This mini lesson teaches you the basic concepts of creating and animating 3Dcameras, adding null objects, parenting cameras and the power of mixing andmatching both for smoother and organic animations. So inside Adobe After Effectslet's go ahead and set up our scene. First thing to do is to create a new After Effects Composition soI am going to click on the create new composition icon and for the purpose of this tutorial I am going touse width 1280 pixels by 720 pixels or alternatively you can click on this Presetdrop down and choose one of these Presets. Click OK and then I'm going to click and drag the semi-dome mosaic PNG imageinto the timeline panel. Now I'm going to also apply a stroke on this PNG image so I am going toright click, bring up the Layer Styles and add a Stroke and change thecolor. Open up the Stroke settings here and choose white and up to size of the stroke tolet's say six. In addition I am going to select After Effects Type tool and I am going to click onceand give a proper name of the mosaic which actually exists in Hagia Sophia located in Istanbul. So that will be Hagia Sophia and then I'm going to center this using theAlign panel, that would be Horizontal Center Alignment and Vertical Center Alignmentand then click and drag this. Hold down the Shift key as a I do size this up. This one the text layer also I am going to apply an After Effects Layer style and I am going to add a Drop Shadow and I won't doanything to it just leave it the way its default settings andthen because we are working on a 3D cameras we need to turn those two layersinto 3D layers and the way you do is to select the 3D layer switchand here's the switch. Now if you don't see the switches here you need to probablytoggle on and off these switches so you can press you can toggle and see theother switches. In this case I can see that, the 3D layer switch so I am going to click toactivate it and do the same for the PNG image file. So both of these layers are now 3D layers but here is the thing. . . With this Active Camera view we can really see how these layers are behavingand what I mean is. . . Click on this Active Camera and choose an Orthographic view,in this case i am going to use the Top Orthographic camera view and as you can see both of these 3D layers are on top of each otherin this case because you're working 3D space you need to separate those in space so I'mgoing to select the semi-dome mosaic and then hover over thisaxis arrow and when you get the indication of the Z axis just click anddrag this and separate the layer on 3D space like so. Of course last thing before we move on we need to add a new After Effects Camera sogo up the Layer menu, select New and then choose to add a new Camera. For this tutorial we are going to use a Two-Node Camera. Now when you get the CameraSettings window here you can select two types of camera, you can have the One-NodeCamera which is a camera that orients around itself or we have the Two-NodeCamera which basically with Two Node camera you get the camera itself and aPoint of Interest that you can point it in different layers and orbit aroundaround those layers. For Preset I am going to use the 35mm and then click OK. Alright and our scene is set up. I am going to Save that and going forward I am going to lookinto how the camera and tools work and how they behave. Adobe After Effects comes with several camera tools to help you work on 3D space and all of these are located up inthe toolbar specifically right here starting with the Unified Camera toolfollowed by the Orbit Camera tool, Track XY Camera tool and Track Zcamera tool. First let's look into the Unified Camera tool. With After Effects Unified camera tool youcan use a three-button mouse to activate any other individual tools forexample with the left mouse button you will use the Orbit Camera tool. CTRL + Z or Cmd + Z to undo this action. With the right mouse button you will getthe Track Z Camera tool and lastly using the middle mouse button willactivate the Track Z Camera tool. OKNow let's go ahead and talk about these camera tools in more detail. By the way ifyou want to jump from Camera tool to Camera tool as you can see here a greatshortcut is the Letter C on your keyboard so if you press that it will jump from camera toolto camera tool. Now we continue let me actually lock those two layers so Idon't accidentally select them and then inside the camera layerI'm going to the letter P for position to bring up the Position parameter and thenShift + A to bring up the Point of Interest. In addition from 1 View I am going toswitch to 2 Viewsso I can see what I do. . . zoom out a bit using the scroll wheel. because the Camera tools behave different for the Point of Interest andthe position so let's go ahead and demonstrate that. Again right now I amusing the Unified Camera tool by pressing the letter C on my keyboard tojump to the next camera tool and that will be the Orbit Camera tool so let's see how thethe Orbit Camera tool behaves with the Point of Interest and the Position. I'm gonna click and drag this around as you can see on the timeline onlythe Position property is changing and only the back of the camera is moving. Let's go ahead andreset that. Here is a trick to learn, first twirl this up and then downto get the Reset button but you canalso isolate only these two parameters, the Point of Interest and the Positionand the trick here is to hold down the Alt + Shift or Option + Shift on the Mac,click, click, click, and now you only