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>>ALAN: Now that we know how to convert our layers into 3D layers in After Effects,
let's talk about cameras. Now cameras inside of After Effects aren't physical real cameras but
they act just like it. Virtual cameras in After Effects are amazing, and, it could just be my own
bias as a video producer by trade that I love having this kind of access, but the ability to
control and keyframe a virtual camera through your composition making your 3D layers come to life,
is a wonderfully fun thing to do. So in this tutorial, I'm going to teach you how to make
a camera and then how to control that camera to make your 3D layers come to life. To teach you
about cameras in After Effects, I've given you a .PSD file of a hillside scene that I designed. Go
ahead and download that now and let's import that into After Effects as a Composition. To do that,
I'm going to double-click in my "Project" panel, find my .PSD and then click "Import."
Again, it's going to ask you what kind of import kind you want,
so let's change this to "Composition" not "Footage." "Composition." Hit "OK."
This gives us a folder of all of our layers in the .PSD and it gives us our composition. Go ahead and
double-click the hillside composition and let's open that in our timeline. So here's the scene:
a bunch of different 2D layers, all listed out here in the timeline panel.
What I want to do is, I want to turn each of these into a 3D layer,
distribute them throughout z-space, and then create a camera to kind of fly through this
hillside scene. To start, let's go ahead and turn everything but the sky into a 3D layer. To do this
quickly for multiple layers, you can click and drag your mouse through multiple check boxes.
Now, visually nothing changed. But if I come down to my "View" pulldown,
change this to "2 Views - Horizontal," I can now start to distribute these layers in z-space. I'm
going to zoom out here to give me some more room. Now, I want my front hill to be at the very front,
so I'm going to drag this forward a bit and then I'll grab my y-axis and drag it up.
I'm going to keep my "Hill Light," which is this one here -- I'm going to keep this where it's at,
kind of dead center in the composition. I'm going to take my "Hill Left" and "Hill Dark Right"
and I'm going to push these back. Don't panic if it starts to go behind different things
because, again, because it's 3D we can easily start to
change the layer order in z-space. I'm going to push these back a bit
good and I'm going to take my "Mountain Left" and "Mountains Right" and push these back even
further. Now you'll notice an issue here: the boundaries of our layers - since we're pushing
them back in z-space and the layers get smaller - we start to see the boundaries of our layer.
And this is an issue because we don't want to see the boundaries of our layers. And this is where
we can start to scale things up to compensate for this. So for my "Hill Dark" right and left,
I'm going to select both, hit "S" on the keyboard -- I'm going to scale these up.
Now, I'm scaling, I'm not moving them closer. So they're just getting bigger, thereby keeping their
look the same. I kind of like my "Mountain Left" and "Mountain Right" the size they are but I am
going to distribute them a little differently. I'm going to grab my x-axis here and move the left one
over and grab my y-axis and move it up a little bit -- and that looks pretty good.
So now I have some dimensionality to my image but, by-in-large, it looks the same. Now, before I go
any further, I want to animate the sun in this scene. So I'm going to click on my sun layer,
I'm going to push it way back, even behind these mountains. I like the size of it here but if you
wanted to make it a little bigger you could easily scale it up. Now, I want to make this sun kind of
rotate in the sky, as if it were like a time lapse of the sun rising. So I'm gonna grab my Pan Behind
tool - my anchor point tool - and select the "Sun" layer. And then I'm gonna grab the anchor
point and I'm gonna drag it down here. This will allow it to rotate. If I get out my Rotation,
I can grab my z-rotation -- you can see now the sun will rotate in the sky around that anchor
point. So at zero seconds, I'm going to start the z-rotation at, like, negative 26. Start a
keyframe, come over to the -- I don't know -- 3 second mark and make this do its full rotation.
That's a little fast. I'll drag this last keyframe out to the 5 second mark.
Good! Now, I want to introduce you to cameras. Let's go and go up to "Layer," "New,"
and come down to "Camera." Now, this Camera Settings dialog box will look fairly daunting,
especially if you're not really familiar with what camera terms mean; things like focal length,
area of view, zoom, and depth of field -- those would kind of be foreign terms to you.
