Blender + After Effects
Ian Pitkanen

- Cameras to Ae Cameras.
- Lights to Ae Lights.
- Objects transformations to Nulls.
- Empties transformations to Nulls.
- Planes (planar) to precomposed shape layers.
- Selected vertices (in vertex mode) to Nulls
- Selected planar Faces (in face mode) to precomposed shape layers.

- Cameras to Ae Cameras.
- Lights to Ae Lights.
- Objects transformations to Nulls.
- Empties transformations to Nulls.
- Planes (planar) to precomposed shape layers.
- Selected vertices (in vertex mode) to Nulls
- Selected planar Faces (in face mode) to precomposed shape layers.

I wanted to test and see if BlenderAe could handle camera bindings on the timeline between the two programs. On the timeline in Blender you can add a marker using the “M” key on any frame and bind a selected camera to that marker using Ctrl+B with your time marker on the same frame. Now the camera will cut between camera 1 and 2 on playback.
Next, you can install BlenderAe by going to Edit>Preferences>Add-ons>Install Add-on and navigate to your BlenderAe zip file. Install it and make sure the Add-on is checked in the Add-ons list.
With the “N” key you can now access the BlenderAe widget in the viewport.
Shift-select both cameras in your scene, open After Effects, Select “Connect to Ae” in Blender and and then “Export to Ae”.
That’s it. Now your camera data is in After Effects, camera bindings and all in 3D space.
Back in Blender go into Edit mode and select a face on the object we’ll be aligning our text with. Hit “Export to Ae” again.
Then before heading back into Ae let’s export our phone screen by itself by hiding all our other objects and using holdouts with “Transparent” activated under “Film” so we can layer the glass over the text and get that nice reflection in our final animation.
Here’s our glass layer and our rendered footage with the plane we exported layered over the phone. No need to track or align anything. The data and cameras from the 3D scene are working in unison with the footage. In most cases you would probably want to use an EXR with all of your objects identified for compositing but we’ll stick with this to keep things simple.
Here we can add our text and animation, layer our glass pass over the top and set it to multiply, and lower the transparency.
