Heard of the 3D camera in After Effects
but you're kind of intimidated by it? Don't be, let me demystify it for you. I'll have you making the most of
the 3D camera in just a few minutes. I'm Jess for Envato Tuts+ and
I'm a professional motion and graphic designer and I too was once very
mystified by this tool, but no longer. In this quick tip, we'll look at how
to set up the camera in After Effects the easy way, get full control over
your scene with the camera position and rotation, and add depth to your
animation to create a 3D universe. So let's go from flat to fabulous. [MUSIC] All right, so welcome to After Effects,
my favorite program, and I've got a little thing already going here, which
is going to explain the 3D camera to you. It's pretty common in my job that I'll
get a bit of a storyboard like this and not really any detail on how to
move between these two frames. So the 3D camera is a great way to add
a little bit more spice to your animations and really blow the socks
off your clients. Because we could go for
something really simple like this and just use a couple of nulls
to get this pan effect. And then, stack it up with another null at
the end to get a scale and all that stuff. But it gets quite complicated
quite quickly when you're using just stacks of nulls or precomps or
something, and it's a bit less flexible. And especially when you need to work fast,
this isn't always the best way. So I'm gonna show you how we can instead
do this same thing but with a 3D camera. We can also get some really interesting
effects with the camera that we can't do like this. Okay, so a camera in After Effects
works with 3D elements. So let's add a camera first,
if you go right click New, Camera, usually I don't change any of
these settings, but a 50 or 35 millimeter lens is usually good. Let's go 50 here, I've never
used the one-node camera before, I'm sure there's a place that you can use
it, but two-node is always safe as well. Hit OK and
we get this little camera down here. And the first thing I'm gonna do is
create a null, New, Null Object. We'll bring him to the top and
we're gonna call it CAM CONTROL. And then parent our camera
to this CAM CONTROL and make sure it's a 3D layer as well. So now basically we're gonna forget that
the camera exists and we're going to use all the position of this camera from
this null and I'll show you why. So everything that you want to be affected
by a camera needs to be a 3D layer. So I'm gonna go through and make
everything in here a 3D layer as well. And I do that by coming down here and
selecting them all, clicking this button here,
which is the 3D layer. If you don't see this,
you can right-click up here, Columns, and turn on Switches for that one. I've left the background as a 2D layer
because I don't want the background to be affected by my camera,
I want it to stay as it is. So anything that is still a 2D layer will
just be ignored basically by the camera and will stay exactly as it is. Thanks to Envato Elements for
making this little tutorial possible. Elements, if you haven't heard,
is a subscription service for creative assets like video templates,
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subscription, so to learn more, check out the link in
the description below. Alright, let's get back to our 3D camera. So now if I`d move this null
around if I open up the position, you can see also because we're in
a 3D layer now, we have three values. You've got your X, side to side, you've
got your Y, top and down, and you've got your Z, which is the most exciting
one, which is basically in and out. It's zoom in depth, so that is a pretty powerful thing
we've just added to our composition. Now let me show you the difference
between using the camera positions and using the null. So if we go over here, you can see two
views, which is also a pretty handy thing. This is our active camera view point and
this is the top view and you can change this as well to be, sorry,
this one's the one that's changing. You can change to be left, top, back,
right, whatever you prefer to do. But usually, I only use the top just
to see where my elements in a scene are in relation to my camera. So if I was to move the camera
by itself you can see that's our little camera there. And if I wanted to change its position, you can see it's moving the camera as
the orbit point basically of this CAM. So it's moving the scene
based on where the camera is. But if I move the position of
the CAM CONTROL, which is over here where our scene is, it's the orbit point
basically of this scene now. And so the camera will follow it, i.e
the camera is following the center of your scene where your elements are, is always
gonna be what your camera is looking at. So I generally find that's a better way
to control what you're working with. Because sometimes or I find in particular,
I don't know if it's just me, I'm sure other people see it differently. But sometimes I get really confused and
lose sight basically of my composition because it's not been the center focal
point at all times and the camera gets. Sometimes it can be quite hard to reset
the camera as well when you've got keyframes. But anyway this is just for me a much