I'm not really concerned with these right now though. I want us to create a basic two-node
camera - that's opposed to a one node camera - and I'll explain the difference once we create
this. So I want to create a two-node camera. We can keep it called "Camera 1" and to make
sure that my camera is the same as yours let's come up to the preset here and let's
set this to 50 millimeters. A 50 millimeter lens is a very standard lens and so by choosing
50 millimeters we create a fairly neutral camera. For those of you that do know cameras,
the fact that we can change the sensor size, we can change the focal length, we can change
the angle of view, we can change the zoom, we can even allow depth of field -- the fact that we have
these properties available to us in our virtual cameras in After Effects really truly gives
us a virtual camera with all the settings that we've come to know and love on our real cameras.
So a two-node 50 millimeter camera called "Camera 1." Keep everything else the same and hit "OK."
Now, this creates our virtual camera, it creates it as a layer down here - I'm going to drag this
to the very top - called "Camera 1," and we can see now the physical camera inside of our
top view. If I zoom in here and navigate to this little rectangle, this is the actual camera - this
little rectangle here. And this large triangle off of it is the field of view. Now, it's called
the two-node camera because we have the camera as one node, and then we have this point of interest,
which is node number two. A one-node camera is just a camera with a field of view - no point of
interest. One-node cameras are much more difficult to control, although they do have their place.
But to start, focus on learning a two-node camera first. Now I want to point out that cameras don't
have any type of mode, track matte, or switches. So we can't make a camera 3D - cameras inherently
are 3D. And we want to make sure that all of our layers that we want our camera to impact are
turned into 3D layers. So our sky is not turned into a 3D layer, which is fine because I don't
want the sky to have any sort of z-space. The sky just needs to exist when you move your
camera. When you're driving, the sky never gets closer to you; it always remains at infinity. So
by keeping the sky a regular 2D layer, it won't be impacted by our camera controls.
Also, if I select my camera, I have most of the keyframeable properties that I know and love:
position and rotation. Now I can't scale a camera and I can't change the transparency of a camera,
but I can move it and rotate it. Now, I also have the actual physical camera here
inside of my composition panel. If I get out my Selection tool, I can physically grab one of these
axes - or the physical pink box if I were to zoom in here - and I can start to move this around.
When I start to move this around, notice several things: I know your eyes are drawn
to the Active Camera to the right, but look at my point of interest in my top view here.
It's stationary. So you can see how the camera is always locked on that point of interest.
That's why two-node cameras are handy. Now, go ahead and look over at the active view.
Notice what we did here - we're starting to actually see z-space. We can see our
layers distributed across that space and we can move our camera around and notice that,
but, that's not all too different from our Orbit Around tool that we learned in the previous
tutorial. I'm going to go ahead and hit control z to return my camera to its starting point
now I want this camera to slowly push in, which means we're going to animate it through z-space.
To do this, I'm going to hit "P" on my keyboard and I'm going to start my keyframe stopwatch
for Position at 0 seconds. I'm then going to drag my playhead forward to the 5 second mark
and I'm going to push my camera through z-space - and I could do that either with my z-axis down
here, or I could grab the physical z-axis in my composition panel. I'm more of a visual learner,
I like grabbing the actual axis handle. I'm going to push this through. Now because we
gave our layers depth, there should be a kind of parallax effect happening here, meaning,
as it's pushing, the more distant mountains are advancing slower than the front hill.
Notice that if I push too far, it will literally go through layers and that's not really what we
want to do. It's kinda like in those old video games, if you kinda pushed through a wall you'd
see it, like, the back end of a mountain -- it would look all weird. We don't want to do that.
So if we need to, we want to move the camera. Now, this is where camera movement can get a
little tricky. We have our motion path here and we can actually add splines and curves to this
camera path by grabbing these handles. And this means, now, the camera is going to move
uniquely -- it's going to follow that curved path, which I kinda like - it kinda snakes around. And
notice how our sun is doing its thing back there. That's why we animated it first. You can always
animate after you've added a camera but it can be a little weird because your point of view changes.
