Okay I am starting out this welcome to 3D lesson by having opened a similarly named project “Welcome to 3D” from the project files on the hard drive, and you will see that it opens with this composition number 1 active. This is called navigation.
Now 3D inside of After Effects is not something we set up as part of the main composition. We do it simply layer by layer. Every composition and layer is two dimensional until we turn on 3D as when we need it, with very easy to do this down in the timeline. It is all based underneath this column here which activates the 3D switch for one layer at a time. Now if we just come to the first layer for instances, and click here to turn this layer into 3D, the first thing you might notice is that absolutely nothing changes.
It is not like all of a sudden we have different camera angles, and lights, and shadows. Nothing has shifted, all we have done is simply given this layer a 3D representation. Now in order to see that a bit more clearly, let us have a look at the result in the timeline.
Let us come back and just turn off the icon for once second, select the word compass and let us hit P for position and also Shift and R on the keyboard to give us the rotation value as well. Now you will be familiar with these by now. The position values are broken down into the X and the Y axes as normal, just two values and the rotation is constrained only to one axis, which is essentially the Z axis because we are rotating around the center of our object.
But that does not mean it is 3D. This is purely one dimensional and two dimensional. However, if you go back and turn on the 3D icon for that one layer, you will notice that all of a sudden we have a much larger selection of options. The position value for instance has now given us three different dimensions. And if you have guessed that this one is the Z, you are exactly right. We now have X, Y, and Z values for position, but we also have a total of six options here for the rotation.
Now this was one only a second ago, we have now get X, Y and Z for the orientation of a layer and also separate X, Y and Z rotation channels. Now we will come back to that in a second, just have a quick look below these options and you will see a separate category called material options. Just go ahead and twirl that open.
You will see there are items in here such as the ability to cast shadows and adjust the way that a layer reacts with light. We are going on to those a little bit later on, but I just wanted to point those out because you will notice they became active again only when the layer was turned into a 3D layer.
So twirl this one up and we will focus currently on position and orientation for just a second. Now, before we start animating, there is one thing that may trip you up if you are using 3D for the first time. If we ever have to use any of the switches here in the timeline such as motion blur, or even frame blending, or even the shine layer we always have to come up here to the top of the timeline and turn on those effects for the composition itself, in order to be able to preview them in here. Well, if we just turn those back off and have a look on the left hand side, you will see two icons. The right hand one of which looks very three dimensional and this is the pitfall. You may think that this one is required to be turn on in order to preview the 3D. Well again we have turned it on and absolutely nothing has happened on screen.
This is not the button that turns on the preview of 3D. What it actually does is it activates something called draft 3D mode which will speed up our 3D work in After Effects once we have shadows, and lights, a transparency, and whole 3D scenes going on. That process can actually slow down the speed of your computer when you are interacting and setting up the animation, so these is a very quick turn on and turn off button purely for those intensive rendering options.
It does not affect your ability to construct and move around a 3D scene like what we are going to do now. So do not be fooled into thinking that button has to be t
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