So my issue is that everytime i change my shape layers to 3d and add the camera, my whole composition becomes a completely blank screen.
Then as soon as i turn the 3d off it becomes clear and i can see my shapes.
Its really frustrating me as i need it to make animations for projects coming up.
Even my teacher was completely confused and said i should ask the forums.
I uninstalled and reinstalled after effects twice but same glitch. 
1 Correct answer
Disable depth of field on your camera or change the focus distance to be where your layers are.
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Replies
I should probably go into a bit more detail here.
Depth of field is a setting that mimics what happens in real-world photography where something can be in focus while things behind it and in front of it are out of focus.
Note how the feet and grass blades around it are in focus in this picture, but the face and trees in the background and the grass blades in the foreground are all blurry.
That's depth of field (or DOF, for short).
A wide depth of field means almost everything is in focus and a shallow depth of field means only a few things will be in focus. Things like the aperture setting for the lens, the kind of lens, the size of a camera's sensor, etc. all will have an effect on how deep or shallow your depth of field is. There are many, many web pages and web videos that cover depth of field for photography and video and some pages cover it with quite a lot of detail such as the Wikipedia page from which the above image comes.
Anyway, the reason you are losing your shapes when depth of field is turned on is that the point of focus is somewhere far away from your shapes and you have a shallow depth of field. Thus, the shapes are out of focus and are blurry. In your case, they're just really, really blurry, but they are still there!
You don't have to turn DOF off for your scene to work, by the way. You could, instead, change the focus point of your camera to be the same distance as from the camera to your objects. Now, the composition will render faster if you turn DOF off because your computer doesn't have to calculate the blur, but that's another discussion.
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