After Effects Weekly

- [Eran] Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of After Effects Weekly. My name is Eran Stern, and this time I'm going to show you how to separate cards in 3D space parenting and as simple camera animation. All right, so escape out of this view, and I'm going to select one of these layers and go to the edit menu and choose Edit Original just to show you our starting point. So, this is an illustration that I've created based on an Adobe stock clip and I've separated the layers, so when we import them into After Effect we'll have access to each one of them individually. I also made sure to create a secondary art board for the layers that go outside of the boundaries of this main outboard. And this is important if you want to keep this information intact. All right, so we'll return back to After Effect, we're going to say goodbye to these comp and start from scratch. So I'll double-click to invoke the input dialogue go to where I save this file and I'll click open or import if you're working on the PC side. Over here because this is a multilayer illustrator file, I can choose how I want to import it. So I'm going to set it to composition and I'm going to maintain the layer-size dimensions. I'll click OK, wait for After Effects to process it and after few moments I should see the comp here inside the project pallet. Now I'm going to double-click on it and notice that in my case, this is a 25 frames per second comp, and the duration is set to five seconds. Their dimensions are being taken of course from the illustrator document, so full HD. And of course if you want you can change it later at any given time. All right, but for now, what I would like to do is make sure all the layers are selected and convert them to a 3D layer by clicking over here. I need to make sure that I can see the parent column which I'm missing in this case, so I'll right-click over here, and from the columns list, I'll select parent and link. You can also press the keyboard combination Shift + F4 to make it appear on screen. Now, what I would like to do is take each one of the layers and parent it to the layer below. So you need to do it one-by-one, there is no keyboard shortcut for it. At least not anything that I know of. But once you get these hierarchy to work, then you can select everything again and then press P, and this is going to reveal the position for all of these layers. And what I would like to do is make sure that I'm hovering on top of one of the Z position. Doesn't matter which one of the layers, but you need to click and start to scrub. So, in this case I'll start to scrub to the left and take their number here to negative 200, something like this and notice that because all the layers are selected and parented to each other, they're actually going to affect each other. So if I'll change from active camera to custom view one we can get a sense of what we are doing. And just so it will be a little bit more clearer, I'll select the unified camera tool, middle click on my mouse and this is going to activate the pan X and Y. And if I'm going to continue and scrub these value further you can see how this is going to work. So this is creating a very quick separation between those individual layers. All right, so I'll return back to the active camera and I'm going to collapse everything, go to the layer menu, and under new, I'll create a new camera. From the presets, I'll choose the 35 millimeter camera, and for the time being, I'm not going to enable depth of field. This is going to wait for us for next week episode. But I will make sure that the type of the camera is a two note camera which is going to make it a bit more easier to animate. Alright, I'll click OK over here, and what I would like to do now is just walk these camera to frame my scene. So again, I'll select the unified camera tool, this time I'll right-click on it, and this will allow me to track back the camera and just make sure that I'm seeing all of the layers something like this is going to be a nice ending point. Now, before I'm going to move further, I'll make sure to select all the layers and I'll hold down the command, this will be the Control key and click once on one of the parent peek weep icon and this is going to cancel, basically dismiss all the parenting for all the layers. So, here is a nice keyboard shortcut, which I'm sure you missed even though you were working with After Effects for many years. And if you knew this one, then I salute you. Anyhow, let's move on. I'm going to park my cursor over here at three seconds, and then I'll select the camera and press UU in sequence. And UU in sequence is actually going to show me what I've modified. Now I actually want to make sure that I can see both the point of interest as well as the position because these is the guys that I want to animate. So, I'll make sure to animate both of them by creating key frames over here and then I can press U again to just show these key frames. All right, I'll go to the beginning here, I'm still armed with my camera unified tool meaning that I can create this animation, something like this, I guess, is going to work nicely. And what I would like to do is get very closer to the moon here. So, I'm just going to pass through this guy and then once I'm at the correct position I'm going to once again hold the middle click of my mouse and just make sure that I see a nice image of the moon at least for this starting point. Now I need to of course move those elements and maybe change it so we won't go through the body of these guy. So, at the first frame I may need to just move this a little bit up something like this, I think we'll work better. All right, so now here at the more or less end of the animation, I'll scroll down, I'll select the background layer, I'll press S to see the scale, and I'm just going to scale it to fill the screen. And I'm also going to make sure to return to the selection tool and move couple of the layers. Now I'm trying to select these branches but I can't seem to do it, because the background is selected. So, one way to work is from the timeline here, or you can just right-click on the thing that you want to select and then from this menu, you can see whatever is under your mouse. And in this case, my interest is in branch tool. So I'm going to select it, and then just move it so we won't see the edge of this branch and then I'm going to do the same for these guy. And you know what? Maybe in this case where we are seeing the camera, I'm going to select it again, and this time just by using the left mouse click I'm going to look for a more interesting angle, something from below, let's say something like this. Just to make sure that we have a bit more of an interesting story to tell. All right, I'll move few have the layers here and then I'll return to the beginning, press Space Bar and check the animation. I think that we need to ease those key frames. So, I'll set up both of them, press F9 to do this thing and then I may want to maybe exaggerate just the title here. So let's see, I'm going to make sure that this is the place that it wants to end, I'll press P to show its position, I'll create the key frame for this guy and I may want it to come a little bit lower or later. So, I'm just going to take this guy and lower it on its y-axis, something like this. I'm guessing here, 'cause I can't really see what it does but I think this works quite nice. Then of course, I need to ease those two key frames. So selecting them pressing F9 to do so. And the last thing that I would like to do here see that when we are very close to those two layers, the magician, the wizard and the tittle, they may look a little bit pixelated due to the fact that we are so close to them and basically we are scaling them more than 100%. So, just for those two layers, I'm going to enable the continuously rasterized switch. Now I'm doing it just for these two and not for everything, because this is going to slow down the process. And I don't think that I need to do it to another layer maybe this one also needs the same attention. So, branch number two, I'm also going to enable continuously rasterize to this layer, and you know what? I'm also going to select the stars layer and change each blending mode to screen. And if we want, we can see maybe we also need to enable the continuously rasterize for this one, just to improve the composition. All right, now we can go to the beginning and we can even go full screen and create a preview to see what we've managed to achieve. So, there you have it. A simple way to quickly distribute layers in 3D space and create that multiplane animation. Join me next week when we'll make it even better and more beautiful with the help of some particles and few advanced camera options.