safer easier straightforward way to do it especially for simple motion
graphics like we're doing today. So now we can basically do the exact
same thing that we had in our comp before with the nulls but instead with
the position of this CAM CONTROL. So if I set some key frames,
say I want what was it, about three seconds we want to pan over,
so I'm gonna, I'll get about ten frames. We wanna pan over to this scene. We can do that really easily the same
way you can do it with the nulls. One tip that I would recommend you do is
always, when you're working with the 3D camera, it's quite a good idea
to keep on some kind of grid, either up here you can have
the title Action Safe. I always work with this, or if you've got
some really kind of strict gridded design, bring in that grid, or even you can
bring in reference imagery like the. Bring in your still that
you have to match and line up things that way because the one
maybe big downside of a 3D layer. Is that you can't align 3D layers, which
is, it makes sense, but it's a bit lame when you're trying to be a nice neat
designer and match your style frame. So yeah, I always make sure, for instance, if I'm moving this over that this is
going to be center as best I can. Sometimes motion design,
it's a bit of an eyeballing game, especially with a 3D camera. So best of all, use the reference image. But today I'm gonna be a bit
loosey greasy with this. So let's add some ease to this, so we're gonna right-click
Keyframe Assistant, Easy Ease, or if you have some cool plugins that
also do that, you can do that too. And now we have that same pan motion. And you might be like, Jess, that
looks worse and it's exactly the same. What is the benefit of this camera? Well, you remember how in this comp, we,
if I wanted to have a scale, I couldn't. I would have to do that on a different
layer because our scale point of this null is all the way over here and I had to
add a new null and blah blah blah. Gets difficult with the camera,
we can move in Z depth to get that exact scale and move all the elements at
once without having to think so much about what comp is where and
where all these elements are. But what if we wanted to
have The pan across, and then we want to have the scale in cuz
right now these are all on the same one. Well, we can separate these dimensions. So if you right click on your position,
you can go Separate Dimensions. And now we have separate
key framed layers for each dimension of movement which is super,
super cool. So, in this particular animation,
I don't really want a y movement, we're just going x side to side. And then later on in the camp, we're gonna we're going to have
that scaling movement down end. So, it's always good to have a little
bit of a bounce, so let's go. We're gonna go out a bit, and then we're
gonna go, bam, towards the camera. So moving in and
out of the space like that. Very simply. It's looking okay, it's nothing fabulous. Let's add a really cool effect that really
then takes this to the next level and it's parallax, and this is where we're really
using the full benefits of the camera. So this is where it can get a bit finicky. And again, you should definitely
keep your reference frames handy. But we can set these
elements in Z-space as well. The elements of our scene, we can set
them in different areas of Z-space to give a parallax effect to our movements. So, let me actually, I'll just pre-compose
this text so we're all together. And make sure that it's a 3D layout again. And if we hit position P on the keyboard, we've got three dimensions
here now as well. So if I move this back you can see
it's going behind this image because that image is this stills frame,
which is at zero in the Z- space. But if I was to make this negative 136, it's gonna go right behind it because it's
one pixel now behind that text frame. So, let's spread these out over
this over the Z-space, and you can again turn on your top view if you
wanna kind of get a bit of a better idea of where things are sitting. I'm gonna move this text
frame really far up. So I reckon for a really exaggerated
movement you wanna be somewhere around the negative 5000 tight zone. And it's gone because it's
really close to camera [LAUGH]. So what we're gonna do,
actually, is it even past? It's past the camera. Maybe I went too far. You can see here that's the layer
that I just moved in Z-space, and there's our camera. So we're probably never going to see
that if I leave it at negative 5000. So actually you can also, if you wanna do
it manually, you can move it this way. Using that little tiny
blue arrow is our Z-space. So you could do it that way. I generally like to stick with numbers so that I know where the rest of
the elements are in relation. So maybe negative, what was it? What was just it? Negative 2000 ish, so
maybe negative 1500 is good. But we still can't see it
because it's really big. So then I'm going to scale it
back down to the frame size. So now it looks like it did before,
pretty much, but you can see that that is now
moving faster than the frame below it because it's
closer to the camera. Which is like when you look out
the window of a moving train and the mountains in the background