So I always like animating when it's flat. Now, by moving straight
I'm hitting this kind of large green hump right here. I want the camera to avoid that, which means
I need my camera, then, at its last keyframe, to move over on the x-axis - to move to the side.
So I'm gonna take this and drag it to the left a little bit but I can start to see the the
bottom of the layer boundary of my mountains and I don't like that either. To fix this,
I could do one of two things: I can move the whole camera down a little bit on the y-axis,
or, I could move my actual mountain layer and readjust. Either work. It really just
depends on how attached you are to the current layout that you see in your active camera view.
We have to be careful though - and this is something that's hard about two-node
cameras - when I moved that last keyframe and I moved the x-value over, it kind of starts the
camera off in a weird position at the starting keyframe even though I never changed the data
here. Cameras are notoriously wiggly. If you start to adjust one thing, it changes it somewhere else.
And this is something that null objects are going to fix in the next tutorial. But for now,
we want to make sure, then, that we compensate and we drag the camera to a good starting point.
If you need to, you can adjust the Rotation a little bit: the x-axis rotates up and down,
the y-axis rotates side-to-side like a pan, and the z-axis is going to make you do a barrel roll.
>>PEPPY: Do a barrel roll!
>>ALAN: So I'm gonna adjust my pan, and move the y-rotation over a little bit
and move all my layers over just a hair -- and now that's realigned.
So now, when I come back to my position...
...I can start to see that mountain boundary,
so I am indeed going to grab it and actually bring it down.
So that looks pretty cool. And that's the basics of cameras. Cameras allow us to move
through - using keyframes - a 3D space. And all we're doing is we're traversing z-space. If I
change my "Top" view here to be "Right," we can actually see, then, the camera traversing through
the space and we can see the layers that it's hitting as it's going.
Now, if you ever wanted to change the settings of a camera, you can click on the camera in the
Timeline panel and come up to "Layer" and then select "Camera Settings." And then our Camera
Settings dialog box pops up and you can change anything about this. Now, we're not going to,
but just know that you can. If I hit "Cancel" and come down to my actual
camera and then toggle the layer down twice, we start to see a "Camera Options" toggle down
which also gives us most of the settings in our dialog box but as keyframeable options. So I can,
indeed, turn on "Depth of Field." If I do this, I can start to change
the focus distance. And notice how the camera, inside of my right view -- we start to see the
focus distance changing. So by decreasing this, I can change the focal plane of the camera's lens.
And then I can change the actual aperture. Now unlike most cameras, where the aperture
is measured in f-stops, ours is measured now in pixels. The smaller this is, the sharper
things are. The larger this is, the more blurry things become. So now, as the camera's moving...
...layers will come in and out of focus as it moves. And I can keyframe my focal
distance - effectively racking focus as I go. So here is my "Front Hill" -- I can keyframe my
focus distance here -- and I could rack focus over the course of 5 frames to...
...my "Mountain Back" and now, the lens literally racks focus over the course of five frames.
Depth of field goes a long way in making your 3D animations inside of After Effects
feel more cinematic because cameras have depth of field! As your camera gets closer to things,
you have to change the focal distance of the lens, otherwise things will go in and out of focus.
And so adding depth of field and playing with these different settings - the aperture, the
blur level, even the shape of the iris - these are all things that can make your cameras more robust.
Now we're not going to be delving into the depths of the camera settings in this class. Those you
that know cameras, these settings might be a bit more comfortable to change. Those you that don't,
feel free to play with these and develop a cool look. We won't be using things like depth
of field in this class, but if this is the only tutorial you watch with cameras in After Effects,
I want you to be aware of these settings. I'm going to go ahead and turn off my depth of field,
toggle up my camera, and now, I have a nice
moving scene through z-space, adding a lot of depth to my previously 2D layers.
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