Today we started looking at the 3D elements of After Effects. Firstly we animated some simple solids in a 3D space. We did this by enabling the 3D button on the layer and animating the keyframes of the Z-axis position parameter.
We then used 2D solids to create a cube. We did this by placing the anchor point of each solid at the top left corner or each shape. We then worked out the position of each side and moved then there using the 3D position parameter. Once they were places, we rotated them to fold around the shape of a cube.
We then created a null object and attched all the sides together to group the cube making it easy to animate the cube as one object.
After that, we pre-composed the cube into its own compostion, and created an animation of the cubes falling to produce a pyramid. To make the animation more fluid and organic we added “ease in” and “ease out” functions to the keyframes of the cubes falling.
We then looked at controlling camera around the 3D space in after effects. We created a camera and key framed the “point of interest” to look around the 3D cubes we had made previously. We also added key frames to the “zoom” function in the camera options dialogue.
We then animated the camera to move along a path created by placing keyframes on the camera’s postion. We experimented with the “wiggle” tool to create a random shake as the cubes land. We added this shake by attaching a Null object to the camera’s position and animating that. We then added another null, with a more severe wiggle effect causing the camera to shake as it moved along its path.
Next, added 2 spot lights to the scene. We had to postion them so that the shaddows were cast on the floor as well as light up the scene. We created a floor using a solid shape, and also changed the background colour to very dark blue.
We took the wiggle off the camera movement so it didn’t confuse the viewer