are moving really slow, but the trees close to the train
are moving really fast. It's the exact same principle,
it's just physics. Okay, so we can do that to all of
our elements to give them a little bit more of an interesting in an exit,
and I will go ahead and do that to these elements and
then check in again. [MUSIC] So Some are moving back in space, some are
moving forward, and I'm just going through and adjusting the scale to get them back
to what they look like in the style frame. Again, if I was doing
this really seriously, I'd be matching this very
closely to the style frame, but I'm just being a bit
laissez-faire with it for this. I'm just gonna adjust this easing as well
so we've got a slow start and a slow out. You can access the graph editor
by selecting your keyframes and clicking this little button, and
then you can adjust these as you like. The steeper the curve, the faster
the animation, that's always the rule. If you're in, sorry, the value graph,
which is where I prefer to work. But you can also use the speed graph,
which follows the same principles, steeper the curve, slower the motion. Cool, okay, so you can see there that
we've got some movement happening. This one's going really fast cuz
he's really close to the camera. But there's a bit of a problem in that
our scenes are quite close together physically, and this one is coming on
when it's popping on it's in scene. And I think it's gonna look altogether
better if we make this more exaggerated, so this is the big difference when using
a null you can kind of have all of your stuff here. But when you're using the camera,
sometimes it's better to really drag this movement out so that it's quite
far, and then select all your elements. And because we're using
the camera to do all this motion, none of them are keyframed anyway. So you can move the position really like
wherever you want, it's quite a flexible way of working, and that's I think why I
really like it because it's very fluid and it really heroes the motion of
the scene over anything else. And now if we watch that back
now that's a bit further away, there we go there's a bit more space. We could even, I don't know,
add a few more of these in here. So that it's whooshing
past a bunch of things and really gets that experience of or
feeling like it's a bit of a world and a bit of a universe you're creating here
of these elements on different planes. All right but,
we can also add some more things. So, I'm going to add, right to the start, we're gonna put a key
frame on our Z position. And then put a key frame right at the end
where we want this pan to happen. And I'm just gonna add a slow zoom in. So if we pan this back out slightly, and
then I'm gonna go into my graph editor, and you can see this curve we're starting
to create on the Z, which is out in and out, push and pull. We've got a nice smooth,
we want kind of a pretty flat line here, so that it's just gradually zooming in,
that is already just way more interesting. And then, here I think the pan is probably
enough, but what if we want to add, I don't know,
some rotation to this particular scene. So maybe by the time it gets here,
let's add, we've got all these rotation tools
as well, which is pretty cool. And I really think it's quite effective
when you spin in kind of this. What is it?
Y, Y always looks pretty cool. So, I think I want it to spit,
be about here, and then spin round slowly,
maybe to like there. Can be pretty subtle. And then obviously we don't
want it at the start, so, I'm just gonna reset that to zero,
and then this key frame. So what we're gonna do is
we'll have the pan and as it's panning,
I want it to flip to that. What is that?
About 30 degrees? I like round numbers. And then before the end, we'll have it. We'll have it slowly
over this whole segment. We'll have it slowly rotate back,
and you've got these cool bits. And then by the time that he is here for
this final push in, it'll be back to straight on rotation. We can do the same, Easy Ease, these boys. We look at the same curves for
this as well. So maybe we want this, maybe we want it
to spin pretty evenly the whole time. Yeah, cuz we want we don't really
want this bit to be rotated, but we want the rotation to
really kick in about there, so I'm just gonna pull that curve,
ooh, yeah, schnappy. [LAUGH] So there's one last thing that we
need to note when using the 3D camera, and I will show you with this sweet little,
where is he? He's over here because we have moved
our scene so much out of the way, he's gotten lost. So if you lose an element,
you're like, where is this? If you scroll really far out, you'll probably be able to
[LAUGH] find it somewhere else. Okay, so this is our little end
explode animation that I made, which I want to kind of kick in when
this kinda punches in and then, poof, we go through this tunnel, right? I have made this in a pre-comp,
and you can see here it's just a bunch of these circles scaling and
also moving in Z-space. So over time,
these get closer towards the camera. And there's another camera in this comp,
right, doing the same thing. So this camera is moving in Z-space
through this tunnel as they are also coming towards it. So in 2 Views, here are all our tunnels,
