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Animate camera down a 3-d road
Hi all, I’m very new to AE but thanks to the Tutorials here and on videocopilot.net I’m learning very quickly.
What I want to do is very similar to a tuturial I found here (it animates a camera down a path, which happens to be a road):
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/gerard_rick/AEWeekly1.php
However the road doesn’t have any hills – it’s perfectly flat.
How would I go about achieving the same effect except with hills in the landscape?
Thanks for any help!
–KTFA
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3 Replies
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Following the same pattern in the aforementioned tutorial include hills as some layers and then manipulate them acordingly like that of the road signs. Now since these layers are 2D they are going to look fairly flat when the camera zooms past them so the best way to avoid this or should i say cheat this is by fooling the camera.Now to achieve this look you are going to have to input an expression. Now this does work but since i do not know what your composition looks like i can only assume. So anyway make all your relevant hill layers 3D. Now to the rotaion properties of the x,y and z axis apply the following expression
X: “lookAt(thisComp.activeCamere.position,position)[0]”
Y: “lookAt(thisComp.activeCamere.position,position)[1]”
Z: “lookAt(thisComp.activeCamere.position,position)[2]”To apply this just alt+Click on the stopwatch beside each property. Once you have inputed the expression select all the layers in question,right-click go to transform>auto-orientate and select the command to auto-orientate towards camera and there you go as the camera passes it will give the illusion that the hills are fully 3D when they are actually 2D. I hope this is of some help. Also check out Andrew Kramer’s tutorial on blue Planet 3D where he used this expression. It might help seeing it being demonstrated! View tutorial.
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Thanks so much for that Jack. If I understand you right, it’s not exactly what I had envisioned – would this way keep the road flat and the camera would just pass by the hills / valley’s? I was hoping for a way to make the path (that is the road) dip and rise as if the road were actually going up and down the hills..
Anyway, I’ll give it a try to see how things work.. And I’ll check out the tutorial you mentioned..
Oh, I don’t really have my comp yet – I’m just playing around with the project that was included in that tutorial.. Trying to get an understanding of what I’m doing and see if I couldn’t figure out a way to warp the path in the way I wanted..
Hmm.. I wonder.. Would an expression be able to make the path dip and rise every so often..
I’m sure that this would be easier in a 3-d program but I don’t own any and, well, don’t really have the budget right now if you know what I mean.. 🙂
Thanks again!
Man this stuff is fun!
–KTFA
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Not sure why this thread was moved to this forum (the tutorial I referenced wasn’t from Andrew K / Video Copilot) but if someone is able to help me animate a camera down a windy and hilly road in AE that would be great – otherwise i guess I’ll stick with a flat road with hills passing by as Jack suggested..
–KTFA
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