have the Point of Interest, the Position and aReset button. We looked into the Orbit Camera tool, press the letter C on your keyboard toswitch to the TrackXY and see how this camera tool behaves. With the Track XY you are moving the camera and the Point of Interest,left, right, up, down, and in the Timeline watch as I use the Track XY camera tool only theX and Y value is changing for both Point of Interest and the Position but not the Z. I am going to Reset the cameraagain, press the letter C on your keyboard to jump to the next camera tool, that will be the Track ZCamera tool and also pay attention to the Point of Interest and thePosition as I do that I'm only moving the back of the camera in and out andonly changing the Z value. Let's reset that as well and basically thisis how the different After Effects camera tools behave in relation to the Position and Point ofInterest. Before we start animating our 3D camera let's go ahead and learn how to use thecamera tools both in the Orthographic views and in the Active camera. Camera toolsoperate differently depending which View you're working in. If you're using anyof the Camera tools in the Active camera as indicated here or hereyou are moving the actual camera and changing the values for both the Position and the Pointof Interest. So let's go ahead and bring up one of the camera tools by pressing the letter C on thekeyboard, right now I have the Track Z so if I click and drag this I will bechanging the back of the camera and change the Z position. Now switch to another camera tool, now are on the Orbit camera tool and I am changing the Position of the backcamera and if I use the Track XY camera tool I am changing both the Point of Interest and the Position. Let's go and Reset the camera. . . The story changes though when we are using After Effects camera tools in oneof the orthographic views, here we are only changing to Preview and not theactual camera as we do in the Active camera so before I demonstrate this to youwe need to optimize the orthographic views in this composition preview window. Orthographic view refers to the Front view,to the Left, to the Top, to the Back, to the Right or the bottom view. Theorthographic views show layer positions in the composition but they donot show Perspective. So now the challenge here is to set the magnification ratio to 100% andstill be able to fit the entire camera into the composition panel. Right now asyou can see the magnification ratio I am using is 25% but the size of thecamera is so small especially the individual axis arrows are hard to select,for example using the Selection tool. So what's the solution, well the solutionis actually to leave the magnification ratio 100% and then bring up the cameratools by pressing the C key, in this case I will start withthe Track Z camera tool and I'm gonna try to fit everything into the composition window. Zoom out a bit using After Effects Track Z camera tool, hold down the Spacebar on the keyboard to panup and down or left and right, I will release the mouse, continue using theTrack Z camera tool, switch to the Track XY camera tool, like so and kind of position thisin the center and then again use the track Z camera tool to kind of zoom in. As you can see here nowI have the individual axis arrows quite visible in using the Selectiontool and it's quite easy to select them. All right, now what about the Orbit camera tool?We used the other camera tools, the Track Z and Track XY but we didnot use the Orbit. Now the Orbit camera tool will not work in any orthographicviews because as I mentioned before in orthographic view it does not haveperspective, in this case what we need to do is to use one of the Custom viewsAfter Effects provides us, these views are actually great for to be able to seeyour states in different angles. In this case I will use Custom view 1. Again I amgoing to use the Track Z camera tool to position this. You can usethe Orbit camera tool and if you notice herestill I am not changing any of the Point of Interest or the Position. In other words this is howthe camera tools work in different views whether it's the Active camera view, theorthographic camera view or the custom views After Effects us. So we talked about how the camera and tools work in different views inside AfterEffects and now we are going to actually start animating our camera. OK the waywe are going to do this is use the Selection tool and drag any ofthe axis arrows and show you how the camera actually behaves. For example I amgoing to start dragging the X axis arrow and notice that both the Point of Interest overhere and the Position is changing, same dragging the X axis arrow and the same dragging theZ axis arrow. Reset the camera. What we arelooking for is actually to animate the camera that orbits around the scene and this can nothappen with the Point of Interest animating at the same time. So make sure we are at the Position of the cameraand you need to hold down the Ctrl key or the Cmd on the Mac and now wecan start moving any of the axis arrows and only the back of the camera ischanging and the Position value. Same thing with Y axis arrow, and the same with theZ axis arrow. Reset the camera and let's go ahead and create our first animation. I'm going to create the first keyframe by clicking on the Stopwatch icon, holddown the Ctrl key or the Cmd key on the Mac and start to find a position. Use the Z axis arrow to bring in a bit and after 3 seconds,hold down the Ctrl key or Cmd key on the Mac to find another