After Effects’ motion tracking has been one of the cornerstones of its power for some time, allowing you to track an object within a frame automatically and make other objects follow it – useful for compositing flames into the hands of spell-casting wizards, for example. Rounding off the trip into other dimensions, After Effects CS4 now bundles Imagineer Systems’ Mocha to create what it calls ‘2.5D planar motion tracking’. You can’t model in 3D or create complicated 3D animations, but it’s still a major step forward for After Effects. Using the camera tools, animated motion around objects can be created and you can also apply effects such as distortions to those objects, the results of which again operate in three dimensions. With the support for Photoshop Extended’s 3D layers, true three-dimensional objects are now supported. Although 3D layers arrived back in version five of After Effects, they were basically 2D planes situated in 3D space. The biggest extension into the third dimension, however, is the ability to import 3D layers from Photoshop.

Planar tracking after effects