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

The technique explained

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

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The technique explained

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So what exactly is Motion Control 3D? Well, it's a combination of techniques that take advantage of some of the great tools in Photoshop and After Effects. Essentially, it starts by selecting a photograph and this photograph will ideally have some depth to it, different planes or different areas of action. It could be a historical image or a modern image. It doesn't matter. The technique works equally as well. Once we have this, we're going to go into Adobe Photoshop and prepare the files. What's necessary is to make selections and masks so we can extract the different objects to their own layer. We then need to fill in the missing holes and sometimes extend the photo through cloning, stamping, or content aware fill. Once that's done, the images will be moved into After Effects where we take them and expand them along the Z-axis in three dimensions. Using a little bit of scaling and some other techniques, we'll recreate a virtual environment and then add a 3D camera and lights to the scene. You'll also see some more advanced techniques that take advantage of things like lights, particles, shadows, reflection and more. Now one of the things that's important to understand is resolution and we'll go a lot deeper on this later, but for this technique to work well, you're going to need more than enough pixels. With the modern photo, this isn't a problem. But when dealing with historical images, we need to make sure we have enough quality to work with. So be sure you keep an eye on your delivery specs. Are you delivering 1080p or are you delivering 4K or perhaps higher resolution for a film project? In any case, the total pixel count of your images needs to be higher so you can get through this. And if you're working with older images and don't have access to those things, well, you may want to explore some of the great technologies that's out there for up-resing. There are lots of plugins that can help with up-resing and even Photoshop has some tools that allows you to bump up the resolution of your photographs. Once we have the material in After Effects and it's built into a 3D environment, the camera moves are going to be very logical. I don't approach this with X, Y, and Z coordinates. Rather, you'll see a technique that allows you to be a director and you can physically move the camera around by clicking and dragging it looking at it in the actual 3D environment. After Effects has some very intuitive controls, but you have to change the user interface in order to see them. I assure you that this is a technique that creative professionals can use. I've shown this technique to many from all sorts of graphic design conferences to the highest end broadcasting conferences. This is very understandable and clear once you dig into the process.

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