Adding 3d parallax effects from stills how to#
Adding 3d parallax effects from stills archive#

That was the film that inspired my project, In Saturn's Rings ( ). However, you failed to mention the Kid Stays in this Picture - the film that really refined and created this process via After Effects almost 10 years ago.

Adding 3d parallax effects from stills archive#

A still shot shows up on-screen, and it appears to be moving in 3D space, the camera zooming or tracking forward toward the subject.Īccording to an article from The Creators Project, Fellows worked on the 2D animations for Ad Hoc Films to create incredible visuals for the World Wildlife Foundation, using their photo archive to create the parallax effect show in the video below: We've seen this effect in the title sequences and end credits in films, where still photos are animated to have 3D look - mostly in recent action films.

By separating the background, mid, and foreground, you can animate your photos creating a parallax effect that will turn your simple 2D still images into moving 3D storytelling devices.

Adding 3d parallax effects from stills how to#

We've seen this used in countless film intro sequences, and now motion graphics artist and director Joe Fellows shows us how to achieve this 3D effect in After Effects. One of the post-production techniques I've yearned to know more about was animating still photos.

To the children of that element apply a translation in Z, and scale them back up to provide parallax motion without affecting their size on screen.

To that same element apply a perspective value, and a perspective-origin set to top left, or 0 0.

Set up a containing element to scroll with overflow-y: scroll (and probably overflow-x: hidden).

# CSS in 3Dīoth Scott Kellum and Keith Clark have done significant work in the area of using CSS 3D to achieve parallax motion, and the technique they use is effectively this: If we want to deliver on the promise of parallax motion, we want something that can be applied as an accelerated property (which today means sticking to transforms and opacity), and which doesn’t rely on scroll events. Many solutions attempt to change background-position to provide the parallax look, which causes the browser to repaint the affected parts of the page on scroll, and that can be costly enough to significantly jank the animation. # Bad: updating background-positionĪnother situation we’d like to avoid is painting on every frame. If the main thread is busy with any other work, scroll events will not get delivered immediately, meaning the parallax effect will be lost. More recent versions do deliver scroll events during the animation, but, similarly to Chrome, on a 'best-effort' basis.

In older versions of Mobile Safari, scroll events were actually delivered at the end of the scroll, which made it impossible to make a JavaScript-based scroll effect. This important piece of information tells us why we need to avoid a JavaScript-based solution that moves elements based on scroll events: JavaScript doesn’t guarantee that parallaxing will keep in step with the page’s scroll position. In most browsers scroll events are delivered as 'best-effort' and are not guaranteed to be delivered on every frame of the scroll animation! This applies, in our particular case, to scroll events. While that sounds simple, an important mechanism of modern browsers is their ability to work asynchronously.

The key requirement of parallaxing is that it should be scroll-coupled for every single change in the page’s scroll position, the parallaxing element's position should update. To begin with, let’s take a look at two common ways of achieving a parallax effect, and in particular, why they are unsuitable for our purposes. If you want the drop-in solution, head over to the UI Element Samples GitHub repo and grab the Parallax helper JS! You can see a live demo of the parallax scroller in the GitHub repo.

For Mobile Safari use position: sticky to ensure that the parallax effect gets propagated.

Use CSS 3D transforms to create a more accurate parallax effect.

Don’t use scroll events or background-position to create parallax animations.

In this article, we’ll discuss a solution that is both performant and, just as importantly, works cross-browser. The problem, however, is that implementing parallaxing in a performant way can be challenging. When used judiciously, it can add depth and subtlety to a web app. Love it or hate it, parallaxing is here to stay.