3D animation

[tessygirl]

Hi all. Creating a photo gallery in after effects where all the photos fly in from different angles to form a shape. The problem I've come across is that when I add a camera to fly in the photo it moves all the other 3d enable photos as well. I only want to focus on the 1 photo at a time not all 3d enable photos. Any help?

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

You have two simple options when you are making a movie, move the camera or move the actors. If you want to move both the camera and the actors it's going to take a lot more work. In this case the photos are your actors.

The way I would approach this problem would be to first set up all the photos to form the geometric shape you want to end up with. You can use multiple comp views or even a camera to check the final position and shape you have created from the 3D layers. I would then move backwards in the timeline and animate each photo out of the frame. The last step would be to animate a smooth camera move into the final position for the camera.

Without a lot more details on your idea and something like a storyboard or even some full screenshots of your project with the modified and animated properties of the layers in question revealed it's hard to point you in a more specific direction but generally, when working with 3D elements you want to start where you want to end up and work backwards. It's just way easier.