How to Use a Null Object to Animate a 3D Camera in Adobe After Effects 7

So let us even bother touching the position key frames on the camera itself. Turn those off leave the camera back in its original position and we will use a very cool 3D function called a “null object”.

Now if we come up to the layer menu we will just go down here to where it says new. Come across and choose null. You will see it does one of two things. It creates a brand new layer in the timeline called null, and we have a small square object here represented on screen.

Well a null object is a very powerful item. The first thing is it contains all the standard geometric properties that any other layer shares inside of After Effects. If we twirl it down under transform, we have anchor point, position, scale rotation and opacity.

However if we hit the 0 key and just do a quick ramp preview of our active camera, you will notice that the null immediately disappears. That is the other cool thing about it. They do not actually render.

However, if we use nulls for parenting objects they can be used to drive the animation of other elements in the scene, yet they completely disappear on output so they become invisible animation assistance. And that is the very cool thing about them.

So we are going to use a null to animate our camera’s orbit using very simple parenting. Now we have to make sure that the null is also a 3D object, because currently it is two dimensional. Its position properties are only X and Y, and you see there is only one axis here for rotation.

So if we come to the 3D switch here in the timeline, click on that to turn it on. You will see that the layer is now represented in 3D space with our free access colors here, and you can see it is very high up in the scene. Well remember that is the center of our scene. All of these elements is slightly below center.

If we then twirl this up so we can see the layer underneath our 35 millimeter camera, all we are going to do now is parent the camera directly to the null. Now apparently nothing will change if we scrub through the timeline, nothing is moving because the null orbit camera has not been set to animate. But like is I said, we are not going to move the camera. It is the null that is doing all of the work.

The null has now effectively become the anchor point for the camera, but remember the camera is all the way out here so we can now rotate it around the center by simply applying a couple of key frames to the null.

Select the null layer hit the R key to bring up its rotation properties, and we will apply a key frame at zero seconds for the Y axis rotation. If we hit the end key and go all the way to the end of our animation, we can say that maybe over ten seconds we are going to rotate this five full revolutions.

If we say okay and now do a quick ramp preview in our active camera view on the right hand side, you can see the camera is now orbiting our 3D scene in a perfect circle defined by very simple rotation of the null object, which as you can see does not even render in the scene.

Now I am not going to render the entire ten seconds. I am just going to click so we can see it at this point. But again, it is a really wonderful animation assistant because it takes away the process of having to add different key frames, adjust motion paths and get very complicated, when the actual end result can be achieved very simply.

Now I am just going to click to stop the preview because there is one more advantage here to having the camera parented to the null object. One thing is we can grab the null, let us say in this grabs its Y axis here in the center and drag it down. You will notice as we do, our view of the scene is change.

Well that is because the camera is parented to the null so wherever the null goes, the camera has to follow as well. Now I am just going to undo that for a second and in the left hand view here, I am going to change it from top to left so we can see the two elements. I am going to select the null object and just make sure that we can see our camera over here on the upper right hand side.

Again if you drag that down, you will see the camera mov