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Now, the one thing that changes the whole reality of this shot is that when we are further away, it looks like there in the planets rotating around the sun here as part of the solar system rig. But you will see that they are just two dimensional flat layers here on after effects. Even though, they do contain animated pixels as we fly past the sun there it is very obvious to see that this is a flat none extruded layer.

This is one instance where the auto orientation feature comes in very, very handy. If you have circular layer such as this that are two dimensional but you want to make them look three dimensional, you can tell them to automatically orient themselves towards the camera. So whichever angle the camera looks at it from, you will always look at them as if they are straight on and this will rotate to always look circular on every frame that we move through.

So what we have to do is make sure the planets are selected. We have done our key frame animation for the camera, just come down here and twirl this up in the timeline to go down and select all of these planet layers. So Jupiter is the first one and go to hold down the control key or the command key on the Mac and select Mars, the Earth, Venus. Scroll down just a little bit more, we have a couple more. We have the Mercury, we also have the Helios movie this is actually the sun in the center of our scene. Just double check, there are no more in here for us to select. What we need to do now is once again pull up our auto orientation command and we are not doing it for the camera this time. This is for the currently selected layers only and you will see that they have an option right here to automatically orient towards the camera.

Go ahead and turn that on and click okay. You should notice a slight shift there in the preview. If we just deselect all the layers by hitting F2 on the keyboard we can see that they do indeed look slightly more circular like then to do just to make this a bit easier to see. Let us go back just one camera view here so we have our active camera. Come back to the beginning of our timeline and just hit the zero 0 to a RAM preview of this. As this builds up, have a look at the planets that are moving around the outside especially Jupiter over here on the left. Even though that should not be rotating side on to us as it passes in front of the camera here, you can see it remains perfectly circular that is because After Effects is rotating that layer now to make sure we see it face on, no matter which angle we look from.

Now, as we progress through this, it looks even better when we get to the Sun. Because it is perfectly positioned here in this sort of container that is holding it as we fly by, after effects will adjust the view of that and make it look completely spherical as if it is totally 3D. Have a look at that now as it is going at the right hand of the screen. It is covering up the other side of the container. This side is visible and it looks like we have an entire ball of flame here inside of After Effects. When in reality, that is just the two dimensional movie layer and we are effectively only seeing one side of it.

Now, as we go past this, we do just catch the few of the flames here on the corner of our frame. Again, that is the reality that I was looking for in this type of shot where we just want to take away to focus from the dead center of our scene. And then when we see the actual playback, you can see the wonderful finish result through all of the steps that we went through. The planets are looking very three dimensional but the really important one here is the sun. We went to the extent of doing a very realistic flyby on it and as we do, you really do get the impression of that as a completely realistic 3D object here inside of After Effects.

Now, all of the motion that we have done so far has been with one camera. Now, we did start out this lesson with three cameras and if you remember they do override each other in the timeline when one sets on top of the other. Well, we can actually use that to our advantage by doing multiple camera edits inside the same scene. If you just click and stop your preview for a second, then scroll up to the top of the timeline and what we can see here is our 35 millimeters camera.

Well, let us use our keyboard shortcut to pull up the new camera dialogue box. If you do not remember what that one is, it is Shift Ctrl and ALT or Shift command option on the Mac and the C key and we will just choose a standard preset here again at about 35 millimeters. We do not need to name at this point. We are just going to try a couple of options here.

Go ahead and click okay and you should notice an immediate shift. Remember our camera one comes in at the top of the timeline, therefore it is now the new active camera and we are effectively covering up all the animation work we have done underneath. But this we can use our advantage because we can make this camera only play for a short amount of time then After Effects will immediately cut to the next camera and our animation will continue.

So let us just change our camera angle here. So we are looking at the scene from a slightly different point of view then we press this C key to go to the camera tool and hit it again to go to the orbit tool and just rotate around looking at this slightly differently maybe hit the C key a couple of times and go into the Zoom option hit the C key again a couple of times and go into the X and Y tracks.

So we are looking at this a little bit more differently. Maybe just go in just a touch closer than that. Do like to look at this with a bit more detailed especially seeing as we see these planets in true 3D now. I do you love this effect and again, I am just going to offset it slightly to one side. Now, if we will just hit the spacebar at this point in time, all we are doing is looking through a stationary camera at this point. If you want to add key frames by all means go ahead and do so. What we are trying to do here though is cut between this one and the other animation that is going on underneath.

Well, cutting a camera is a simple as cutting the layer. You simply trim it the same way. So let us say we only want to view this for about a second and a half. Scrub up to that point in the timeline. The layer is selected. Hold down the ALT key or the option key on the Mac and hit the right square bracket to trim the camera out at that point. If you now hit the page down key and go one frame on from that, you can see that we are now back to the 35-millimeter camera layer that is underneath and after effects is actually down the cut force. If you just scrub back a little way there hit spacebar we are static on that view for just a few more frames and then all of a sudden we switch to our animation.

Well, let us do the same quickly at the other range just to give ourselves a slightly different ending to this animation. We are going to eight seconds along in the timeline. Again, use the keyboard shortcut to pull up the new camera dialogue box. Keep everything in the same way and just say okay. And now, make a couple of changes to this.

Just go and move it down in the scenes so we fairly low down overall. I should go to the point where they are almost leveled with the floor, but the problem is here that we do see the planets from underneath. So now we can go to the Z track tool. Just zoom in a little bit more on the shot itself. Just leave the sun there at the top. I quite like this wonderful extreme perspective that we have here on the floor almost as if we have very, very small on standing on this huge expansive area and looking out at the very, very large model of this solar system.

Again, this camera in the timeline is the top layer. Therefore it becomes the new active camera and overwrites the one underneath. So we do not actually need to trim the 35-millimeter camera underneath. These two cameras will do the multi-camera edit for us. Then we go back to the selection tool for just one second, I am going to hit the tilda key to go full screen on this and build up a quick and final RAM preview at this entire shot so we can see the finished results of our

Now, the one thing that changes the whole reality of this shot is that when we are further away, it looks like there in the planets rotating around the sun here as part of the solar system rig. But you will see that they are just two dimensional flat layers... click to read more