Is it necessary to use cameras if you can achieve the same thing with null objects?

Question

Is there any reason to use cameras if null objects do the same thing? I've seen dozens of tutorials about using null objects to control cameras and how they make cameras a lot easier to use in After Effects. So is there any reason to use both? My reason for asking is that I need to animate a scene that orbits around a map. Since I can do this with just a null object, is there any reason to add a camera as well and parent the camera to the null object? What are the advantages to using both? Thank you in advance.

Mylenium · Answer

Nah, you're thinking about this the wrong way. It simply boils down to isolating/ decoupling transforms and avoiding gimbal lock, i.e. that old Euler vs. Quarternion thing for rotations and also otehr stuff like being able to compensate parent scaling by moving stuff back in when it's independent. If you don't need eitehr, then fine, but more than anything else your considerations should be driven by those principles. Adding an extra Null even if it may not seem necessary initially can often safe your behind later. In my younger years as a 3D animator I learned that the hard way and it's really not much different for AE. Except for the most basic rotating logo animations or straight pan & zooms there are usually some benefits to using more complex parenting setups (or isolating transform steps with pre-composing) instead of trying to directly get the camera to point where it needs to. That also includes actually creating camewra layers and not relying on the default composition camera, be that just to avoid spatial orientation confusion.

Mylenium

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