Hey, everyone, welcome back to Adobe's Learn From the Pros tutorial series.
My name is Boone.
In this five part tutorial series, I'm
showing you how to create a cool map animation inside of Adobe After Effects.
In the first episode, we talked about
how to animate the path, as well as some markers.
In the second episode, we set everything up in 3D space.
In the third episode, I showed you how to work with lights.
In this fourth installment in the series, we're going to be
animating our 3D camera, as well as adding some depth of field,
which is really fun.
OK, things are starting to get
a little busy here in my project, a little system intensive,
so I'm going to change my resolution
down to one third so that things are a little bit easier to work with.
As I talked about before, I'm going to harness the power of draft 3D
and that's going to get rid
of those shadows temporarily, but it's going to allow us to work in real time.
So now I want to animate my camera.
This isn't the best layout to do that.
So I'm going to go over here
and I'm going to switch this to two views on the right.
I want to have my active camera view
and then on the left, I'm going to use this left view.
So in the sample animation, you can see that our animation
consists of this camera just flying over our map.
And I want this to fly perfectly parallel with our map because our map is flat
on the ground plane here and we're just going to move this
straight across parallel.
If I grab the camera,
we have a bit of a problem and it has to do with our position here.
Check out our Z. We want to move this in Z space.
However, if I grab this and I try to move it, it's simply moving it
closer to our map or further away.
And I don't want it to do that. I want it to fly perfectly parallel.
So this has to do with the axis mode.
So up here you can see it's currently set in local axis mode.
However, I can switch it to world axis mode,
so local access mode is essentially relative to the layer.
So here you can see the camera is facing this way because I change the angle.
Well, the local axis mode is going to reflect that change of rotation.
If I want to show it in world mode, simply click this way.
And now it's relative to the world.
And since I rotated my map perfectly at 90 degrees in relation
to the world, it's now perfectly parallel to this layer in world mode.
So now with this world mode axis selected,
I can now move the position here and fly this perfectly over the map.
And this is once again why I rigged it this way.
Now you can grab the camera layer, click P for position, and I'm going to add a key
frame here and just we're going to select the starting position.
So it's going to start somewhere over here.
I'll move this keyframe to the beginning and now grab the position
and we want to end somewhere over here.
And actually, this is animating way too fast.
So I'm going to use the whole 15 seconds here.
So we're going to bring the key frame to the end here.
But I also need to go and grab that key frame of my path that I animated before,
and I'm going to extend this out as well to maybe like ten seconds.
And naturally, I'll need to retime these map markers as well.
I'll do that really quickly.
I want to add a little bit more movement
here, so I'm going to actually rotate the map ever so slightly.
So I'm going to go over to the map layer here and I'm going to hit R for rotation.
It'll bring up the orientation as well, bring the playhead back to the beginning.
And I've got this nice curve here
and I won't, you know, show just ever so subtle movement here.
So if I animate this on the z axis, it's
going to allow me to get some movement here.
So I'm going to go ahead and add a key frame here.
And then maybe I can have it spinning in this direction.
And we just do a little bit of a change here, and we'll fullscreen
this and let me remind you this is one third resolution here.
I'm looking at this in draft, but the animation is looking good.
Once again, this is allowing me to edit in real time
without my computer catching on fire and me having
to throw it out the window or something.
So if I fullscreen this, you can see everything is in sharp focus,
even on the corners here.
We don't have much depth to it, so I want to have like
a little focal plane here of of shallow depth of field look.
So what it'll look like is that it will slowly fade out into a blur, as right
now, it's like slowly fading out into like a darker area,
which makes it looks pretty cool and dynamic.
I also want it slowly fading or transitioning
into like more blur, and this is pretty simple to achieve.
You just have to know what you're doing some of the double click on camera
and then over here make sure preview selected
and I can just enable depth of field and we're going to click OK.
And now if I fullscreen this, everything's looking blurry.
But it looks like we have some stuff in focus over here,
so we need to move the focal plane or the focus distance.
So the best way to do this is to switch back to two views.
You're going to be able to see what's going on over here in left view.
So if I double click camera again, I'm going to move my dialog box over here.
Right now, this little checkbox here says Lock to Zoom.
We want to deselect that.
And now, as I start to move the focus distance back,
you're going to see something moving over here.
This is your focal plane.
So all I need to do now is move this back all the way
so that it's intersecting right here with this layer.
If you hold shift, it'll move faster.
And I'm going to move this look over here.
Now we have some depth of field.
It's starting to fade out a little bit here.
And you can actually open this up
and see the same parameters in the camera options over here.
And just as with all cameras, if you bring down the F stop, you know,
if you bring this to a lower number like, say, two, it's
going to make your depth of field more shallow.
That might be a little too much.
And I'm going to
go ahead and pull that focal distance back even a little bit further.
And here it, once again, here it is.
OK, so I pretty much have a finished animation here that looks great.
And the next video I'm going to show you how to work at the Cinema 4D render
and how we can achieve a totally different look with extruded shapes.