From the course: Integrating Real 3D Objects in After Effects

Tracking the shot - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: Integrating Real 3D Objects in After Effects

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Tracking the shot

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- [Instructor] In this chapter we'll use Element 3D to integrate the 3D animated model that we've prepared in the previous chapter into this scene. So this is what we are hoping to achieve at the end but there are a few steps until we get there. Now this is a fun project and even if you don't have Element 3D on your system I urge you to stick with me because there's tons of stuff that you can learn from this workflow. Okay so let's close this final composition and start with the first stage, 01 lake monster. This is the mini lake or swamp, whatever you want to call it, but this is just a road cliff as it came from the camera. The camera here is panning to the left as we can see so first we need to track this shot before we'll bring in the 3D model. Because the motion is so linear, we can put it off very easily with a single point track. All right so what I'm going to do is make sure the clip is selected and then activate the tracker panel. If you can see it on screen you can call it from the window menu, here it is, but in my case I'm just going to click on track motion and this is going to open this clip in the layer panel which will allow me to take the tracker .1, we only going to track position in this case and just place it on an element that I want to track in this shot. So I'm just going to zoom in making sure that I can see the double arrow plus the black one over here and then I can click and drag the entire group. And by group I mean this middle cursor which is basically going to be on this white dot over here. This is where the tracking data is going to be calculated. The inner square represents the pixels that after effects is going to track and the outer one is the search area. So I'm just going to zoom out and I'm going to click on analyze forward, and watch this tracker go and this should work without any problem, because, this shot has enough details and so the movement is very simple. Now, I'm going to go to the layer menu, and under new, I'm going to create a new null object. I'm going to rename this null object, tracking data and then I'm going to go back to the tracker panel, click on edit target and make sure that the layer that I'm going to apply the tracking information the motion in this case, is the null object that I created. And this is going to be more clear in the next stages. Now I need to click on the apply button and I also need to approve that I want to apply both X and Y dimensions. And this is going to take me back to the composition panel, so we can go ahead and close the layer panel as well as minimize the tracker, and we can verify that this red null tracking there is actually in the center of the desired point, which is exactly what we're getting here. So this is how you can track a simple camera pan, using the good old trusty track motion feature inside after effects. And now that we have this out of the way, we can proceed and import the model, which we are going to do in the next movie.

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