Now we are just going to twirl these layers because we do not need to see that position value for just a second, and let us jump back across to our active camera by hitting F12 on the Keyboard so we can view it from the front and just make sure that nothing is selected. Now when you look at the front of this scene, you are noticing these lines that look like they dissect the scene. Now your first reaction might be that these are guides, and they are not. They usually show up a different color depending on what is set on your preferences.
What we are looking at here are actually the edges of the two layers that we are looking at head on. Remember, if we just go back to our custom view, the camera is over here. So as we look down this axis we are actually seeing the horizontal edge of this flat layer and we are also seeing the vertical edge of this flat layer right here. Coming back to the active camera, this is exactly what is going on.
This reveals that After Effects does not do extrusion of layers. Every single layer even though you have turned on 3D, does essentially remain two dimensional. You can scale it on the X and Y axes, but at Z axis its dept does not actually exist. And this is the one and only thing I think I have on my wish list for 3D inside of After Effects at this point in time.
We can do everything else with lighting, shadows, dept for feel, transparency and produce some really wonderful effects which you will see as we go through this training, but the dept of a layer is not adjustable at this point in time. Now the reason that After Effects is showing us this edge because it is not going to render from this angle, because we are not able to see any dept, is purely to make it easy for you to select something.
We do not have to keep switching to a view to see a layer in order to be able to select it. We can simply do that here by clicking on it directly on the composition window. Now by clicking on this one you can see that I have highlighted one of the center lines. These are one of the white lines that cut through all of the axes in this scene, but you can also come down here in the timeline and click on any of the name in order to highlight those as well.
So let us choose X and Z here and we can see that the end point of this layer is in fact on the left and right hand side in the paste board. This other guide that appears to come out to the side here is actually the center line, the other white solid that continues along that axis as well. Now the reason these edges are colored the way they are is purely based on the label color here for the actual layer. So feel free to change those if you need them to stand out a bit more differently.
Now you are maybe asking why these edges are even visible not only for selection because they also do not render. The real reason behind it is, it gives you an idea of what is going in the paste board with regards to your 3D scene. If I just use this scroll wheel here to zoom down on the scene, you will see that these lines do extend way beyond the outside, but you can now also see the 3D angle here of the floor side that has been placed down below.
Likewise, if we change our view here and come over to the active camera and maybe go to the top view, we can now go down even further with the scroll wheel and we can see the actual size of the floor in relation to the rest of the scene, it is absolutely massive. And this just gives you a good idea of the overall scale of the 3D world that we are currently working with event though if we quickly jump back to fit to zoom, we can see that the rendered portion is purely this 800 pixels square composition here. So it is just again relating to the overall size of the elements that you put inside your 3D scene.
Now let us hit F10 at this point to go to the front view, and do not forget that this is one of the flat views that we have access to, and let us come up here to the top of the tool bar now and have a look at the camera orbit tools. They are not the same as rotation, this is actually to do with the way we are looking at our 3D scene and if we click and hold on that, you will actually see that we have a set of three tools. We have orbit camera and two track tools, one for tracking on X and the Y, the other on for tracking on the Z. Now this one I sometimes refer to as the zoom tracking tool and this one as the move tracking tool because it does appear that you are just moving on X and Y when you use this one, and on this one zooming into the scene or zooming further away from it.
Now all of them have the same keyboard shortcut of C. What that means is if we just select the first one, we can see its icon highlighted here in the tools pallet. If we hit the C key it will change us to the track X and Y, hit C key again and it all changes to the track Z. If we hit it once more we will go all the way back around to the orbit tool.
So remember those three Cs. They are very important because you will be using these constantly throughout the navigation of your 3D scene. This is definitely the fastest way to do so. Now I am leaving the first one currently selected. We are inside our front view. If you click and drag with that tool now and try to do something with it, you will notice that absolutely nothing changes and chances are, your computer will also beep at you to tell you that you made an error.
The reason is you can not use the orbit tool inside a flat axis in a metric view. There is simply no 3D. There is no perspective that can be adjusted. However, if we hit the C key and go to our X, Y track tool you will see that you can actually move around. Now we are not moving the 3D elements here, we are effectively moving the view and looking at this from a slightly different angle.
Now I am just going to undo, set that back where it was. If we now hit the C key again, we will go to the track --. If we drag left and right on that, we will be able to zoom in and out of the scene again looking from the same angle, but not seeing any form of perspective. Now if we take this just to the top view again just to have a look at the scene from a different angle, we encounter a similar problem to what we have at the beginning. When we are dragging on an axis, it does not quite drag quickly enough for us. I can come all the way down here, I hit the bottom of the screen and I run out. Well, just like we did earlier to solve that problem, if you add the shift key to using this tool, you will notice that you are able to drag down a lot further or drag in a lot quicker without having to move all the way across the screen.
And interestingly is we drag down on this, you can see the full extent there of the floor with the further the edge on the background. So I am just going to zoom back up to this because we do not need to go that far away at this point in time, but if we now switch across to our custom view by hitting F11 on the keyboard, we are now able to use all three camera tools inside this same view. So let us hit C now to go back to the very first one, camera orbit, click and drag anywhere inside the scene and now you are truly inside the world of 3D.
We are changing only the view angle here. There is no 3D camera in the scene as yet and we are certainly not rotating any objects. We are just purely adjusting our view so we can arrange and animate things correctly in 3D space. If we hit the C key again, that will change to X and Y, we will see that we are able to move the view around again but only on X and Y, and again if we hit the C key once more, go to the Z track tool, we can zoom in closer on the scene. We get a lot more extreme perspective there and also zoom out.
Again the shift key will add to that and make it more extreme but you probably, in a custom view and want to be a little bit more careful with dragging with the shift key. I will just zoom up very fast. You can actually invert the scene and fly around the other side without even realizing it.
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