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Filed under: 3D •Motion Graphics •Post Production •

Motion 3 = 3D

Motion 3 - part of Apple’s Final Cut Studio 2 suite - has experienced a major update, including the addition of motion tracking and stabilization, optical flow (smooth slow motion) technology, a gorgeous particle-based paint system, enhancements to their Keyframe Editor, and interesting new Audio Parameter and Retiming behaviors. But the big headliner is the addition of 3D space - including 3D animation for 2D layers, 3D cameras and lights, and 3D enhancements for their particle and text animation systems.

A New Dimension

You can combine 2D and 3D layers (“objects” in Motionspeak) in the same project. To place a layer in 3D space, you toggle a 2D/3D switch for the layer’s group, which then affects all layers inside that group. To move a layer in 3D, select it, and switch from the normal Select/Transform tool to the Adjust 3D Transform tool (shortcut = Q). You can freely drag and spin a layer by dragging on its axes in the viewer, or you can use Motion’s HUD (Heads Up Display - shortcut = F7).

Dragging on various icons inside the HUD constrains your movement to specific axes; holding the Command key while dragging yields useful alternatives. For example, Command+dragging the Z Axis Move icon also adjusts the layer’s Scale so that the layer appears the same size in the active camera view, even as its moves closer or farther away. The same HUD can be used for 3D cameras and lights. The HUD also contains other parameters relevant to the selected object - such as the camera’s Angle of View or a light’s Intensity and Falloff. A subset of these move icons for the camera also appear in the upper right corner of the viewer, even when a non-camera object is selected.

Apple is good at building special tools to perform common tasks. For example, you often want to move a camera to center a layer in its view. To do this in Motion 3, select the camera, click Add Behavior, and choose Camera > Zoom Layer. Then drag and drop the desired layer from the Project pane to the HUD for Zoom Layer. You can adjust the timing of the move through a combination of the HUD’s parameters (which are duplicated in the camera’s Inspector > Behavior’s tab) and the length of this behavior’s bar in the timeline, as shown in the figure below. To then move to another layer, add a second copy of this behavior to the camera and set it up as desired.

To have a 3D camera automatically move to aim at a chosen layer, use the Zoom Layer behavior. The Sweep behavior adds rotation to the mix. To move from layer to layer, employ copies of these behaviors at different points in time.

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