After Effects CS6 Tutorial - 138 - Parenting to Nulls Video Lecture | Adobe After Effects CS6: Complete Course from Novice to Pro - IT & Software

hello everybody what's going on buddy
Blackford here with another After
Effects cs6 tutorial and I want to go
over parenting with nulls this time and
how to use nulls in case you don't need
to parent to a specific object in your
scene so what if we want to take this
logo here and we want these teardrops to
rotate around with each other all at the
same time but then after that break off
into their own areas and move in
position on their own so we can't just
parent them to the brown no because then
when we move the to the brown teardrop
because when we move the brown teardrop
on its own these other two are gonna
follow it and you can't keyframe
parenting so what we need to do is
parent these to a null object what I'm
talking about is for you go up here to
layer and we go to new we go to normal
object and a null object pretty much is
just a an object with no properties on
it that can be used to parent to it can
be used for all sorts of things and I'll
go over like some different uses of
nulls in another tutorial but this is
one of them here so what I wanted to do
is probably line up this null with the
anchor point on this brown teardrop here
so if we line that up let's find the
ground drop here if we put down our our
guidelines and our rulers so if we go
here to show rulers we can bring down
our rulers to figure out where the null
is when we need to position our null
object or the anchor point is when we
need to position our null object keep on
saying Nolan place it like everything
but so let's move this and you don't
need to move the anchor point within all
you can just move the actual null itself
there we go so that the anchor point of
the null is usually in the top left of
this little square here so now we've got
that right in the middle there now we
can parent in all of these teardrops to
it so let me do that no 11 in all 11 and
all 11 so now I can move this Knoll
around with its position and these will
follow same with the rotation and
everything that parenting allows you to
move one parenting so its position
rotation and scale so what we want it to
do is have these do something like a
rotation and then like split off or
something like that
so let's actually do like a position and
then we'll have them split off so I'll
show you what I mean we can start them
there move ahead a second make a
position keyframe move ahead another
second and we'll move this down to here
and then that way we can take each of
these drops and move them well actually
we've got a kiefer in them so let's open
the position of these guys
the keyframe buttons so they're still
gonna move on their own here or together
here and once they get to here we can
move them on their own so this one can
it will bring it down and these two we
can move them to the left and to the
right
to get something like this
yeah I should have supposed to keyframe
those second ahead I forgot to move
ahead let's do it again bring these down
he'll take two seconds one two I guess I
was wrong
now here's what I'm talking about
they both come down while while their
parent doesn't know and now everything
can move off on its own so that's what
I'm talking about there now a really
good useful or using a null to be a
parent is when you use a 3d camera and
actually doesn't have to be a TV camera
it's just a regular camera and I went
over different types of camera rigs with
you in a previous tutorial where we use
nulls to move the cameras around and
that's an advanced tactic that people
use when moving cameras since it's a lot
easier and you don't have to move around
the actual camera and mess with its
different values so you can keep the
values like position and rotation
separate you could also create separate
nulls and name them either position
movement or rotation movement and you
can still have them the other drops like
parented to it and everything like that
so that's how you use nulls there and
they're basically good for parenting -
that's the main thing I always use them
for so thank you for watching this
tutorial thumbs up it if you would like
and thumbs down and if you would like
also subscribe for more videos and I
look forward to seeing you guys in the
next tutorial that I'd make up have a
good one everybody