Export Blender Camera and Position Data to AE | Blender and After Effects Tutorial

hey what's up in this video we're going to talk about exporting camera and position data from blender to After Effects alright so let's look at getting camera and object data out of blender into After Effects now this is one that actually kind of confused me for a little bit because at one point this add-on that allows you to do this was included in blender but apparently in the official build they have removed it so you need to go find the add-on and install it yourself which I'll walk you through right now so this is a silly stupid little render that I made just to kind of show what you can do with you know the communication between blender and After Effects so we'll throw something like this together real quick so the first thing you want to do is go to this website I'll put the link in the description and this is the blender add-on repository and this is where you can find the add-on that allows you to do this so here you want to click on this link raw file and that allows you to download the file okay you can download it anywhere you want and then you need to install it in blender so it's a Python file by the way not a zip which confused me at first but all you need to do is go to install and you can select the the the Python file that you just downloaded and click install add-on and it'll show up in your list of add-ons here now I couldn't find it at first and that's because you actually need to be in the community tab and if you just type in JSX it'll show up there and you can click the little button to enable it I know you know this is a pretty basic thing that most people at this point know how to install add-ons but I had a little trouble finding it so I figured I'd just go through it real quick okay so what this add-on does is it takes all of the object data and camera data from your file and converts them to a format that After Effects can understand okay so just to show you what I have in this scene so you know what all is getting converted and going over to After Effects I have our little default cube just jumping around I have a empty that I've named null master that is controlling the jump and I have a second empty this one right here that is parented to the first one that I just stuck on the face of the cube to get the location data so we can stick something there and after effects I also have a light and I have two cameras okay and the cameras are switching from cam 1 to cam 2 which I showed you how to do in the other video that I load it today so that's all the data that I have here I'm gonna select everything with the a button okay and I'm gonna go to file export and there at the very bottom you have export to Adobe After Effects JSX so if you click that you can save that file wherever you want so I'm gonna save it on my desk in this desktop folder here hit export and what that does is it gives you this JSX file okay now to get that into After Effects all you have to do is open up After Effects and go to file scripts run script file ok and you double-click on that JSX file that you just exported and it's gonna ask you to name the new composition that it's gonna create I'll just leave it at default ok so we'll open up that composition that we just created and you can see all of this inside of the composition alright so let's look at these layers it brings in both of our cameras it also brings in a combined camera has the switching in it between Cameron cam 1 and cam 2 which is super nice so I'm going to disable the two cameras up there and just leave active camera which has that switching in it okay you got the point light you got all the nulls so you also have to render out your scene and blender which I already did so I'm going to drag that into the composition and you can see zoom out here that all of those nulls and cameras stick to the scene just as you would expect that they would now the rotation on some of these nulls is a little off I guess there's a difference in how blender and After Effects calculate rotation probably has to do with blender having the up axis as Z but that's okay we can fix that really easily so let's go ahead and stick that silly little eyeball comp to this cube so I'm gonna drag it in and I'm gonna make it a 3d layer and you're gonna see right away that it turns completely black that's just because we have this point light in here and we don't need that so I'm going to disable it alright so we have our 3d eyeball layer and I'm going to shift pic with it to the null label which is the null that's on the front of the object okay and you can see that there's where we we see the difference in rotation so I'm going to take that null label and I'm gonna fiddle with the rotation here to get it to sit right so I think negative 90 degrees we'll go to that eyeball and we'll scale it down a little bit looks like that rotation you can see that the the squash and stretch is a little bit off on that eyeball again that's because of the difference in how they calculate rotations so we'll fix that I believe this just needs to go back negative 90 and you can see that the coordinates on that null are correct now you have the Y facing upward and the X facing left and right and then the Z is correct as well so now that's squash and stretch is working and the eyeball is sitting very nicely on that cube and obviously like in my dumb little render here you can bring in 3d text and it will stick there because the camera data has been exported correctly so that's it I mean that's it's it's really that simple to get camera and object data out of blender into After Effects and you can do all kinds of stuff with this I use it all the time I do most of my text in After Effects as opposed to blender and this really helps out with that a lot ok I hope that was helpful thanks for watching and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Motion Apprentice

Views: 34,429

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Id: BmfJWkmrf34

Length: 7min 31sec (451 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 11 2020