How To Add 3D Tracked Text To Footage In After Effects CC
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Welcome to this After Effects tutorial my name is will and on this channel we release weekly filmmaking content such as tutorials travel videos and reviews and we have dozens of tutorials already on the channel so consider subscribing in this video I'm going to show you how to use After Effects to add 3d texture footage that's perfectly tracked I'll also show you how to extrude that text and have lighting so that it composites much better as your footage and the end result will look like this.
All right so I'm in after-effects now with my footage in the project let's go ahead and drag it down to the new composition button that'll create a new composition with our footage the cameras perspective changes slightly as the camera tilts down and because this clip is really wide it'll be a great clip to add our 3d text to so to get started let's go to effects and presets and we'll type in 3d camera and then with a 3d camera tracker we'll drag it to our footage it will automatically start analyzing in the background as you can see here now this clip is 222 frames so it will take a little bit of time to analyze and then once this is done it's going to create a whole bunch of colored points in our footage and that will be the tracking data and now it's solving the camera and as you can see there's a whole bunch of these colorful points now on our footage and if we scrub through our footage you'll see that kind of danced around a little bit and if you're not seeing them you have to select on your footage and then in effect controls make sure that the effect is selected if you haven't used a 3d camera tracking it then it could be a little bit intimidating but it's actually pretty straightforward the goal is to find three of these points that line up so that this red circle that keeps bouncing around ends up in a spot that corresponds with the footage you're working with so if we look at our footage here and see what we're working with we have a bright sky and then we have a dark forest and then below that we have this lake and you'll notice that the majority of the colored points are in the lake and that's because there's a lot more variance in the pixels down here in the lake compared to just the pure black forest so our goal is to try to find three of these points where our red circle aligns up with our footage so it has the same perspective let's try to find a spot where the red circle lines up with the exact same flatness of our lake so I would say that's pretty flat with our lake this one is a little too forward so I think we'll go with the one we found originally which was right here so we'll click there and then that will highlight the three points that were selected now it's important that the tracking points you select appear during the entire footage so since the camera moves forward and tilts down and shows more the lake this will be in the the whole time so this will work fine with the three points selected as you see here we can right click on one of them and then you'll get a whole bunch of options here because we want to add text to this we'll choose create text and camera and then it's created text for us so let's go ahead and double click our text layer we'll type in the word that we want and then we'll go back to our main selection tool and you'll see down here that the text is 3d so that means that we can move it around in 3d space using the three points here each one of these is an axis so you have the X the Y and the Z or Z depending on where you're from each one of these moves it around in 3d space based on the position because we have the selection tool if we wanted to rotate our text in 3d space then we'd have to use the rotation tool and then in the same way we can go to any one of these three axes here and move it around in 3d space based on the rotation ok so let's use the x-axis and try to align the perspective so it matches our scene and then we'll go into the scale here and we'll just bring that down to about 155 or so and next we'll go back to our selection tool and we'll go to the z-axis and drag our text forward and then on the y-axis we'll lift it up and we'll keep adjusting this until we get it to where we want.
Okay I think that's a good spot for a text so let's close the text layer and because we track the footage using 3d camera tracker and once we tracked it we had it create our text layer it has automatically been tracked to our footage throughout the whole thing it will be perfectly tracked so that's looking really good except our text isn't 3d so in order to do that let's go into our text layer again and then we'll go down to the geometry options and will increase the extrusion depth by let's say 40 and now each letter has been extended into 3d space it is tough to tell though because the way 3d programs work and how 3d text works in After Effects is you need to add a light source in order for the shadows to show up properly to do that let's go up to layer new and then we'll choose light for the light type we'll keep it at parallel we'll make it similar to the Sun so kind of a light orange a yellow and then we'll set the intensity to about 150 we'll hit OK and then that turned our text completely black and that's because the light we created in 3d space isn't shining any light on our text because it's not in the right spot so just like we did with the text layer to move it around we can use each axis of the light to reposition where the light is shining so let's go to the z axis and we'll bring it back a bit and then that brightened up our text and created the shadows on the extruded parts which looks really good however our text is too bright so we'll go back to our z axis and keep moving it until we see some changes in the text shading and now the Lighting's not so harsh on our text and it blends in a little better with our footage and using the 3d camera tracker to track your footage and then add 3d text into it is really just that simple so let's go ahead and preview this and you'll see that it's tracked really well into our footage the perspective is changing of the camera and so is our text and the coolest thing about this is if we went back to our subscribe layer and then parent the light layer to our subscribe text layer using the parent and Link options over here and then adjusting our light slightly so that it matches how we had it before now that it's parented and now if we move the text layer anywhere we want in 3d space our light will follow it because it's parented so if we wanted to move it all the way up here and then render you can see our camera will move past our text and because it's still using the 3d camera tracker points it's still going to do a pretty good job at tracking so I'll undo that because I prefer it like this in the middle and we are done our effect all right so that does it for this video on how to add 3d text to your footage using After Effects CC we release new filmmaking content such as tutorials travel videos and reviews weekly so consider subscribing and hitting the bell to be notified when we upload and we'll see you next time
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