After Effects Motion Tracking (2D & 3D)

1. Intro: welcome to another course by Studio X, and today he will be learning how to track in after effects. This includes both point tracking as well as three D tracking, so you can see some of the examples right now on the screen. This is what point tracking looks like and where you trash a subject and three D tracking is where you track an entire scene and you can add elements in that scene. So let's go ahead and start with the point tracking first. 2. 2D Tracking: this part is for learning how to point track. So let's get started. So to get started, I have two clips here. Um, and as you can see, one of them is of this boat. And what you're going to be doing is you're gonna be tracking the tip of this boat and putting some text on the side that could be used for some kind of YouTube video. So we're gonna take this clip, and we're gonna drag it down into this icon over here, which makes a new composition with the settings of the clip. And I'm just going to go through into a part where I think I'm just going to have enough details to use this as my tracking option. So I'm gonna go to the Tracker, um, tracker window here. And if you can't see that, you can just go up into window, go down and find a tracker, and I'm gonna hit track motion and you can click on the box and move it over to a point. So I'm gonna use this right here, which is the very tip of the boat. And that's a really good example. Off a point to track because it is very distinct. You know, there's a lot of contrast between the background and the object that you're tracking, and the inside window is kind of the image that you'll be tracking. So the computer will be using this part here to track it, and then the outside box is the movement window. So if you make this too small and your object is one frame here and next dream is over here , it's gonna lose it. But the bigger you make the box, the longer it will take to process. So you can. You should usually have a pretty rough estimate of how fast your object moves. So this should be a pretty good search region. And I'm just going to say my project and I'm gonna hit this fact button here, and that's gonna analyze it backwards. So now that it's all the way at the end, we can just scroll by to kind of where we started, and you can start playing forward. And I'm gonna only do this for a couple of frames just because I don't want the boat to be too big, because my text is that I'm gonna be coming out all the way on the side on the left. So I'm just gonna play for a couple of frames and stop it, Okay? I think that's perfect. And what you are going to need to do next is goto layer new, no object. And now when you click back on your video and your once again in the factory port, you are going to hit Edit Target. You're gonna choose the null object and hit, OK, hit, apply, applied to mentions X and y hit. Okay. And now if you scroll through the video, you can see that the no object is stuck to the top of the boat. The next up I will be adding the text, So I'm just gonna hit the texture and type in top 10 sale books. And I'm just going to to auto with the vertical auto for the crediting and I'm going to align the text on the other side. Perfect Could be scale it down a little bit, something like that. And now to attach it to then object, all you have to do is in the parent and links section. You can just take it and drag it over to the north. You can see there's a little loop here, so you can just take it and pick Whippet too little object. And if you don't see this, you can just right click. Go to columns and make sure parent and link is checked off. So now if you go back, you can see that it's attached to the boat. But now the problem that you're having is that text isn't getting any bigger with the boat . And this is because when you're tracking, uh, we had under track motion, it was selected for position. And this is the perfect thing to do if you want whatever element that you're attaching to stay the same size, um, and not be scaling along with your object. So what you can do is we can delete the null object and go back to the video and was good to our tracker to You made track motion choose scale. And now you can see that there's two point trackers now, and you need to point trackers to do rotation and scale. So I'm just going to bring them into the opposite corners of the boat, and I'm just going to scale it up a little bit and do the same thing to the top. There we go. Don't forget to say and I was just gonna hit the back play button and wait for it to track both of those points. Okay, so now that we're at the end, we could do the same thing and just go back to in the middle to where our point trackers are left off around here and playing this forward as well. Okay, around here, she was perfect. So I'm just going to stop. And once again, I'm going to make a new null object. I'm going to choose the target to be no to it. Okay, apply over X and y hit. Okay. Perfect. Okay, so now I'm gonna parent the sale books to this null object. And as you can see now, the sailboats is stuck and also changes with scales. So that's how you do two d tracking using a point tracker to add it to add any elements you'd like to your scene. So now you can watch the next video to see how to do three d tracking. Now it's time for your assignment. So I would love to see you try out point tracking. You can either use the footage that I will be including down in the project file or you can use your own footage. 3. 3D Tracking: If you're watching this sport, that means you have already learned point tracking, and we will move on into three D tracking to do three D tracking. We are going to once again take or footage and put it into a new composition, and I'm just going to trim down this video. I'm only gonna need about six seconds. Just was not taking as long to create this tutorial. And I'm gonna hit shrimp competent work area and you can see in this scene there's not that many moving elements. It's just the camera that is actually going through the scene. That's very helpful because it's not gonna be messing up or tracking data because it's only the camera that's moving through the scene, and that should really, really help. So in order to track the camera or also called doing a three D track in the Tracker section , you see there's a button for track camera so you can just click on that. And there's an effect that gets added to the clip called three D Camera Tracker. So what you're gonna have to do is just wait for it to analyze it, and we'll move on to the next step. Now that the effect analyzed the scene, there's a couple of different options for what you can do. So as you can see, there's an option to create a camera as well. That's some advanced tools would give you the average air to see how faulty the track is, and some options for point tracking sizes and target sizes. And that's for when you're hovering around on on your clip, as you can see here. So what this lets you do is truth points or actual planes to do a couple of different things. So we're just gonna play through a part of this video, and you can see it gives you a rough estimate to where the ground is. And if you right click, you can create a text on camera, a solid in the camera, a null and a camera or a shadow catcher camera and, like we are going to go with no and camera. The reason I chose to go with the null object is because it can give you the position in three D space, and then you can add anything you want, whether it's images that will be floating in that space, and tracked or text or anything else you would like to do. So in this case, I'm going to add text, and I will type in save the environment, and we're gonna line this in the middle, make a little bit bigger, place it roughly in the spot where I wanted to be, and I will make it a three d element. And what I'm gonna do is copy the position if p on my text cased the position. And as you can see, it's now on the ground. But I wanted to be in the air, so I'm gonna raise the text on the Y axis. I want to move it over a little bit to the left. Animals are going to scale it up. Great. I'm also gonna hit are because I want to rotate the texts lightning to kind of face the camera a little bit more. Okay, that looks perfect. So now when you play it through your scene, I'm just going to change the quality to quarter. So it's a little bit easier to play, and you can see that it stays in its track position. And once you're done with that element, you can always go back to the three D camera tracker and pick out new points to add more text. And if it's hard to see the actual point, you can go in here and change the point size so that they're easier to see. And obviously in places with more details, there will be more points because it would be easier for the computer to track. And in this example, I want to make some text that's very in the front of the camera. But you can see the closest point that I can pick is on this rock. So what I'm gonna make is create a null and you can see we have a new no object here, and we can do is bring it out forward. And then if I make another text layer calling it text once again, make it three D and copy the position of the notes. Ridge is gonna make this text slightly bigger, and you can bring it even more closer to the camera. There was going to rename this text toe, say task task, save the environment, and you can see when you play it's room, it actually flies closer to the camera flies out of the way and keeps going. Another great thing that you can do is enable motion blur. So if you hit the motion blur icon over here, which is three circles and then enabled it in the competition, you can see now we are getting motion blur for when the camera flies by To help adds more realism to the tracking. And that's basically how you do three D tracking. Now it's time for a second assignment. I would love to see you try out the three D tracking again. You can either use the footage I'm providing, or you can use your own. Submit your project so I can see what you can create. 4. Outro: now you finished watching this course, and hopefully this was very helpful for you. 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