Easy 3D Tracked Text

Hey what's up guys, welcome back to my channel. So in today's video, I'm going to quickly go over how you can easily create 3D track text inside of After Effects. It's a super simple effect to pull off and it's really useful. So with that being said, let's jump into After Effects and I'll show you how to do it. Alright guys, so I have After Effects open now and I'm going to try to make this as quick and to the point as possible. So I already have my footage imported and I'm going to grab it and drag it down to the New Composition icon. After I have the new composition created, I'm going to make sure that my footage is selected inside of the composition and go up to Animation and select Track Camera. Then I'm going to drop down the Advanced tab and select Detailed Analysis. And then I'm going to let that do its thing and it's going to take a few minutes. Okay so that just finished up analyzing and if I scroll through my clip, you can see that it created a bunch of tracking points on the table and on each one of the objects that I have placed on the side of the table. And since I'm going to be tracking the text to each one of the objects, I'm going to be using the tracking points on the objects themselves. So if I go up here to start with my drone, you can see as I drag the cursor around, three of the tracking points are highlighted at once and it creates a target and that's going to be the angle and the position that the text is created. So for example, I like these three points right here because it's facing the camera the most and it's where I want my text to be facing. So with those three points highlighted, I'm going to right click and click Create Text in Camera. And if I play this through, you can see that I already perfectly tracked the text to the drone. Then I'm going to come to the text layer and double click on it so I can rename it. Just rename it to Mavic Pro. Then hit S on the keyboard to bring up the scale and I can grab the scale right here and drag it down so I can rescale it. When you're working with 3D layers, you're going to see some pretty big scales like this. Like this one's over 21,000. So to scale it down faster instead of dragging it like that, you can either just type it in, say go down to 10,000 to start with and see where that goes, or you can hold down shift and it'll have a wider range that you can drag your mouse maybe faster to rescale it. So after I have that scale down, I'm going to make sure I'm clicked on my layer. You can see my cursor is still for the text. So if you hit V on the keyboard, it'll bring you back to your regular cursor. Then I'm just going to grab the text and drag it to the position that I want right about here. And then over here on the Mavic Pro text layer, I'm going to come down to the Transform tab and use the X, Y, and Z rotation to position it exactly how I want it. So for this one, I kind of want it angled a little facing the camera to kind of match the angle of the object facing the camera as well. So right about there, Z rotation looks good for me, and yours is going to be different depending on how you want your text facing the camera or anything like that. Okay, so if I go back to the front of the clip and play it through, you can see already I have some text tracked perfectly over my drone. Also to change the font for these text layers, just double click on it and come over here to your Character tab and you can go through the fonts and just pick whichever one that you prefer. So for the last thing that I'm going to do is add a camera lens blur to this. So I had my quality set to quarter so that I could work faster, but for this I'm going to set it to at least half so that I can see when the object is actually in focus. Then I'm going to come to a point in the clip where the object is perfectly in focus and then come up to the Effects and Presets tab and type in Camera Lens Blur. Drag that over the Mavic Pro text, and by default it's set to 5, I'm just going to set that to 0, and then create a keyframe right there, and then on the Mavic Pro text layer open up the Effects tab and then the Camera Lens Blur tab so I can see my keyframes. Then I'm going to scroll to a point in my clip where I can see the drone out of focus and my text in the frame as well, and then just set the blur amount on the text to match that of the drone. I found 15 was good for that. Then I came to a point a little bit past the first 0 keyframe and then set another one at 0, then scrolled to the end of my clip and made another keyframe at 7. So I have the keyframes for the blur starting at 15, going to 0, coming into focus when the drone comes into focus, leave it at 0 for about here, and then when the drone starts going out of focus, go to the end of the clip and have it go to 7 so that the text falls out of focus with the drone at the same time. I also like to select all these keyframes and right-click and turn those into Easy Ease keyframes to make it a smoother transition for the blur. But alright, so there you go, just repeat those same steps for each one of the objects that you have inside of your scene, and that's how you easily create 3D tracked text inside of After Effects. Alright guys, that's it for today's video, thank you so much for watching, I hope you're all doing well and staying safe while we let this virus run its course, I have a lot more videos I'm going to be posting over the next couple of weeks so stay tuned for that, and I would like to welcome all of you who have subscribed over the last 30 days and helped my channel go over 30,000 subscribers, so thank you so much and welcome. But okay guys, that's it, take care and I'll see you soon.