From the course: Motion Control 3D: Bringing Photos to Life in Three Dimensions with After Effects and Photoshop CC (2019)

Understanding parallax

From the course: Motion Control 3D: Bringing Photos to Life in Three Dimensions with After Effects and Photoshop CC (2019)

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Understanding parallax

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Let's take a quick look at the parallax effect in action. Don't worry, we'll break all of these techniques down much more in-depth in just a moment. But I'd like to give you a high-level overview of how things work. I've opened up an After Effects project, and it already has the pieces imported. One of the things we need to do is create our 3D environment. So to do that, I'm going to click the switch here that enables each layer to work in three dimensions. If we twirl this down and we take a look at the Transform tools, you'll notice that when we click this, it changes the controls. Notice that the z-axis is added to the x and the y. This'll give us some flexibility for positioning things. Additionally, I need to add a camera. So I'll do this by choosing Layer, New, Camera. From the Preset list here, you'll find many different cameras to pick from. Now, in this case, I don't know the metadata from the image because this is a scanned photograph. But I can assume looking at it that it's a relatively wide field of view, but I don't see an distortion or curvature. So I'm going to assume that it is a 35 millimeter lens. And click Return. This adds the 3D camera. You'll notice that we're currently looking through the Active Camera. It's labeled here. What I want to do is choose to see two views. So I'll place these next to each other. Here's the Active Camera, and on the left is another view. From the popup list, I'll select Custom View 1, which let's me see the space. Now, what we're going to do is start to spread these layers apart. Let's zoom out a little bit so it's easier to see. And we'll take the trees, and I'll press P for position. Now, I'll adjust the z-axis. If I hold down the Shift key, this scales and moves a bit faster. Notice I push the trees further away, but they're much smaller. So now I'll press the S key for scale and adjust the scale of the image. Again, holding down the Shift key can speed that up. And we'll scale it until it's about the original size. Now, looking through the Active Camera, it looks the same. Next, let's take the columns, and I'll press P for position and move those backwards a bit, not at as far back as the trees, but a little bit further back. Then S for scale, and I'll scale this until it matches the original apparent dimensions. Now, when we look through the 3D camera, the photograph really looks like it did when it started. But over here in 3D space, I see that we have a virtual environment. If it's helpful, you can also change the color of these layers. I sometimes find that assigning a unique color makes it a little bit easier to better understand them. So in this case, we have green Trees, a sandstone Column, and a light pink Statue. Makes it a little bit easier for me to understand. This is particularly useful as you might change your view here. For example, if I view this from the top and zoom out a little bit, I now have a better understanding of how these layers are arranged. For example, I see that there's not much distance between statue and the column and a great distance here between the trees. So, let's push that column just a little further back like so and then adjust its scale again. Sometimes, by switching the view, you can get a better idea of the relationship between the two layers. Now, I'll switch this back to Custom View 1. What I like about Custom View 1 is it's really easy to see things. Notice our camera and all of our objects. Now, what happens is that we'll see movement. Let's duplicate this composition for a moment by pressing Command + D, and I'll open it up. Now, under the Composition Settings, I'm just going to switch this to a low-quality deliverable. In this case, we'll go with HDTV 720. This is one of those down-converted photos that's lower quality to make it easier to work with and download. Now, what I can do is adjust the camera using Camera Options and Transform. Let's move the camera's position inward. I'll just click on the camera itself, grab its z-axis and push. And now I can grab the y-axis and pull up or down. Notice how it changes. Let's adjust its point of interest, and it starts to pan. And additionally, we can zoom in a little bit to fill the frame. So now what I want to do is move the camera. Watch, by adding the stopwatch, it begins to key frame. So we can pull the camera to the base of the statue and take its point of interest for the y-axis here and tilt up or down. And you see the camera physically move. Now, let's go to the five-second mark, grab the y-axis for the camera, and drag. And you see the camera moves up, except I also want it to move a little to the side. So I'll grab the x-axis and pull. And now, we could tweak the point of interest. Notice the camera itself moves. If I drag through here and let's make this a little bit bigger by zooming in, you'll notice that the virtual camera, the little box there is moving through the scene. I could hold down the Spacebar here to pan around, and we clearly see the movement, which is pretty cool. If we click on the motion path here, I can even see the path. And using a Pen Tool, I can actually convert these vertexes here to create a nice curved line for the path. And notice how it creates a nice arcing camera. So now as we drag, you see the camera moving through the scene. There we go. Now, there's a little bit of overlap here, a black hole. So we'll just tweak the Zoom of the camera to push in a little bit more. There we go. Now, watch what happens. The camera moves through the scene, and as it does so, because there's depth into the different layers, watch how there's a relationship. Let's switch to just one view for a moment, and we'll zoom this to fit. Pay close attention to the back pillar as the camera moves. You'll notice that it appears to move behind the object. And notice as the camera moves through the scene, how the relationship between the pillar, the vegetation, and everything else appears to change. This is parallax, and because there's a distance in depth, different objects at different depths appear to move with a real-world relationship. Parallax, after all, can be thought of as the distance between objects. So even though the sun is moving incredibly fast when you're driving down the road, it seems to be really far away and doesn't move. Or that mountain that's far away, seems to take forever to get closer, yet the car that just sped past you seems to be moving substantially faster. Well, the relative depth or distance to the camera greatly affects our perception of speed and size, and this is where parallax can be useful as an animation technique.

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