Animated Path around a "3D" layer

[Parradox]

Hello everyone!

I am an AE beginner and I am struggling with something for one of my projects.

What I'm trying to do is animate a series of objects/icons around a layer. To put it plainly, I want to have a series of planets orbiting around a human being. I know I have to use the animated path tool, but I don't know how to make it look like the orbiting planets eventually go behind him, only to return later.

[angie_taylor · Accepted solution]

Place a Null into your comp and a new camera. Place the hhuman in the same position as the Null. Make all layers 3D.

position the planets around the human in 3D space where you want them to begin moving and then parent all the planets to the Null layer.

animate the rotation of the null to make all of them rotate around the human.

If they need to be different speeds you could create several Nulls, each at a unique speed and parent some

planets to each

[P.M.B]

In addition you could pickwhip the planet layer's Y Rotation to the Null's Y rotation and then multiply by -1.

So it looks like this

thisComp.layer("Null 1").transform.yRotation*-1

After you pick whip it just add the  *-1   This way your planet will always be facing front

[angie_taylor]

Or you could select the planets after adding the expression, then go to Layer> Transform> Auto-Orient > Orient to Camera 🙂 Thats what I love about AE - so many possibilities 🙂

[Mike_Abbott]

...and you wil, of course, need to have your human model masked or cut out from the surrounding content in some way.

[angie_taylor]

I was assuming that you were doing an animted human so it would be a separate entity. But if its a photo or videO you’ll need to do some compositing as Mike suggests. However, you can mask the planets - its much easier than masking a the human. Once youve done the animation, precompose it and then draw a mask over the area that would be behind the human. You will also have to keyframe the mask if the human is moving.