they're going back, and then the camera there, you can see,
is starting to move through those ones. It's a pretty cool little
effect you can do. But one thing to note is that if you
have Collapsed Transformations on, which is this little trigger here,
it basically overrides that camera and is using this camera now, so
this is gonna not really work as well. So that's just one thing to be aware of,
is that you might want to have, for instance, the reason I did
this is because I wanted this to have a more exaggerated movement than
I wanted these elements to move. Cuz these are moving kind
of slowly out of frame. And I wanted this burst to be really
exaggerated, so it's a bit faster and a bit punchier,
which is why I've added a second camera. So we're just gonna keep
Collapsed Transformations off, but this is still a 3D layer, so it is still
being affected by this camera as well. So you get kind of the double movement,
but it's not only being affected by
that camera, if that makes sense. There's a lot of tweaking that
I would still do to this, but it's pretty clear, I think,
on the benefits of the camera. One final quick tip that I will show you,
cuz the camera, it's an endless tool, there is so much
you can do with it and it is very cool. But one of my favorite things
to do is turn on Depth of Field. So in this little comp, imagine this is
a little cool social post or something. I've got this text, it's all pretty
boring, nothing is really happening. But if I chuck this into a 3D layer and
I've got a camera, here, I'm not gonna move the camera so
I haven't worried about a banner now. So all I've got is this normal camera, exactly the same settings
as you would have before. And I'm going to rotate
this piece of text so that I love the angles,
on a bit of an angle. One other thing that's good to note with
the camera is just to make sure that you are watching the resolution of your
pre-comps, because, for instance, here I'm scaling this up quite a bit and
it still looks okay. But you get too big and
it might start to look a bit grainy, especially with images and
things like that. So it's not a hard and fast rule
that scaling it over 100 is gonna ruin the resolution of it,
because things are in space as well. But just be mindful and
make sure your pre-comps are double size of basically what your end
comp is and you should be fine. So we've changed the rotation of this,
it's kind of on a fun angle, that's cool. And if we go up to the camera, twirl it
open and twirl out Camera Options and turn on Depth of Field, and
nothing's really happening, why? It's because our aperture is quite low. So usually I just go in and crank this
up until I can see what's happening, and then I'll go back and refine exactly how much blur I want using
things like Focus Distance and Blur Level. So if we open up, again,
our 2 Views, dah, dah, dah, dah, here's our camera,
here is our text layer. And you open this,
our focus distance currently, it's this pink line here, so
it's right at the end of that camera. There we go,
you can see a little bit better. This is our focus distance, and you can
see how that's affecting our comp here. As the focus distance pushes into where
it's interacting with our comp here, it gets clearer, which is pretty cool. So you can animate the focus
distance by setting a key frame. So I might want it to start really blurry
and then in three seconds come into focus. And because this is on an angle
as well and this focus distance isn't hitting straight on, we're getting
a little bit of blur at the edges too, because the focus is
right in the middle here, basically of this comp,
which I think is quite a cool effect. And if you were to animate maybe, I don't know how well it's
gonna come out of frame, but you can animate something like that
through the focus distance as well, which I think is a really
cool effect that you can add. But, yeah, there's also a whole bunch of different types of
blur that you can put on this. Some of these ones, nonagons and
stuff, get a bit chunky, but it'll give you a smoother blur. Basically the more blades you have in your
iris shape if you're talking about a real camera. So maybe it's good to work with this
shorter ones until you're happy with the animation, and
then if you really want a nice clean blur, bump it up to this before you export. And you can also change
the blur level as well. So if you're like,
I just want a little bit of blur, you can change that percentage down or
you can crank it up to loads. So it's a really fun little nifty
trick and useful in a lot of ways. This is a very basic way to use it, but
you can set up whole big scenes where you have trees in the foreground and
a background and a character layer. There's so
much that the camera allows you to do, so I hope that you're not
scared by it anymore. So that's how I use the 3D
camera in my projects. I hope that has helped explain how,
when, and why to use the camera in After Effects. Let me know down in the comments
how you use the camera, because I'd really love to hear about it. If you enjoyed this tutorial,
please also consider subscribing. Until next time, stay fabulous. [MUSIC]
