So you want it to be big enough to catch all the text behind it. Now you can see the whole-that’s the solid thing right there. I’m going to make it so it just is accepting shadows on. So I’m going to open this up here and press That’s why it’s important to put things all in the same place you can begin to see them all.Īnd now, what is the shadow catcher? Let’s take a look at that. I’ll pull back a little bit so you can see the whole “Shift + /.” So you can’t see the shadow catcher but if I slide it this way, now you could see the shadow catcher beginning of the shot. Well, the shadow catcher is located in the same place as the text is. Now it’s shining on the text.Īnd actually, I don’t want it to shine on the text. A little bit at a time.Īll right, actually making the number smaller, that lifts things up in the X, Y, Z world here. Hopefully, we’ll begin to see the text shining a little bit.Īnd I want to lift it up a little bit like so. I want to move it to the left, slide it to the left. “Space bar.”Īll right, now we can play with the position a little bit. The “Period” key, and press one more time. You can barely see it probably but that’s the light right there on top of the text. That’s what’s important.Ĭlick on “Position,” “Control + C,” to copy it.Īnd it puts the light, now you can see the little reticule there. And 4,000, I mean, I could see so far away from where we expect it to be.Īnd then 38,000 meaning it’s so far back in the scene that if we went to the top view we wouldn’t even find it. It’s 23,000 that means it’s way, way, off to the right relative to the scene. I go to “Text,” and I go to “P” for position and I click on “Position.” But that’s more of little things about working with a 3D camera tracker.īy moving the light right on top of the text and then start moving it away so you can see it better. It’s kind of-in some places, the text is not being illuminated by the light, weird. The reason it came up black is because the light’s not shining on the text properly. Now the weird thing about working with shadow catchers and the lights is that it’s hard sometimes to find the darn light and then adjust it to make it work the way you want it to. So this text there, and light, and shadow catcher. Right-click on it again, and say “Create Text.” It’s just a solid layer with the option for shadows to be shadow only. So it’s the same process we’ve used before. We’ve used this before when we wanted to simulate putting a shadow in a 2D scene. So it’s just a solid layer where it’s been changed, it says receive shadows only. So it’s transparent but it shows shadows, that’s how shadow catchers work. And the material option regarding shadows is that it receives shadows only. The shadow catcher is a solid layer that has material options because it’s in 3D. And I wanted first to create a shadow catcher camera and light. I want to get something that kind of skews down the aisle here.Ĭlick on that.
It’s somewhere down there.Īll right, so make the track point size and the target size large by just dragging that and pressing the “Shift.”Īs I drag it, it makes it drag faster, make the targets bigger, there we go. If I take it back down 100 percent and that 100-you can barely see the target too. The reason the target’s large is I’ve already made it large. So I’ll make them more visible by increasing the size of the track point. The targets are ok but the little spots are barely visible. So we’ll see if they stay sharp this time or not.Ĭlick on the video to make it active.
This gets a little tricky and the last time I did, the shadows didn’t behave properly, they remained sharp. I want to simulate that there’re some shadows here so it would be weird for the text to be floating up against the vines without having some shadows fall on them. Because I know the sun is coming from the left so the shadows here are falling on the ground. We will go to the last one here, this is a little bit different because we’re going to use a shadow catcher on this one. Note: Remember to watch the video tutorial, you will understand easier what Jeff does. So let’s start talking about 3D Tracking with Shadow Catcher. We have already figured out how to create simple motion tracking in After Effects. Welcome to the second blog post of our tracking motion series. 3D Tracking? Shadow Catcher? Seems interesting, right?