Matching position - After Effects Tutorial

- [Instructor] Now that we have the 3D data that was exported from After Effects, we can easily match the bonsai pine tree so it will appear in the correct place in our comp. So we no longer need this Bonsai Time Fixed composition. I'm going to select it here in the project panel and delete it, this is going to show us how the original is looking over here, and frankly, we don't need this version as well, so I'm going to select it here in the timeline and say goodbye to it by pressing Delete or Backspace. But we do want to edit both of those documents, and the way to edit a Cinema 4D document, in case you don't have access to the full version of Cinema 4D is to select it here in the project panel, this is why I've imported both of them, and then go to the Edit menu, and choose Edit Original. And this is going to launch the built-in copy of Cinema 4D Lite that ships with every version of After Effects Creative Cloud. Alright, so here we have this tree, this is set to the zero zero coordinate, so obviously this is not what we want, but I'm going to select it over here in the Object Manager, and I'm going to copy it by pressing Command or Control + C. Next, I'm going to switch back to After Effects, and then I'm going to select this version, remember this is the temporal composition that we've just exported, and we need to open it as well, so I'm going to go to the Edit menu, and choose Edit Original. And this is just going to show us the scene that we've exported from After Effects, so we have the 3D Camera Tracker, this is the After Effects camera that we've generated in the first movie, and two layers which serves as shadows, and we can use the 3D coordinates of them in order to match the tree over here. So, first, I'm going to select all of those guys, and just drag them outside of this now, and then we can just delete this now, just to make it more organized. And then I'm going to paste the tree that I've just copied from the other document, so pressing Command or Control + v, and I'm going to say, "Yes," in order to get all the materials. And we can see the exact scene that we've seen in AFter Effects. So the tree is just in the middle of this composition. However, while it is still selected, I can transfer its location to one of those planes. I'm going to use this one. In order to get quickly to the transfer tool, I'm going to hold down Shift, and press c, this is going to show us the commander here inside Cinema 4D, and I'm going to start to type the command that I want. In my case the words transfer so I don't need to type the entire word. The first four letters should suffice. And then I'm going to double click in order to select the transfer tool. Note that my tree's selected over here so I can just click on the desired location in order to place this tree and sync it with the same plane. Now I can switch off the visibility for both of those layers, keeping only the tree visible, I'm going to return to the move tool and now I can drag this and place it in the desired location. So I want this tree to be down in the scene over here. I'm also going to go to the coordinates of it, and scale it to 200%. Now that it is a little bit squished because it got all of the transfer properties, so this is almost like shift parenting inside AFter Effects. Any how, I'm going to type here two, and then I'm going to move to the next field, and I'm going to scale all xyz dimensions to 200%. Now in order to check what I'm doing I can go to the file menu, and just save this document, and Cinema 4D is going to give me this warning that the original document that was created from AFter Effects was saved with r 17, and I'm using a newer version. This is okay, I'm going to proceed by clicking yes. And then let's switch back to AFter Effects then take the bonsai pine fixed layer that we have over here. And I'm going to drag it to this composition, to see how this is working in concert with my other layers. So in this case we can see that the tree is almost in the correct place. Let's switch back to Cinema 4D. We can also use this option in order to show us the orthographic views. In this case I'm after the right view, so I'm going to click on it, and press h just in order to frame this object better over here. And then I'm going to pull it down and let's also use this one as a guide, so I can just make sure that it is in the desired location. Now every time that I'm doing this change, I need to update AFter Effects if I want to see how this is going to render on that side. So I need to save on top of this document by pressing Command or Control + s, and then when I'm going to return to AFter Effects we can see that it is going to update the tree, and its location. So I'm going to return once again, for the last time, to Cinema 4D. I'm going to select this tree and instead of just guessing these numbers, I'm going to give you my recommendations. So negative 700 for the x position, and then I'm going to tap to the y, and this one wants to be negative 5000 and for the z, I'm going to stick it where it is at this point just press Command +s, again, Control + s on the pc, return to AFter Effects to see how this is going to reflect, and then I'm just going to scrub to verify that indeed we have the tree in the desired location and it is not blocking any of our titles over here. So this is how you can use the camera tracker data that was collected in AFter Effects, then transfer it to a real 3D object inside Cinema 4D so everything is going to sync up nicely back in the AFter Effects comp.