind that this will take longer depending on the resolution of the clip you're working with as well as the length if there's more frames to solve you can see up there the frame counter is going to take longer all right so it's solved our camera now if i go through we see all these little points i could just all the same create a camera although i'm not going to this time this time i want to talk about these little crosses what do these do well these colorful crosses are tracking points and it's important to know that three tracking points creates what's called a plane or this red target here i can even lasso around multiple tracking points and create a singular plane so what can we do with this well if you hover your mouse over these different tracking points you'll see that plane change in angle choose the one you want and click it and that selects the three points that make up that plane and now right click that plane we have different options here we can create text and a camera create solid and a camera or we can create null in a camera not worried about the other settings here i want to start by creating text and a camera and what this is going to do click on that is it's going to create a text layer that is affixed to this plane and it creates a 3d camera just as if we had clicked the create camera button that is now working with this text layer check it out so now no matter what my camera is doing that text layer is affixed to that plane it makes it look like it's part of the building this is a really fun way to do titles or call outs or informational pieces in your shot i'm going to double click my t down here and change my text to be population 2.2 million detroit is probably bigger but hey i'm going to double click my text layer and come up to my character panel and bring my text size down this will help it fit a little bit better there we go and then i'm going to click on my text layer and i'm going to hit r for rotation the reason being is because that plane wasn't it wasn't exactly lined up with where i'd want this it's a little off skew so i'm just going to change my rotations here to be a bit more in line with what this should look like that looks pretty good there just a little bit of fine tune adjusting and now as i move my playhead that text layer exists in that world affixed to the plane of that building and hit play here and as the camera gets above it the text layer gets below i mean check that out i don't know that's motion tracking for me is one of the most fun things you can do in after effects i get super giddy from this now we're not limited to a single text layer we've created our camera now i'm going to click on track city through once more because i can always click on my 3d camera tracker and find a brand new plane get out my selection tool to make this work so i'm going to come over here to earlier i'm going to track the wall of this building here i'm going to right click i'm going to create a new text layer there it is double click scale this down and click on it hit r for rotation i'm going to change the x rotation to be a bit more straight up and down good and now just as before that is now affixed to the building so we can go through and add as many things as we want to any plane we have to re-click our original layer and then click on our camera tracker and go through the same process now we have a few more options here if i right click right here we have create solid and create a null now nulls as we know from the previous tutorials are just invisible objects that we can apply data to and that null object would be really handy because we could just parent things to it and it would track to that particular point this is handy if you have multiple callouts coming to the same location we can also create a solid why would i want to create a solid well let's go ahead and do it and let's find out i want to create a solid on this face of kind of this spire object it's sort of 90 degrees from our population text here right about here so go ahead and right click that and select create solid that creates a blue square solid affixed to that plane now why on earth would we want to create a solid affixed to a plane let me show you let's pre-compose this let's right-click our tracked solid and let's hit pre-compose you might be thinking why are we pre-composing this when it's only one layer well track with me pun intended let's click pre-compose and let's call this square replace hit ok again nothing's changed but we've pre-composed our blue square let's double click that pre-comp to crack it open there we go as expected we have our blue solid now the first thing i'm going to do is delete it i know it seems weird but now we have a blank canvas that we can start to create things on maybe some of you are kind of catching where i'm going with this if you're not let's just keep going let's come up to composition and let's change the actual composition settings here it defaults to a square in a motion tracker i'm not sure why but let's change this to the full by 1920x1080 to give us our full aspect ratio and then let's start to create some new elements in this i'm going to come over here to my text click on this and let's write some uh some facts here now even though this might not be detroit i've went ahead and done some digging to get some true facts of detroit at least then i'm not going to butcher it entirely i'm going to go ahead and type those out here okay i'm going to change the size of this to be a bit smaller using my character panel looks kind of cool i'm going to create a new box for that text and then i'm going to create some shapes around it and let's have fun with this even further let's animate our text using the track matte i'm going to add a brand new solid here i'm going to apply the track matte i'm going to have my text kind of be constrained to the stroke of this pink box so on my new track matte layer i'm going to draw that bounding box and i'm going to animate using two position keyframes here kind of making this up as i go so bear with me yeah it looks kind of cool all right so i've created now inside of our original solid composition i've created a very complex sub composition with animated text on a track mat with different shapes and colors and now let's come back to our track city through composition and see what happens it out because this was a precomposition anything inside of that precomp is automatically updated here so i'm going to come through i'm going to change the rotation to match a bit better increase the scale a bit and now check that out it animates in and tracks with the camera this is cool this gives us full flexibility in the things that we can create using pre-compositions text and solids inside of a 3d environment and all we had to do was click on that track camera button and get our 3d camera tracker on our layer and it gives us full creative flexibility to create 3d content using real life footage you

Channel: itsalantime

Views: 1,583

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: tutorial, tutorials, adobe, learn, how, beginners, new, good, creative, motion, graphics, exporting, after, effect, design, how to, effects, make, create, cc, 2020, editing, edit, class, video, starting, interface, understanding, export, psd, files, animate, animating, working, using, layers, 3D, workflow, basic, graphs, shapes, data, null, objects, object, tracking, camera, cameras, solve, solving, movement, 2021, track

Id: tDlRpKHGjd0

Length: 9min 38sec (578 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 02 2020