Subtitles of the Movie

If you're familiar with animation, you may have heard the term Null Object before. But if not, never fear. A null object is simply an invisible none-rendering object that you can use to control elements in your composition. For example, let's say you have a whole bunch of stars in your scene and you just want to use one controller to move them all. You can use a null object. Or, of course, you could group those stars. So what I'm going to do is show you how to make a null object and how to parent things to the null object and actually move the null object itself instead of the object. Once again, the benefit is you have one object that you can use to control things so it's a little easier to choose and you don't have to worry about missing whatever you're trying to click on and you can just use the null object instead. So I'm going to create a new composite and I'm going to just make it 3D for now, click OK and I'm going to go to open up some footage that you'll find in the Galaxy Folder. So we're going to bring in the star field. We're going to bring in the nebula by Control Clicking and we'll bring in Mars. So we'll bring in these three pieces of artwork and we're what we're going to do is we're going to create a null object to create movement for the planet. So I'm going to just go to a one-up view for now. So I can just focus on that. OK. So here's Mars and what I want to do is add a null object. So I'm going to go to my Object Menu and choose New Null Object. It appears in the workspace and you're looking at it right here. This is the null object. If you were to render, it would not appear. It remains invisible at all times. Now what I want to do is over here I want to parent it. So I'm going to choose the child first and then the parent, which will be the null object. But what I'm going to do is actually make a null object for the star field first. So I'm going to increase the scale of the star field pretty big and I'll move it over as well so I can show you that we can animate with this null object. So we have the star field and if you look in the Parent List here, we see the star field is the currently selected object and I'm going to choose the null object as the parent. So when I click on the null and I move the null, the star field follows. So what I can do is animate now based on that null. So I'll click Animate, go to my last frame and move my null and the star field follows. I'll turn that off and let's see what we have. The cool thing about a null object is that your child will do whatever the null does, so if I scale the null, the star field gets bigger. I can shear it, I can rotate it and whatever I'd like to do and the child will follow suit. That's the beauty of it. Now let's go ahead and make the null object more obvious as to what the child is. So I'll right click and I will rename this by getting rid of the word Object and just putting Star Field in front. So this is the Star Field Null. I'll create one for Mars now. So I'll click on Object, New Null Object and once again I right click and I will get this guy the name Mars Null and I'm going to choose the child and then choose the Mars Null as the parent. So when I grab the Mars Null, the planet follows. And the really cool thing is you can have your nulls in one location and quickly grab them from the list to make your animations. And that's really all there is to a null object. It's just an object that does not render that gives you the ability to control another object.