Now you maybe fooled into thinking that animating the orientation will give you the 3D spin look that we might be looking for right now. So let us give this a quick try to see a problem here. Just go to reset everything back to upright, and then come down to the timeline and at zero seconds, if you are not there just hit the Home key.
Let us turn on a key frame for orientation. This will allow us to change all three axes at the same time. We do not need to apply three sets of key frames. Let us come out here to around two seconds just by scrubbing through the timeline, and then let us take one of the corner points and rotate ourselves on the Z axis.
Now as we start to rotate, you will see in the timeline an extra key frame has been added. But let us try something here, let us rotate through 1, let us go 2, maybe 3 even 4 rotations and maybe just add a little bit to that 4 and a bit, okay? So go all the way through that and let go.
Let us hit the home key now and hit the Space Bar just to have a look at the animation that was recorded. It looks nothing like you actually expect. Always seeing is the bit. We are not getting in the four rotations, we just seen the last few degrees, in fact in this case just around 69°. Now the reason for that is orientation actually takes the shortest route from A to B. No matter how many times you rotate it After Effects does not take that into account. You are only setting the default orientation of a layer, and that can only be between 0 and 360°, there is never more than one rotation. So if you are trying to spin this around on any axis, orientation is not going to do that for us.
So let us come back to the beginning of the timeline. Let us turn off the key frame for orientation because we know that is wrong, and this time let us choose the Z rotation value, because this is what we are trying to do, just animate it moving around the Z axis. Once again, let us put out to around two seconds and do exactly the same thing. Let us grab on the corner point, drag the cursor around, and as you are doing that have a look in the timeline.
The first thing that you will notice is no extra key frame has been added to the Z rotation property. Also, you will notice that orientation is highlighted and as you drag around, it is doing exactly the same thing. All it is doing now is specifying the default orientation of the layer. If we went back to home and hit the Space Bar, we get absolutely no motion. All we have done is set one angle. After Effects is not seeing any difference between key frames. So let us go back home and just undo that and again undo to reset that back so we have no orientation, and then come back to the beginning of the timeline again.
With the rotator still selected, come up here to the control bar across the top and you will see this option that says “set orientation for 3D layers” this is the default state of the rotation tool and that is why it is causing us so many problems. Now this is handy in some respects, but the most popular use of this is to specify the rotation of a layer. You are going to be rotating them more often than you are simply setting the orientation, so it is totally fine to set the default function of this to rotation, and now we should get the required results.
Once again let us turn on a key frame to Z rotation at zero seconds, move around two seconds down the timeline, grab our corner and start spinning and we can see in the timeline the rotation value is changing as we drag. The key frame has been added once we go over the top. We see the rotations are building up in total numbers. Go back home and hit the Space Bar. We have now got the correct animation.
If we just back up, give this a quick try on one more axis. Turn off the key frames for Z but maybe turn on the key frames for Y. We can actually animate this in a slightly different way. Let us come back out to around one second and instead of dragging on screen, you can also come down to the timeline and just rotate it as if you are doing a normal two dimensional one.
Let us say over the course of one se
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