Let us begin on our 3D cameras lesson by opening the project file 03 3D cameras from the project files folder on your hard drive and the project opens up with two compositions over here in the project pane. Now the first one let us open here is simply called creating cameras and that is what we are going to deal with.
Now this scene, you will see there are actually quite a few layers in this composition. If we scroll down we got actually about 17 in total, and if you want to scrub through the animation, you will see that we have a 3D system with parenting setup here to replicate an old fashioned solar system rig. Now each of these layers is like the ones that we have in the previous lesson where we have animated movie textures on each one of these.
So if you want to speed up the process of working through this 3D lesson, you may want to just come and check in your fast preview options that you have freeze layer contents turned on. Remember you just speed it up as you go along.
For now we are just going to leave it on OpenGL interactive and let us take a look at adding a camera to the scene. Now as before, we are only working with a current active camera down here on the comp window, and we can tell that there are no cameras in the scene because the camera orbit tool is unavailable. As soon as that becomes active, we know that we do have cameras in here.
Now the way to add a camera, there are a couple of ways to do it. The first way is to go up to the layer menu, go down to new as if we are going to add a text layer or a solid layer, and you will see down here the camera option. Now the keyboard shortcut for this is also fairly easy to remember, Ctrl+Alt+Shift or Command+Option+Shift on the Mac and the C key will bring up the new camera dialogue box.
Now there are a lot of settings in here that you can adjust things like the film size, angle of view, the zoom, the dept of the field, many different things that are probably very complicated at first sight. If you are a cinematographer then this is probably second hat to you. But for us we are going to work with a preset.
First thing that I will say is turn off enabled dept for field if you have that available. That is only set on this machine because I have used this setting before, but you probably have that turned off anyway. The first thing that we are going to do there instead of adjusting all of these settings is go ahead and use a preset camera size. Now if we come to this list, we have some different options down here. Now generally the smaller numbers suggest much shorter focal length cameras. It is very much like macro or wide angle lenses, and then if we come all the way down to the larger numbers, these are very much like zoom lenses.
And you are very familiar with those sorts of settings if you just have a standard digital camera, those do sort of relate to the lens settings. Now we are going to use a fairly middle of the range 50 millimeter preset. We are not going to change any of the settings at this point in time, just come down and click okay and a new camera will be created in the timeline.
You can see this coming as layer one and currently takes up the entire length of our timeline. Now on screen, nothing actually shifted. There may have been a slight shift but chances are you saw absolutely no difference. Well that is because the 50 millimeter camera is almost exactly the same settings as the default no camera that After Effects is using to display our 3D scene when we are on active. But now we do actually have a camera in here and we can start to work with it.
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