As a motion graphics artists there are a lot of instances when a project is ordered yet no existing footage is available. Being able to tweak pictures and text in this situation is a necessity. I am always happy to try out a new effect that can either make my 2D elements look a lot cooler or save me a lot of time from the usual grind of breaking out layers in Photoshop. Digieffects' Camera Mapper delivers on the former and suffers greatly on the latter.
Here's the basic setup with Camera Mapper, 2 cameras, your pic, and as many solids as you need. For my example, I'm just gonna use one solid to break out the ground of a pic.
Ease of Use
I couldn't figure out Camera Mapper right out of the box, so I ended up watching a few tutorials to get started. The way the plugin works is not exactly intuitive. You have to set up 2 cameras (projection camera and animated camera), a 3D still, and x amount of 3D solids that represent each layer that you want to break out. These solids are "projections" of the layer that you can then move around in 3D space. With some practice this seemingly confusing setup can become second nature.
The 'innards' of Camera Mapper. Not too much under the hood feature-wise.
I was happy to see that the plugin worked with masks for carving out objects with the pen tool. Since objects in photos are rarely all square planes, this feature is a necessity. However, I was never able to get it to look quite right, or at least better than I could have done in Photoshop. One thing I was happy about with this plugin was that it gave subtle believability to objects (like text) outside of the photo. After some toying around with Camera Mapper, it seems to be a plug-in best suited for subtle accents rather than full 3D world creation (which one might otherwise believe by watching some of the official tutorials).
Here's a standard zoom on a 2D pic without Camera Mapper. Nothing special here.
