How to Change the View Layouts and Options in Adobe After Effects 7 Video

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How to Change the View Layouts and Options in Adobe After Effects 7

When it comes to constructing and laying out elements in 3D, it is going to be a bit of a pain to keep jumping back and forth say from the active camera to see what the actual result are going to look like. Maybe to the front view to check things are aligning, and then maybe back to custom view so we can access the camera tool, just hit the C key twice there, come around and look at it again from a different angle. So this is where the views come in handy. We did look at this briefly back in the Essential series if you worked your way through that, but down here at the bottom of the composition window, we are currently seeing only one view of our 3D file. Well if we look under there, we have access to different options such as two views of the same scene, four views of the same scene and then different ways of laying those out. So my favorite in here is actually to use the four views. This gives me almost everything I need to construct a 3D scene correctly and once you have chosen that, just hit the tilda key as your cursor hovers anywhere in here just to go full screen and it makes it a bit easier to see what is going on. Now currently the upper right view is selected. You can see these yellow highlights on the corner of that view. You click in any of the others you will see that that selection does automatically change. If we select the upper left here, we can check down at the bottom that we are looking currently at the front view. Well let us hit F11 and set that to our custom view. We can even use the keyboard shortcuts in here as long as the right pane is selected. If we come down to the bottom left, I maybe want that to be the front view so let us hit F10 to do that. Let us come over here to the lower right hand one and maybe set that to the left. There is not really any harm to use the right just sometimes it is confusing because everything looks backwards. So if you do set it to left, it will at least at this point in time, set everything to read it correctly just so we can understand the process. Now let us come up here to the upper right hand one and select that and hit F12 to put us back to our active camera. So we have got four incredibly handy views here to look at our object from any angle. This is the finished rendering view. Remember the active camera. We have got two acts in the metric views which give us front and side, and also, if we come over here to our custom view and for some reason the tool is dimmed out. You may just need to switch the view and come back to it again. So you could always hit F10 then F11 to come back to custom view and we hit the C key, we now have the camera orbit tool that will allow us to move around this view only. Sometimes, After Effects just needs a quick nudge. So this is giving us access to all of the views of our file that we would need to construct and layout the elements in 3D space. if you click back to the upper right hand view here, the main reason that we set this one to the active camera is that if you come down to the bottom of the composition window and decide now that you are ready to switch back to one view, it only uses the upper right hand one as the view that it then snaps back to. If our upper right was set to front, that is what you would see once you disable the four views. Now just because we have turned them off it does not mean the After Effects resets them all. If we come back to here and choose four views again, you will see that we have exactly the same layout. Now this is very handy because it gives us the ability to use different viewers as well, it maybe that you do want one viewer, which is set to one view as well as this one, which is set to the current four views. Well here is an easy way to do it. Let us set this one back to just one view only. Again, that puts us back to active camera, but let us come up here to the viewer menu in the upper left hand side of the screen, and gives ourselves a new composition viewer. Now if you have never used this before, this gives us another tab which is simply showing us the same composition in the same view. However, if we have other compositions open, those can be chosen here as well. So this viewer could show us the navigation comp. The one here in the background could continue to show us our grids composition. But the reason we have opened this one is if we come down to the bottom now and go back and choose our four views, you see they are still set exactly the same way. Let us have another one by coming up to the top, again choosing new comp viewer and this time, let us use four views again but a slightly different layout. This one I use a lot as well, four views bottom. This actually gives us a larger preview at the top with our active camera, but then evenly sized views down her of the previous three that we had selected the custom, the front and the left hand side. Now you can switch back and forth between these tabs now just by clicking them here at the top which now gives us very quick and easy access to those different layouts without having to reset them down here at the bottom, but as always there are keyboard shortcuts that will make this even faster. If you hold down the Alt and the Shift key or the Option and Shift on the Mac and use the coma and period keys, this will allow you to very quickly jump back and forth between those viewers. So this makes the work even easier. Another thing I will point out whilst we are in this full screen mode, remember we have hit the tilda key to get to this point. If you hold down the Ctrl key or the Command key on the Mac and hit the back slash, not the forward slash but the back slash key, that will actually send us in to true full screen mode. It gets rid of all the tools and pallets at the top and just shows us the results of our composition scaled up to 100% size if that is what is set in the comp viewer. Hitting the same key will bring everything back in and then now we will just quickly tidy things up so we can take a look at our next composition. Let us come over here to the other two viewers and just close them down. We are not going to close the project, it simply closes the viewers down that sets us back to our first one which is currently at one view, but do remember, you can come down here and choose anyone of those other layouts at anytime.

