Welcome back to Adobe's
Learn From the Pros tutorial series. I'm Boone from BooneLovesVideo. In the last episode, we created this
animated map path with some markers. In this episode, I'm getting everything set up and ready
for animation inside of 3D space. So this is a pretty
simple project right now. I've got these five map markers
shape elements, my path, shape layer and my map layer. Now I want to rig these up in a way
that when they become 3D objects, if I make any changes to the map
layer, naturally, I want the path in the map markers
to stick to the map. However, I do want to have the ability
to pull that path and those map markers away from the map
so that when I add lighting, I have nice shadows cast on the map and I can achieve
a really nice three dimensional look. So to rig this up, I'm going to right click in my timeline panel
and go to new null object. This is going to be my path controller,
so I'm going to hit enter and rename it Path Controller, and I'm going to grab
all the map markers as well as the path. And I'm going to parent these
to the path controller. And then to have this follow the map, I'll simply parent
the path controller null to the map. Now everything's properly rigged up
and I can switch all these elements to 3D, and I'm going to do that via
these little checkboxes here. If you can't see them go down to the toggle switches and modes
button and simply click on that. If you can't see this
button, toggle it on over here. So now I'll go and I'll switch
all these to 3D. Now, after I do that, if you go over here
to the panel, you're going to see there's all these new parameters available to me,
one of which is the 3D view. Now over here, it says
active camera default. Now I didn't add any camera layers. However, when you switch layers to 3D, it
automatically adds what's called the default camera, and you can control this default camera
using the camera tools up here. So you have orbit,
you have Pan and you have Dolly. And if you click and hold, you'll see
there's subcategories of these tools to give you different ways
to control these tools. So here I can orbit around the scene
and you can see I'm making adjustments to my default camera. I can toggle between these camera tools
by hitting the C key. I'm going to drag out
now. I'm dollying out. If you find that your system is
a little laggy and it really can't hang. There's a little button down here
that's called draft 3D. And if I click this, this is going
to switch to what's called the RTE render. It's the real time engine render, and it's going to allow you to work in
kind of like real time. It's going to be real,
punchy and responsive. So this is really designed to assist your animation workflow
and allow you to work really quickly. It also has a 3D ground plane here. So if I turn this on, you can see this really helps me figure out
where I am in 3D space. And with the new April 2022 release of Adobe After Effects,
we now have the new extended viewport. So if I toggle this on,
you can't really see what what it's doing, but I'm going to switch to Dolly
and I'm going to Dolly in, and now I'm actually going to zoom
out of my comp out of my window here . You can see this is the parameters
of my composition. See if I toggle extended viewport off.
This is what it looks like before. So this is just a really great way to see,
also see what's going on in 3D space. And if you want to,
you know, zoom in a little bit further. And if I click and hold on extended
viewport, you can see that I can control the transparency amount
or the opacity of the extended viewport. Incredibly helpful. You'll notice that I can't add
key frames to my default camera, so I need to actually go
and add a new camera. Then I can right click
right on the panel here and there's a little menu
group here called camera, and you can see that I can create a camera
automatically from my current default camera 3D view, which is pretty cool,
but I don't want to do that. I'm just going to go ahead
and reset the default camera that's going to snap it back. Now I can just right
click down here and go to new camera. There are two different types
of cameras you can create. You can see over here and type. If I open this up, you have one
and two node cameras, so one node camera essentially creates a camera layer
that has only position parameters, whereas a two node will have position
parameters as well as a point of interest. Since this is a pretty basic project,
I'm going to stick to one node camera and then I'm going to go over here to preset
and I'm going to select the 50 mm preset. And then all the other default
parameters are just fine. I'm going to click OK,
I can now see a new camera layer, and over here I can now see that
active camera is camera one. So if I make any adjustments now with my camera control tools, it's
going to be controlling camera one. However, I can still switch back
to default camera, which is very, very helpful. See, watch what happens now
- I'm moving my default camera around, which is very helpful. I can get a bird's eye view of my project
here as they move around and see there is my new camera. So now when I'm animating this camera, if I switch to default view,
I can really see what's going on. In fact, I'm going
to switch this to two views. This is a viewport controller here.
I can switch this to two views. And then on the right here
with this selected, I can switch this to active camera camera one
and this one to default camera. This is really cool because you can switch
this viewport to whatever you want. You know, you can switch it
to like looking down the left and then you can, you know,
see what your camera is doing here, which is in fact
the way we'll be working in a minute. Another new feature being introduced
in the April 2022 release of Adobe After Effects are these new 3-D icons,
so this is what's called binning, and it's essentially showing you
how 3-D layers are going to be rendered and if they're binned together, they basically will be able to intersect
each other and cast lights and shadows on each other. However, if I were to go to new adjustment
layer, I added some kind of 2D layer in between these watch what happens,
it breaks the bins. So now, for example, these two 3-D objects will not intersect with each other
because I've broken them here. So this doesn't change
the way that After Effects is functioning. It's essentially a UI enhancement,
just giving you a better way to see what's going on inside of the 3D world. Now, if I go back up here
to the comp panel and I select my 3-D map, you're going
to see this colorful little tool here. This is the 3-D gizmo or widget,
and it allows you to quickly control 3-D layers
from directly inside the comp panel. I can control the position, the scale
and the rotation, all with this one tool. You can see as I hover my mouse over,
you get these tooltips showing you the various axes
that I can grab here. So here, if you see an ellipse,
that is where you can control rotation, this is the X rotation here. I can mess with Z rotation
and if I see an arrow here, this controls the actual position
so I can move the position on each individual axis. And if I grab a square
that is going to scale it so you can see, I can scale it
just by Y, I can scale it just by X. This tool is incredibly handy. It helps you avoid having to dive down
into the actual timeline transformation properties and edit things in this method. Now we know how to look at our scene
from various angles. We know how to navigate 3D space. For the next step,
I'm going to get things rigged up. So if you remember from the sample
animation, the map is lying flat and the camera is kind of flying over it,
looking down at a slight angle. So to rig this up, I can come over here and grab my map
and then I can grab the X rotation. And let's say I just want to make it
flat on the ground plane. So to do that, I can move x rotation
and I can hold shift and I have a little tool
to operate out here. So if I turn it 90 degrees on X rotation
now, you can see it is flat with the plane and
you can really see it here because our active camera
is looking straight down. So it's kind of become invisible because
we're looking straight down this plane. Now what I want to do
is position the camera so that we're right over top of it
looking down on it. The best way to do
this is to switch this viewport to left, and I'm going to grab the wipe position and just bring it up
a little bit like this. And now we can start to bring it way up
closer to the map and now grab the x rotation of this. And I can set the rotation to maybe
something like about 20, I think is good. And now we're over top of the map.
We're looking down at the map. However, I want to be
aligned with the path. So to do that, I can just grab this here
and I can control my map just by rotating a little bit. So I'm going to rotate it, by the Y
so that it rotates it so that now we are looking down the path and it's
nice and centered up here like this. And there you have it.
You saw how easy that was to rig up. All right, now that we know how
to navigate 3D space and feel a little more comfortable in the next video,
we're going to add some lights.
