Tuesday, 8 December 2015

3ds Max exercises 7.1: Path animation

Path animation

As in some real circumstances, the camera can follow a track to automate it's motion. This useful as it saves manually moving it and makes the movement process smoother. Simply setting a destination using keyframes would move the camera toward it without any room for rotating around bends. As shown below, following the drawn out spline allows me to specify exactly where I want things to go, and with the target camera, what I the camera to to focus on rotate and rotate around

                                            

The result of the camera following this flat spline while always focusing on the model is show in the below gif:


As demonstrated below, the path animation method can also allow the camera to smoothly across even vertical curves. This would be useful in a pov shot of a ship moving around a lot. In terms of my animation, this will be useful for the POV of the tow cable where the camera follows it's motion. The result is shown below:


 In preparation for the final animation, I did a test render of the simple 360 around the box. Exporting it as an image sequence has it's benefits, as with my larger scenes this would save the issue of losing progress if for whatever reason the render was cancelled or stopped prematurely. Rendering directly as a video file would have to start from the beginning in that situation. I have used Premier Pro and intend to use this for blending the ambient occulison map and adding in audio.


Good parts:
  • This method saves on moving the camera manually
  • Can follow complex yet smooth paths using splines
  • Is not limited to flat movement

Improvements/Issues:

No comments:

Post a Comment