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When it comes to constructing and laying out elements in 3D, it is going to be a bit of a pain to keep jumping back and forth say from the active camera to see what the actual result are going to look like. Maybe to the front view to check things are aligning, and then maybe back to custom view so we can access the camera tool, just hit the C key twice there, come around and look at it again from a different angle.

So this is where the views come in handy. We did look at this briefly back in the Essential series if you worked your way through that, but down here at the bottom of the composition window, we are currently seeing only one view of our 3D file. Well if we look under there, we have access to different options such as two views of the same scene, four views of the same scene and then different ways of laying those out.

So my favorite in here is actually to use the four views. This gives me almost everything I need to construct a 3D scene correctly and once you have chosen that, just hit the tilda key as your cursor hovers anywhere in here just to go full screen and it makes it a bit easier to see what is going on. Now currently the upper right view is selected. You can see these yellow highlights on the corner of that view. You click in any of the others you will see that that selection does automatically change.

If we select the upper left here, we can check down at the bottom that we are looking currently at the front view. Well let us hit F11 and set that to our custom view. We can even use the keyboard shortcuts in here as long as the right pane is selected. If we come down to the bottom left, I maybe want that to be the front view so let us hit F10 to do that. Let us come over here to the lower right hand one and maybe set that to the left. There is not really any harm to use the right just sometimes it is confusing because everything looks backwards. So if you do set it to left, it will at least at this point in time, set everything to read it correctly just so we can understand the process.

Now let us come up here to the upper right hand one and select that and hit F12 to put us back to our active camera. So we have got four incredibly handy views here to look at our object from any angle. This is the finished rendering view. Remember the active camera. We have got two acts in the metric views which give us front and side, and also, if we come over here to our custom view and for some reason the tool is dimmed out. You may just need to switch the view and come back to it again. So you could always hit F10 then F11 to come back to custom view and we hit the C key, we now have the camera orbit tool that will allow us to move around this view only.

Sometimes, After Effects just needs a quick nudge. So this is giving us access to all of the views of our file that we would need to construct and layout the elements in 3D space. if you click back to the upper right hand view here, the main reason that we set this one to the active camera is that if you come down to the bottom of the composition window and decide now that you are ready to switch back to one view, it only uses the upper right hand one as the view that it then snaps back to.

If our upper right was set to front, that is what you would see once you disable the four views. Now just because we have turned them off it does not mean the After Effects resets them all. If we come back to here and choose four views again, you will see that we have exactly the same layout.

Now this is very handy because it gives us the ability to use different viewers as well, it maybe that you do want one viewer, which is set to one view as well as this one, which is set to the current four views. Well here is an easy way to do it. Let us set this one back to just one view only. Again, that puts us back to active camera, but let us come up here to the viewer menu in the upper left hand side of the screen, and gives ourselves a new composition viewer. Now if you have never used this before, this gives us another tab which is simply showing us the same composition in the same view. However, if we have other compositions open, those can be chosen here as well.

So this viewer could show us the navigation comp. The one here in the background could continue to show us our grids composition. But the reason we have opened this one is if we come down to the bottom now and go back and choose our four views, you see they are still set exactly the same way. Let us have another one by coming up to the top, again choosing new comp viewer and this time, let us use four views again but a slightly different layout. This one I use a lot as well, four views bottom.

This actually gives us a larger preview at the top with our active camera, but then evenly sized views down her of the previous three that we had selected the custom, the front and the left hand side. Now you can switch back and forth between these tabs now just by clicking them here at the top which now gives us very quick and easy access to those different layouts without having to reset them down here at the bottom, but as always there are keyboard shortcuts that will make this even faster.

If you hold down the Alt and the Shift key or the Option and Shift on the Mac and use the coma and period keys, this will allow you to very quickly jump back and forth between those viewers. So this makes the work even easier. Another thing I will point out whilst we are in this full screen mode, remember we have hit the tilda key to get to this point. If you hold down the Ctrl key or the Command key on the Mac and hit the back slash, not the forward slash but the back slash key, that will actually send us in to true full screen mode. It gets rid of all the tools and pallets at the top and just shows us the results of our composition scaled up to 100% size if that is what is set in the comp viewer.

Hitting the same key will bring everything back in and then now we will just quickly tidy things up so we can take a look at our next composition. Let us come over here to the other two viewers and just close them down. We are not going to close the project, it simply closes the viewers down that sets us back to our first one which is currently at one view, but do remember, you can come down here and choose anyone of those other layouts at anytime.

Transcription by: Scribe4you Transcription Services