From the course: Introduction to 3D in After Effects

Understanding camera lenses

From the course: Introduction to 3D in After Effects

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Understanding camera lenses

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- [Instructor] Now inside of After Effects, we know that there are two different types of cameras we can create. A two-node camera and a one-node camera. And those different types give you different animation possibilities, but both of those cameras use the same sets of lenses. And using different lenses will change the angle of view of the scene, and it does a number of different things within that view that we're going to analyze in this video. So to start, let's add a camera to this project. You'll notice I have many layers and they exist in 3D space, and I have lights in the scene. So just so we can see that these layers are spaced out, I'm going to click on the active camera dropdown and I'll change that custom view one, and here, you can see how spaced out the layers are. All right. I'll change that back to my active camera. Now I'm going to go up under the layer menu and choose new camera, and for this new camera, I'm going to choose a two-node camera and under the presets, I'll choose a 50 millimeter camera and I'll click okay. And once I've added that into the scene, you'll notice not much has changed. And that's because the 50 millimeter camera is designed to simulate the angle of view that people have using just their eyes. Now to more clearly see the angle of view and where the camera's positioned in the scene, let's go to the lower right dropdown here where it says one view and change it to two views horizontal. And here, you can see the 50 millimeter camera that I've got in the scene. Now I've already added two other cameras to my project. And to reveal those, I'll click on my shy guy here and you can see I have 200 millimeter and a 15 millimeter lens. So let's start by renaming our layer one camera. So select camera one and press enter and we'll call that 50 M-M, for 50 millimeter. All right, let's turn the visibility of 50 millimeter off and turn on the visibility of 200 millimeter. And if I hover over the left side of the composition panel and scroll out with my scroll wheel, notice I can't even see where that camera is positioned. It is so far off to the right because this is a telephoto zoom lens, and you can see the angle of view here is pretty straight, but what a telephoto lens does is compresses space, so it pulls all those layers that are wide apart and smashes them together into this one scene. So you can see, if I look in the active camera area, the angle of view of a 50 millimeter looks like this where there's a fair amount of depth and shadows, but under 200 millimeter, it's actually flattened everything out so they're a little more flat. Now let's look at 15 millimeter. I'll turn off the visibility for 200 and I'll turn on 15 and check this out. See how close the camera is to the scene and how wide the angle of view is? Well, when you have a wide angle lens, it actually adds space and actually creates a little bit of distortion, so if you want to create something that looks like it's imposing without necessarily having to move those elements, you might want to use a wide angle lens and position the camera really closely to that element like our logo right here. So when you're choosing lenses, a 50 millimeter lens simulates the view of the human eye. A telephoto lens like the 200 millimeter will compress space and make layers look like they're actually closer together. And a wide angle lens will accentuate the angle of view and can make closer-looking objects look more imposing, and also increase the amount of space in between the layers even though the layers really haven't moved at all.

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