Instead of manually selecting points for After Effects to track, 3D tracking involves the software scanning a al of a video clip for points to track, and then compiles all the data together for easier use by the user. The first video included the same box as the first 2D tracking video, but this time the camera was moving and the camera was still.

Since After Effects had detected where the surface of the box was in a 3D space, I simply added the text on top of it. I also gave them a shadow by adding a light and telling it where to cast the shadow. It was simple to add text to a flat surface as After Effects can work out by analysing the whole clip where each surface is in space. It simple needs points that it can recognise and can track the movement of. The dots in the box, and even the corners of the box itself, are perfect for this.

I also added a black rectangle over a magazine on the right. Adding it was just as simple as adding the text, but what’s really impressive about this is that since it is adding it into a 3D space by working out how the camera is moving, it can continue to move accurately even when when the magazine is out of shot. This is different to 2D tracking, because if one of the points I manually selected for tracking went out of frame After Effects could even begin to guess where it is now, and so just stops tracking that area. With 3D tracking, there are many other point for it to look out for so it can work out where that area is, even when the surface i’ve added something to is no longer visible.

Next we had a video of a road, with the camera moving around, and we were giving an image of a hole. After Effects was able to track where the ground was, and I then laid the hole on that surface. I wanted to give the hole depth, and to do that I would need to simulate a parallax effect. To do this, I duplicated the layer with the hole on it, placed it above the original and masked out the actual hole, leaving only the cracked edges. I also mad the bottom layer of the hole bigger, so you couldn’t see the edge again inside the hole. Lastly, I made it so that everything that could be seen of the bottom hole layer that was outside the top hole (so not including the actual hole) would be masked out. This was to hide the edges of the bottom layer so you would only see the edges of the top layer. I then just added a grungy texture and did some colour correction to make it all blend in better.

It was surprisingly simple to add something like this to a layer, and I’ll definitely have to look into using it further for my final project. I already have a few ideas to use After Effect’s tracking capabilities but I want to try the other some things in the other workshops before I finalise anything.