From the course: Particular 4 for After Effects Essential Training

Animating with cameras

From the course: Particular 4 for After Effects Essential Training

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Animating with cameras

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- [Instructor] Particular does respect any cameras that you've added into your after effects composition. And as you animate the camera, the particles will move accordingly. In this project here, I have a particle system setup that's a grid and I want to animate a camera to fly through it. So I'll start by going up under the layer menu. And I need to make sure my composition panel is active here. And then I can go up under layer and add a new camera into the scene. Now I want this move to be relatively simple. So I'll leave it a one-node camera. And I'll use the 50 millimeter preset. Now when I click okay, the camera's added into the scene. And it hasn't really changed things much. But, if I press P to open up the position of the camera, I can go ahead and scrub on the X-axis. And here you can see I'm moving through the grid. If I want to move more quickly, I can hold down shift as I click and drag. And that will scrub much more quickly. So I'll create a quick little animation here. I'll zoom out. And I'll add a key frame for the position of the camera. And then I'll go to about two seconds in the timeline. I'll hold down shift. And click and drag and scrub 'til I'm in the middle of my particle field. That looks pretty good. Right there, okay. And I'll make sure my current time indicator is on that key frame here. And I want to animate the rotation of the particle system as a whole. So I'll go ahead and select the particle layer two. And I'll go to the effect controls. In here I want to go to the world transform. And I'll add a key frame for the Y rotation right now. Then I'll move down to about three seconds in the timeline. And I want to make sure that it rotates one full rotation in that second. So now if I scrub, you can see the particles are actually rotating around. So let's go back to the beginning and press the spacebar and here you could see, comes to the particles and then boom, they all kind of rotate around. Which is super fast. So you know what I'll do? I'll just stop playback here for a second. I'll select layer two and press the U key. And I'll extend the position of the right most key frame all the way down to the end of the timeline here. So now, even though it's a linear move, the camera's going to come in and it's going to stop. Boom! And then you can see, there we go, we've got all the other particles spinning around. So, whether you're actually animating the camera through the particles or manipulating the particles in the world transform area, so they spin around the camera. As you can see, interacting between the 3D environment within particular and the 3D environment within after effects is a pretty natural, straightforward process.

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