DigiEffects acquired Buena Depth Cue, eased the license conditions, fixed the bugs and added some smoothness, and makes each After Effects plug-in available a la carte. The first plug-in to hit the streets is Camera Mapper, a plug-in that makes camera projection in After Effects a lot easier than it used to be.Camera mapping or camera projection is the art or science of creating a 3D illusion in a what basically is a 2D environment. After Effects doesn’t “know” real 3D. Instead it uses a sort of postcard approach: you can make it look like it’s 3D by placing one plane after the other. Imagine a billboard photographed against a background of a city skyline. In After Effects, you can make the billboard seem detached from the background not by applying “bokeh”, but rather by placing the billboard on a separate plane in front of the city skyline. If you then animate the scene as if you were to drive closer to the billboard, the eye will be tricked in seeing a billboard moving closer to you faster than the skyline.
Eight steps are required to apply camera mapping in After Effects without Camera Mapper. Three steps will do the job just fine if you install DigiEffects Camera Mapper. Camera Mapper uses the same basic components as Camera Projection without the plug-in: you will need a source image or footage, two cameras (projection and render) and as many solids as there are elements in the image that you want to detach from the background.
The workflow with Camera Mapper is almost dull. You import your footage into After Effects, create the two cameras and the solid layers, turn all layers into 3D layers. select each solid and apply the plug-in to it. The plug-in itself has a drop-down menu for a projection camera, one for the source image and one for the alpha channel source you wish to use.
It took a while for me to fully grasp Camera Mapper’s capabilities—I’d never before created camera projections in After Effects. The main obstacle to me was that I had to forget about a limitation that only existed inside my head: you can actually apply Camera Mapper to the same source image multiple times and still get very different results by applying different masks to the original image.
In fact, I found that if you were to take a photo of the billboard, then a photo of the skyline in such a way that both photos would be close to each other in terms of angle, you can create illusions that go a long way towards what you would expect from a real 3D scene.
Although Camera Mapper comes with a user’s guide that extends beyond what you’ll usually get when buying a plug-in, the software invites to experiment with its few parameters, simply because it doesn’t cost any energy, time or effort. In fact, I found myself spending several hours, creating solids, but also multiple projection cameras, each with their own position and rotation in a scene. That allowed me to see how each camera and solid interacted with each other, and yes, each gave slightly or dramatic different results.
If I were to advise you on the Camera Mapper plug-in, I’d honestly say that if you’re even in the slightest way interested in creating dramatic effects with After Effects, and camera mapping is either something you do regularly or have never done before but would like to try out, you should definitely try it out. I’ll bet you will not hesitate for long to buy it.
