How To Position An Object Properly In A Scene After Camera Tracking - After Effects

 How to position your object/text/whatever properly after running After Effects 3d Camera Tracker.

For some reason I always fail to remember this simple step:

 After the tracking is done and the camera is solved by AE, right click on a point or a target and create Null+Camera.

The thing to understand is that this Null is the actual position where you want to add you 3D objet so that it feels like it belongs to the scene.

As a side note, if you have several objects in several places, you must have several corresponding Nulls.

Anyway back to inserting a 3D object into the scene. When you bring in a new object/image/watever, first click on the cube to make it a 3D layer. That will probably wreak it up and move the 3D object to a random place. Not to worry.

Remember at this point to not try to move the object by hand try and make it go where you think it should go. I always have a tendency to do that and I have to make an effort to not do it.

Instead select the Null to which the object is attached, hit P for position and select Position (the word) and Command + C for Copy. You are copying the Null position to the 3D object which makes sense because that's where it belongs!

Now select the 3D object and hit P again, select Position (the word) and Command + V for Paste. All XYZ positions for the object and its associated Null should now match.

Now wherever you scrubbing/playing in the timeline, the object will match the track rock solid and feel like it belongs to the scene.

You can adjust scale, anchor point and rotate the 3D object as needed, but do not change its position.