From the course: Motion Control 3D: Bringing Your Photos to Life in Three Dimensions Using Photoshop and After Effects

Understanding parallax

From the course: Motion Control 3D: Bringing Your Photos to Life in Three Dimensions Using Photoshop and After Effects

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Understanding parallax

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- Let's take a quick look at the parallax effect in action. Don't worry, we'll break down all these techniques in much more depth in just a moment, but I'd like to give you a high level overview of how things work. Let's start by opening up an After Effects project. It already has the pieces imported. Now, in this case, I've brought in a layered Photoshop file and you'll see we have our trees, the columns and our statue. In order for this to work, I'll need to make these 3D layers, so I'll click on the cube icon here to do so. If you don't see that, just click switches and modes to reveal it. Now, let's add a camera Layer, New, Camera. In this case, the shot's relatively wide angle so it's about a 35 millimeter, and I'll click OK. Now, what we want to do is take a look at the scene. If I take a look at two views here, I can see it side by side. So let's start by moving things around a little bit. I'll press P for position and then Shift + S for scale. Now, I could push the tree layer further back and then scale it up. What we're doing here is just creating a sense of depth. We'll keep pushing that back a little bit more. And then, scale it up again. What this does is creates the sense of postcards in space. In other words, there's a bit of separation. And I know the scaling is correct once it touches the edges, there we go. Let's move the columns back a little bit. I'll press P for position and move those back as well. And then, again, scale it until it matches the edge of the frame. Now, if we look at this, you start to get a sense of some actual depth, and then there's our statue ourself. Now, what we can do is take a look at the composition settings. In this case, I'm working with a low res picture. Don't worry about that, normally you'll have higher quality but these are just optimized for download. Let's set this to 720p and click OK. Now, what we need to do is just adjust the camera a bit. You see that we have a zoom control, which lets me push in, for example. I can also turn on key frames for zoom, position and point of interest. You also may notice that the camera itself has some arrows here, this allows us to click and drag to set a start position. For example, the base of the statue. I like that, and then as it moves forward I'm going to have this start to rise so I'll drag on the y-axis and then pull back a little bit to reveal more of the scene. And holding down the space bar, I can move here. Maybe I want the camera to go a little bit to the side and then pan its point of interest back. And notice here, we can really start to frame things up. So let's play that, we have a nice big move. Because the objects are at different distances, you'll see them moving differently and intersecting. Notice how the pillars and the statue seem to overlap nicely, creating a real sense of depth. Now what I want to do is tweak a few things here with the camera so we've got depth of field on, but we're going to change it. Let's drop the aperture here a little bit and set the f-stop a bit shallower to say, 2.0. Now, things that are further away will begin to blur a bit. All we need to do is adjust the camera settings. So if I set the focus distance right there on our scene, it's a lot better. Now the focus is on the statue, and we can key frame that. So as our camera moves, we just keep our subject in focus, but let the backdrop fall off a bit. And if I want, I could push the blur level a little bit more to make those leaves go out of focus back there. All in all, this is pretty amazing how it's working. Notice that we can really combine these to create some great moves. Now later, we're going to explore all sorts of advanced techniques that let us add lights and shadows and animation. But this has really come a long way. I'll just unify the scene with an adjustment layer and apply the Lumetri color correction effect. Now, it's super simple to put a nice vignette there on the edges with just a gentle feather. That gives us a little darkening at the edge and really unifies the scene, giving it a more filmic look. All in all, I'm very happy with this effect. And, as I said, we'll explore this technique in depth throughout this course so you'll learn how to really advance it even further. Parallax, after all, can be thought of as the distance between objects. So even though the sun is moving incredibly fast when you're driving down the road it seems to be really far away and not moving. Or that mountain that's far away seems to take forever to get closer. Yet, the car that just sped past you seems to be moving substantially faster. Well, the relative depth, or distance to the camera greatly affects our perception of speed and size, and this is where parallax can be useful as an animation technique.

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