How to Track 3D text in After Effects - 3D Camera tracking tutorial for any Motion Designer

today we're going to learn how to track text in 3d space in two shots first a camera rotational shot secondly tracking a whole comp in a forward moving scene all in adobe after effects so let's get going hey so this is our first scene a lovely sort of um camera rotation scene with this um nice church in the middle um we're going to delve straight into uh tracking this scene so go up to your effects and presets panel and type in tracker and you'll get the effect 3d camera tracker come up so just drag that onto your footage and you'll see it starts to work straight away now depending on how long your footage is the size of it and how complex it is it can take anything from sort of 30 seconds up to sort of three four minutes really so um i'm going to speed up this little bit of the video just so you don't have to wait and wait around for the result and there you have it so you can see it's stuck in all these um nice little points these tracking markers in 3d space if i scrub the the timeline you can see them sort of flicker on and off with bits it sort of can't pick up along the way um but it's done but it does a really good job of matching um and tracking what we what we need and it's quite a complicated shot here really so what you want to do is look for um points that you can parent to and you want them to stay in shot the whole way there's no point picking tracking markers that go off camera um so let's just let's just scrub through this and you can see you can sort of select these along the front or the front of here and and after effects give you gives you this sort of circular representation this sort of guide of what the angle of ones that you're going to pick so i'm going to just scrub to here and then if you just click and drag you can sort of draw a circle around a few of these and then if you let go uh there you go it gives you the sort of nice angle and shows you the way it's going to be facing and then right click and go create text and camera and there you go it creates text straight away and it tracks it beautifully so you might need a little bit of tweaking on this so we're going to select our text and i'm going to open up press r for the rotation and i'm going to first of all let's just rotate this on the z just to get this really nice and in line with the perspective there and with the x rotation just tilt it forward a little bit to um to match your scene you know you might you're gonna have to tweak this um to your scene your in your liking and then we can just change the text as well in my example i just used the word sunrise but you know feel free to use whatever you want you can change the text size it's completely editable um editable text as we go you can see that here and you can position it if we move it around in in 3d space to wherever you want it to go and you can also um if i click shift p to open up the position key as well what i want to do is is send it back in z space as well so that it's not right we have these markers here but i want them sort of back so we get a bit of nice parallax scrolling you see so that looks quite nice there let's move this over or you can use the slider down here and i'm going to um i'm going to you know make this larger and i'm going to push it back more in z space let's have a look at that i'm just going to do a quick ram preview there you go it's beautiful it's it's moving really well exactly where we want it and you can see how quick and easy it is to do it after effects does a great job of of tracking you know even complicated scenes with bits moving around in it so let's just tweak this a little bit move it how we want um i think i'm going to move this over a bit um up a bit here that's quite nice and um what i want to show you knows is i actually um i've done a little cutout um a little row scoping of this of the steeple on the church here to put in front to make it look like the text is behind that now i'm not going to go into how i did that because this tutorial i just want to keep it straight to the point i mean it's about tracking it's not about rotoscoping which can go sort of quite in depth but i did use um i had to go at the roto brush but then the uh the free plug in the mocha ae version worked quite well to to to just key that out and i'm going to bring this to the front and you'll see and i'm just going to turn that on and it's just it's just just cut out over the front so i can go over that in another tutorial um but i wanted to sort of stick with um the topic of of just tracking the text for today so as you can see that works quite well i'm going to move it further back in z space move up here something like that um maybe scale it up maybe change the font let's just see what this looks like now so quick round preview yeah it looks great now it's looking really good um there you go it really is it really is that simple and i think what i did here as well is i added a little bit of animation so what i did is i um went along to let's say about here just to get a bit of movement of of moving up added a position key and then here just moved it down and let's just hit f9 to give it a smooth in and there you go just animates up quite nicely and just have a play you know you know these can be used for really good motion graphics for corporate videos anything you want um and i also you know if if you want to know let's have a look at the example again um and the here i did actually um just just add a stroke and a gradient fill really easy to do um just really quickly show you that so it was just in in effects um it was just a gradient fill let's have a look um here it is gradient ramp i just drag that onto my sunrise um you'll get your um you'll get your colors here so you've got your the top and the bottom so i'm moving this up you can see um the the so i don't want the gradient going across the whole top but just across my text so then you just double click the color you want say nice red and and here um a nice nice yellow and that was it really and then i changed the blending mode i think to something like um hard light and i just simply gave it a layer layer styles and i gave it a quick stroke and and it was really as easy as that let's just ram preview this there you go easy as that for the first shot i mean you can obviously take a bit more care i think i overlapped the sun at one point um if you know but it's just an example of how you can track the camera how you can add the text and how easy it is to to edit the text you know right up until until render point you can add more text and do some more animation okay so that's it for the first example so let's go on to the next one where we do something just a little bit more complicated we actually attach it to a null and we use a comp um instead of just text to allow you to do to add