Now to animate our three D. Scene you noticed earlier that the camera tool has transformed properties so we can animate these different properties. But there's a better way in an easier way to animate the camera and that's through a null object. Let me show you though just to explain why we're doing this. So I'm just going to create a quick new composition. Going to add some text. Hello? Let me also add a background. Perfect. We'll add our camera. Okay, So let's make sure that our hello text is three D. Perfect. So if I bring up our camera and say I want to just do sort of a position animation of the camera where we're panning across this. Hello text. Well you would think that if I just take the X axis position of the camera and drag it to the left or right we would just get that sort of subtle pan. But you'll notice that when I do that it doesn't look like it's panning, it does this sort of weird sort of rotation and it's not a direct sort of pan across. We want to use a null object. ...

So if we go up to layer new null object, just like we did before with the three D. Animated text. Now let's parent the camera to the null object and turn three D. on for the null object. Now if we bring up the position for the no object you can see that if I adjust the position the X axis position we are. Now actually just panning across there's other sort of intricacies for why we use null objects for cameras. But basically it's just because it's easier to animate and it's just a little bit more intuitive than using the properties within your camera itself. Plus I like being able to sort of undo things quickly so if I want to go back I can always just delete arnold object and get back to where we're started. So in our space scene let me add a null object layer, New no object. I'll rename this camera control And then three D enable it and parent the camera to the camera control. So remember what we did before. So with the camera, if I just do a position animation, it's not really panning, it's kind of rotating which might work well for some animations. But if I just want to do sort of a pan across, I want to use our camera control, no object. See so this is a pan across and you can see this is in three D. Space. Now, you know, the objects sort of are layered and then depending on where the camera is, you see the different objects behind Pretty cool, you can create some cool animations that way but we want this sort of zoom in and zoom out effect. So what we're going to do is take the Z space and really Dragon actually let's set a key frame for this point right here and we'll move that to the very end and then we'll zoom in. So taking the last Z. Space, I'm holding the shift button down to speed up are zooming until right about there in front of the sun, something like this. So if I play through this, we get this kind of cool space scene and maybe what we want to do is add some animation to the asteroid. Maybe we won't, we want the asteroid coming across the frame. So let's take our asteroid, let's add some rotation first. And this is just gonna be Z rotation because X rotation will look kind of funny since it's like a flat object, maybe a little subtle X. Or Y rotation. But with Z rotation let's just set it right there, put that at the start and then we'll rotate it counterclockwise, something like that. Put that at the very end, just so it's rotating throughout the whole thing. And we want this asteroid flying across the frame so bringing up the position, let's actually take art X axis position, drag it to the right and now let's go so our cameras moving and maybe we can see, okay, so at this point it's flying in and then at this point we want to cross the sun already so we will drag to the left and we're gonna drag it even further because we're going to drag this key frame to the right all the way so we want to actually make it even further, something like that. So now when we drag the key frame all the way to the right, what happens is it goes across the frame spinning, it's still spinning, still moving because we don't want it to just stop in the middle of space while the camera is moving backwards. Now let's play through this, that's looking pretty cool. The one thing that I notice is that the moon, it takes a while for it to sort of come up after the asteroid flies across so I might want to move that a little bit backwards in space. So what I can do is just bring up the position. So around here we can take our moon set the Z. space to around 7000 or so compared to what it was on the 5000. So now when we play it out, the moon comes a little bit earlier on. The other reason I like using a null object is if we want to add another subtle motion to the camera using the position. Well if we do that with the Noel object now we would have to redo all of these key frames because say I wanted to sort of rotate a little bit in between or move left to right. If I do that with the camera control. What happens is it just creates another key frame right here, which it sort of changes the whole animation, it goes to this key frame, then it goes to this key frame rather than having sort of a subtle camera turn or something like that throughout the whole composition. So now I can go under my camera tool and then I can change the position of it. So say we want to start here and move that to the start of our composition. But then throughout we want it to rotate to the right just a little bit, something like that. So now let's move that key frame to the end. So now it's sort of rotating away. If we want to go to an extreme what we can do is rotate until the sun is behind the moon. Which is actually pretty cool with that. You can kind of tell that these layers are more of just like these flat later layers. They're not really three D. Layers especially with the Earth at the end. To combat that, what we could do is just rotate the Earth so bring up the y rotation and rotate backwards just a little bit so that it looks flat to the camera. Now we have our basic animation and the next lesson I'll show you how to easily create a star field that's going to go behind all of these other layers

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Animating Our 3D Scene

Animating Our 3D Scene

Lesson Info

55. Animating Our 3D Scene

Lessons

Class Updates & My Favorite CC 2020 Updates

Understand the After Effects Workspace

Starting a New Composition

CC 2018 Update - Starting a New Composition from Footage

Adding Media to Your Project and the Timeline

Using the Basic After Effects Tools

Create a Perfect Circle, Alignment, and Shape Colors

Working in the Timeline

Layer Properties

Quiz: After Effects Basics

Animating in After Effects

Position, Scale, and Rotation Animations

Tips to Make Your Animations Look More Nautral

Using the Graph Editor

Challenge - Bouncing Ball

Solution - Bouncing Ball

Quiz: Animating with Keyframes

Working with Solid Layers and the Ken Burns Effects

Working with Shape Layers, Strokes, and Paths

Adding Layer Styles like Drop Shadow, Bevel, and Gradients

Shape Effects - Trim Path Animations, Wiggle, and Zig Zag

Quiz: Shapes and Solid Layers

Track Matte Animations - Make Layers Appear and Disappear

Using Pre-Compositions to Group Layers

Easily Reverse Complicated Animations

Playing with Time

Blend Modes

Stabilize Shaky Footage

CC 2018 Update - Previewing and Favoriting Fonts

CC 2019 Update - Responsive Design Time

CC 2019 Content Aware Fill

CC 2019 Create Motion Graphic Templates

Quiz: Important After Effects Skills

Intro to Motion Graphics Projects

Clean Lower Third

Logo Reveal Animation Bumper

Colorful Transition

Text with Mask Path Animation

Text Bubble Animation

Weather App 1

Weather App 2

Weather App 3

Quiz: Motion Graphics Projects

Flat Animation Challenge

Phil Designs his Flat Animation Scene

Animating Fireworks with the Repeater Effect

Removing Green Screen Background

Adding a Background that Matches the Foreground

Adding Motion to a Still Image with the Puppet Tool

Adding Movement with the Ripple Effect

Quiz: Flat Animation Challenge

Intro to 3D

Swinging 3D Text Animation

Build Out Your 3D Composition

Animating Our 3D Scene

Create Stars in After Effects

Quiz: Green Screen (Chromakeying)

Using the Rotoscope Tool

Cleaning Up Your Edges

Finishing Our Rotobrush Animation

Quiz: 3D Animations and the Camera Tool

Easy Screen Replacement with Masks

Replacing a Screen Version 2

Screen Replacement with Mocha

CC 2019 Update - Native Mocha AE Plugin

Quiz: Rotoscoping

Using the Puppet Pin Tool

Animating Your Puppet Pins

Animated Blinking Eyes

Adding Perspective with Animated Clouds

CC 2018 Update - Advanced Puppet Pin Tool

Quiz: Screen Replacements

Applying Text Animation Presets

Create a Page Turn Effect with CC Page Turn