position of the camera. Something like that. . In the meantime I am using the spacebar on my keyboard to pan up and down, left and right and bring it in using the Z axis arrow. So let's see what we got. . . press the spacebar on your keyboard for RAM preview. We have a nice animation here but here is the problem. . . I am looking at this inCustom view 1 and I am seeing a motion path, a straight motion path. In another Custom view we see the same motion path,a straight motion path but if you look at the preview animation. . . we see a straight motion path getting closer to the two layers in themiddle of the animation as well as the camera swinging at the back in anice curve but the question is where is the curve? There is no curve is just astraight motion path so as you can see this is quite deceiving. . . so what we need to do isis actually pull out those two handles each keyframe in order to get themotion hypothetically we are seeing. Now if I play the newly changed motion path wegoing to get a different animation. So that's actually not something that you opt doing inside After Effects,having motion paths sticking out in different directions with handles andso on, instead you want to create a camera that's perfectly orbits around your scene. Creating a camera that perfectly orbits a scene it's actually quite simple. Besides creating a camera we will also create a Null object in which we will parentthe camera to it so let's go ahead and do that. I'm going to twirl this up on the Camera 1and also make the Camera 1 invisible, then to the Layer menu, choose New andcreate a new Camera. I am going to use the same Preset I used before which is the35mm and the Type will be a Two Node Camera. Click OK. Return to the Layer menu, select New and choose to create a new Null object. Now we need to parent Camera 2 to the Null 1 and that's actually quite easy. First you need to have this parent column available to you and the shortcutfor this is Shift + F4 on your keyboard. Couple of ways you can dothis. . . You can either click and drag this pick whip to the Null 1 or you canjust click on the drop down menu and parent Camera 2 to the Null 1. Now because we are working on 3D space inside After Effects we also need to turn on the 3D switchfor the Null object like so. OK let's open up the Transformations on the Null 1 and all I wantto focus is on Y Rotation so press the R key on the keyboard, now Iget all these rotations and then I'm going to focus only on the Y Rotationso press Alt + Shift or Option + Shift on the Mac and click to isolate only the Y Rotation. Let's goback to the very beginning, click on the Stopwatch like so to create our firstkeyframe. Play around with the axis arrows to find a position of your choice, change the rotation degrees. . . Move the cursor of the timeline to the 3 seconds and kind of reverse the degrees of Rotation and move to theother direction. So let's play this animation by pressing the Spacebar on your keyboard. Its a nice animation and its a smooth animation. As you can see here we don't have any motionpath sticking out in any kind of directionsinstead we have a smooth animation that perfectly orbits those two layers. Now that we've learned how to create a Null object and parent a camera to it wecan go ahead and take this even further by mixing and matching between the Nulland the camera but before I do that let me show you a quick way how to create aNull object and parent that to a camera. So just for a second I will make these layersinvisible, go back to After Effects layer menu to create a new Camera. ClickOK and then instead of creating a new Null object, go back to the layer menu,scroll all the way down in the Camera option and then choose Create Orbit Null. Here we got threethings happening, After Effects went ahead and created a Null object, it turned on the3D switch for that Null object andparented Camera 3 to the Null 2. So keep that in mind next time you wantto do the same. Revert to the last changes and then continue. This time I amgoing to animate Camera 2 so go back to the first keyframeI'm going to click on the stopwatch in the Position and find a position to start. Bring in this a bit. . . sync this to the next keyframe and then kind of do the opposite. OK. Let's play this, do a RAM preview. What else can we do?Well we can mix and match and create a new Null object. Go to the Layer Menu, choose Newand then Null Object. This time I am going to parent Null 1 to Null 2. So again you can click anddrag this pick whip of Null 1and drag this to the Null 2 and now Null 1 is parented to the Null 2. Twirl this down, I am going tomake this a 3D layer so turn on the 3D switch for Null 2 and thenI am going to change from Top view to Custom view 1, on Null 2use the Y arrow axis, place it and then sync the next keyframe to the frame below. Take the Y arrow axis and place it. Return to the first keyframeand for the X Rotation I am just going to rotate it and place it. . . Perfect so as you can see we have a very nice smooth organic animation but justmixing and matching Null objects and cameras. Combining Null objects with cameras is an extremely powerful tool inside After Effects. I would suggest to kind ofplan this ahead and think about the motion you would like to have, then use similartechniques that would yield smooth and organic animations for any of your projects. Thisconcludes this tutorial and thank you for watching with Elias Sarantopoulos!
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