camera animation

[flipside]

Hi,

I'm animating a camera to fly in and out a 3d model, a bit like a spacship flying through space avoiding meteors and stuff like that

I tried using a target cam with both cam and target constrained to a path. Also tried a free cam with lookat constraint. But I find it a real pain to animate the speed of the camera travel over the path by using the % value (even with curve editor). I would like to do it without a path, but then it gets more difficult to move the camera exactly where you want in between two keyframes, and the motion becomes chunky if I keep adding more and more keyframes...

How do you usually set up a camera animation? Do you use path constraints or not? Or is there something obvious I am missing...

thanks,

wouter

[joconnell]

Heya Wouter -

Normally I either use keyframes or path animation along a nurbs curve to keep everything smooth. One thing that's made a difference though is to seperate the different parts of the animation in terms of roll, pan, tilt and movement. For example I'd normally have one null that does the position and pan / side to side looking animation. Parented on to this i'd have a null that does the tilt / up and down animation and then the camera itself which does the roll / dutching animation - for flyarounds I find it much easier to get the correct amount of swing on the camera when you're only animating a single axis per time as opposed to dealing with gimbal lock etc. I'd do this with a free camera too.

[flipside]

Hi there!

With "a null" I suppose you mean something like a dummy object which you link the camera to?

[joconnell]

That's exactly it - just a few points - it gives me a lot more flexibility than try to animate everything on the one controller - if you're a camera man, the camera itself weighs quite a big so they don't move very quickly - often the pan will happen after the camera starts moving because you need to put some energy to get its weight moving in the first place so it's nice to be able to first of all animate the position of the camera and its pan, then maybe delay the pan a tiny bit, then add a little bit of roll where the camera is swaying from side to side - works better than fighting with one set of curves.

[kimgar]

hey those are some great tips joconnel!
i often find myself fighting with camera control on flybys, your ideas sounds very clean and logical - gonna try that the next time

great tips, thanks!

[flipside]

Just to check if I get it right.

You create for example a free cam. Then also a dummy for left/right/fwd/back. And a dummy for up & down. Then you link the camera to the up/down dummy, and the up/down dummy to the left/right dummy? So that when you move left the cam always follows, but when you rotate the camera the two dummies don't rotate with it? And if you move the up/down dummy, the left/right dummy doesn't move up/down with it (this seems strange to me).

Do you also set the controllers of each dummy and cam to something else than the default? Would you for example delete the rotation controller on the movement dummies?

Thanks for the help!

[glyph]

I've tried both methods and come down to using a target cam with both cam and target on paths - I find the linked multiple dummy system easy to mess up when I select the wrong dummy
Putting the target on a path can give a drifting look to the sequence as the target is by default always moving, so its worth thinking it through and planning moves carefully
(though I usually start by duplicating the camera path and then shift it in space so its ahead for the target path)

it can get tricky if the client asks for the camera to slow down a lot on a bit which used to be fast (less trouble if everything is free)
adding an ease curve can help but can also over complicate it

but I guess its what I've tried and it works for me!