and track more i'm also going to do the forward tracking so this was the example i set up for this um the forward tracking and the comp so you just see it it's a nice little shot just just really rough roads going over the top and it moves forward this time instead and what it's got is we've got this comp so what i've done is i've set up an animation separately in a con now this could be anything it could even be video it could be um sort of character animation more in depth motion design anything you want but i just set up this little this little hanging sort of um swinging motion graphics into a comp and we're going to use that to attract uh to attach to our camera tracking so let's go back into our scene here and let's set this up so just as before click your footage um layer type in tr uh you know tracker to look for your 3d camera tracker and same as before drag it on and let it process so again i'm going to speed up the video at this point and um just just to jump forward so you can uh get into the information okay great so you can see it's track let's fit this to view let's just slide along and see what we've got so it's picked up um the buildings really well um obviously they come off screen um as we go past so we really want to be looking for tracking points around here so let's let's see what we've got here we want something that stays in shot all the time so i'm thinking around sort of sort of here would be the best place um let's just have a little look yeah definitely so let's just quickly um select uh these see what we get so we've got a nice little nice little point in there and this time instead of create text we're going to right click and go create null and camera and as you can see what that does is it creates a tracking null here down in our layer and it's here it's a 3d layer automatically and it's called track null one and we're going to use that to uh to parent to so let's go into our um our project window um here it is and let's just drag out um the the the comp that we showed you before this this is uh the text comp that was in um in the example from the animation now this at the moment is just a flat layer so we need to turn it into a 3d layer so what you do is you click on this little cube here and it turns into a 3d layer now you might be thinking where's it gone but now it's a 3d layer it's actually moved forwards if i drag the timeline back it's there you see so if you ever wonder where it's gone it's because you you know you if on this sort of camera movement that's going forward it might be behind you behind the camera so so there's a funny little trap you can fall into there so let's um let's have a look at this so at the moment um it's looking good it's tracking but it's going forward too fast because it's too far forward we want to push this right back in z space so let's go down here to our position key and um and let's push this right back in zed space you know maybe something like um let's have a look for on 1 1200 there you're gonna have to have a play with this um and it's still moving too much for me so i'm going to move it way back again i want that nice parallax that's looking better i'm going to go even more you know i'm going to go up to something like maybe 10 000 and i'm going um i'm gonna scale this up obviously it hit hit the um sk to see the scale and it's on a hundred percent at the moment let's just whack this up something like something like that and now let's just have a little look and see what this is looking like let's just do a little round preview and that's perfect brilliant and now obviously it's behind the buildings i'm going to move this up a bit i want it to be up in the air a little bit more and again i did exactly the same before i've done another little layer i've cut out these buildings um i've rotated them out just using the free built-in mocha ae so let's just do a little ram preview and let's see when the camera goes past you get that lovely sort of um closeness as you go over the buildings now i'd like to i think i'd like to move this back even more really let's have a little quick look yep so i i'm gonna um i'm gonna go to our comp again hit the position key and we're gonna send this back even further and i want this higher i think you know you all you'll see will differ oh that's a lot better you know and you could you could you could like put shadows on the floor from the from the uh from the text you could put reflections if it's over water um anything you want really again this is just um a stock a stock um piece of footage that i purchased that was part of my you know subscription part i use for client work and things like that so there's lots of this stuff around you can get this actual clip from from envato in fact i'll leave the links to the actual footage if you want to purchase them as well you know i don't have any affiliate to them but um it's a very nice clip so let's just have a little round preview back now and just check out our scene there you go that's looking really nice so i hope that helped it was a really short tutorial today um but it's a really good skill for any motion designed to have to be able to track text and put it in there with motion design you know we can actually use 3d text as well we can use element 3d or we could bring text and graphics in from maya and track the cameras and things like that so you know add more animation bits of video panels so there's a lot you can do with this and it and you can see how quick and easy it is to do and you get a really nice effect whether your camera is rotating uh moving forward um dynamic you know try it with a fast camera you can rotate them as the camera as it goes and things like this so have fun with it i really hope you enjoyed this um if you could leave a like that would be really good and really helpful and i will if you're interested i will try and do a little rotoscoping tutorial as well to match this um i haven't been using mowgray you know long at all so i'm no expert myself but i found it really easy to use or just i might do a little video on the roto brush as well so yeah i hope you like that if you can please give it a thumbs up and share and like and i will see you in another video thanks very much you

Channel: Animator Artist Life

Views: 32,457

Keywords: after effects 3d camera tracker, after effects easy text tracking tutorial, camera tracking after effects, camera tracking after effects tutorial, how to use 3d camera tracker in after effects, how to use after effects 3d camera tracker, text tracking tutorial, tracking 3d text in after effects tutorial, after effects tutorial, motion tracking, how to track 3d text in after effects, 2d text animation after effects, how to animate text in after effects beginner, 3d camera tracker

Id: AuywQT4twEI

Length: 14min 18sec (858 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 22 2021