In this episode, I’ll show you how to create a 3D animated photo effect.
I'm Mark Spencer from RippleTraining.com. Welcome to Motion Magic where you'll learn
visual effects and motion graphics in under 5 minutes.
Here I am in Motion with an empty project. In the File Browser, I have a layered Photoshop
document. I’ll drag it to the group in the Layers list, keep the mouse button held down
until the drop-down menu appears, and choose Import All Layers.
Then in the Canvas I’ll click on a blue bounding box handle, hold down the Shift and
Option keys, and drag to scale up the group of layers proportionally around the center
point.
In the Layers list, let’s turn off each of the layers. The Background layer is the
original photograph, which we don’t need, so I’ll leave it off. I created the other
layers by cutting them out from the original photo in an imaging editing application and
then I cloned in some extra pixels on the edges.
To create the animation, I first need to center the anchor points of each layer so
they'll scale correctly. So, from the View pop-up menu I’ll enable the Rulers, then drag out
vertical and horizontal guides to locate the center of the Canvas.
Then I’ll select a layer, right click in the Canvas to switch to the Anchor Point tool,
and move the anchor point to the center.
I’ll repeat that process for the other three layers.
Note that if snapping gets in the way, you can hold down the Command key to disable it.
When I’m done, I’ll use the View button to turn off the guides and the rulers.
Next, I’ll add a camera by clicking the camera icon in the Toolbar, and clicking Switch
to 3D.
Notice if I orbit the camera by dragging up here, that the layers are all on the same
plane. I’ll double click the orbit tool to reset the camera.
Now I can use the Heads Up Display to spread the layers out in Z-space and scale them up.
I’ll start with the Sky layer. One approach would be to move the sky back by dragging
right on the first Move tile, then dragging right on the Scale tile to scale it back up
to fill the frame. But there’s a better way; I’ll press Command-Z to undo those
last two changes.
Instead, I’ll hold the Command key down while dragging right on the first Move tile.
Adding the Command key scales the layer at the same time as it moves it back in Z-space
- so it looks like it’s hardly changing at all - but if I now orbit the camera, we
can see it’s pushed back in space.
I’ll reset the camera, then select both the Sky and Rock layers and Command-drag them
both back in Z-space. Then I'll add the Trees layer to the selection and move all three
layers back.
If I orbit the camera now, we see that the 4 layers are spread out in Z-space
- yet they appear unchanged when viewed from the original camera position. I’ll reset
the camera.
Finally, I’ll animate the camera by selecting it and using the Behaviors menu to select
Camera > Dolly.
I’ll move the playhead to the end of the project to view the final framing, then use
the Heads-Up-Display to adjust the dolly amount. The dolly reveals a gap in the layers so I’ll
select the Car on grass layer and move it up.
I’ll select the Camera, then click the Behaviors shortcut again and add the Camera > Sweep
behavior. The default End amount is too much so I’ll bring in down in the Heads-Up-Display.
Let’s play that back.
The camera moves forward and also pans, and because the layers are
spread out in Z-space, we get a nice subtle parallax effect that you would see in a real
3D scene.
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