Blender 2.8 Set Up a Camera Rig and Animate On A Path

hey this is Kevin bender binge in this video I'm gonna show you how to animate a camera on a curve using an empty and set up that rig that I had alluded to in the last video so I got some comments and people want to see it so I'm gonna use a camera instead of that really awesome spaceship thingy that I used and it's gonna be really cool for you so let's go so you see the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna need something to animate on so I want to animate on a path to make a nice smooth camera motion so I'm gonna go ahead and add in a curve and I'll say circle okay Bezier circle and I'll just go ahead and scale him up a little bit and I'll say about six seems to be pretty good so now I have a nice wide circle kind of moving around and we're gonna go ahead and create a simple rig that's gonna be pretty useful and as this video moves on you'll see how useful it really is so the first thing I'll do here is I will create a empty and for this tutorial I'll use a cube so you can see it so here's our empty an empty is just a non rendering object it's never gonna render it's never gonna show up it's never gonna ruin your scene it's just kind of there to be used as a tool and you'll see how we use it now so for this I'm gonna end up having this move around the circle and have this parented to this so the first thing I want to do is you notice our camera is out here in the middle of nowhere alright so if I go here this little arrow thingy or I hit N on the keyboard that shows this hides it shows it okay n does that you see here that the location and the rotation are kind of weird right so we could go in here the long way to do this is to go in and type zero zero all these out or you can click and drag and hit zero once and zero mount or there's a really cool shortcut from an old version of blender that allows you to Center an object just with a keyboard shortcut so if I hit alt G that's going to zero out my location so alt G snaps it in to the center and then to clear out the rotation here I'm just going to hit alt R so that's zero is it all out so now you see it's perfectly centered with our perfectly centered empty so now I'm going to do is I'm going to select the camera then I'm going to shift select the cube I'm gonna right click and hit parent and or you could hit control P that works too and I'll go ahead and say object and it says object keep transform sure okay that's cool so now what we have is we have this camera parented to our empty so if I go ahead and I hit the move tool here you can see that it moves with the empty and that's exactly what we want so now all that's left to do for this part is to parent this to this so we want this to move around this now in that video that I talked about in the beginning of this video which showed you how to parent things and how to how to get stuff to animate on a path I did two ways I choose and prefer to use the constraint mode so I'll show you that now so if I have this select didn't I go over here to this constraint tool over here this little glyph I can say add object constraint and go to follow path under relationship follow path and then we just have to choose the target so what what path we want to follow that's what target here means so if I click this little thing I can say bezzie ik circle boom there it is and the last thing I want to do here is I'm gonna sit follow a curve and I'm going to say fixed position and what that does fixed position gives us this offset variable so I can now go from 0 to 1 0 being where it's at and if I click and drag in here with my left mouse button 1 is 360 degrees around the circle so this can control our pan for the camera or our kind of movement for the camera alright so you're looking at this and going well that's great cool that's wonderful but your camera's still pointing straight down well yeah we're gonna fix that so the first thing 1 to do here to fix that is select the camera and what I want the camera to do I mean I could go and rotate this in but it's still only gonna like if I just rotate this it's not going to track to Suzanne so we want this to always be pointing at Suzanne for this move so what we'll do here is we'll use another constraint okay under constraint add object constraint and we say track two and we give it a target what we want to track it to in our case Suzanne so boom so now it's not tracking this is n that's do pretty much doing exactly what you thought it would right so we have to fix this how do we do that let's take a look at our axes here so we have these axes that we can use so you can go through these and really kind of tear your head off or you could just follow me do exactly what I just did and hit up Y and negative Z okay and that's going to point it directly at Suzanne okay so you probably just want to take those settings if you're following along but know that you might have to frustratingly play with these depending on what axes you're on and so on and so forth so just know that's a little bit tricky but it ultimately works now you'll see here if I go to my know my empty here and I view offset you see the camera that little blue dot appears dotted line and now my camera is always staring at Suzanne well that's really cool all right so if I go into camera view I hit 0 on the keyboard and I go into camera view all right and I select my empty alright we're still here offset and I offset we get a nice turntable if Suzanne look like great cab that's just wonderful I could have just like grabbed Suzanne and like turned her around set keyframes a little big deal I'm watching this video haha why are you watching this video because we're gonna do something really cool it you can't do if you just did that so watch this I can now take my camera okay let's set it let's set some keyframes here so I'm gonna go ahead and I'll say offset at frame 1 let me pull this up so you can see it better yeah I'll set a frame 1 I'm gonna right-click and say insert keyframe and then I'm gonna go out to frame Lana 120 is fine and I'm gonna zoom up maybe to about there and I'm gonna say right-click and say insert keyframe there so now I have this little motion happening where the camera does this little kind of pan all right and if I hit zero you'll see that we're doing this little pan here all right so still it's a big deal right so you were able to do that you could have just done that by you know turning Suzanne however what you can do now because this is this camera is separate from the object that's moving it you can now keyframe the camera to do different things all right so let's just say okay I'm gonna go offset at zero and I'll select the camera and I'll set a keyframe for the camera so I'm just gonna go up here I'm gonna say location and I'm just gonna say right-click say insert keyframes and then I'll go to the last frame 120 and I'll click here and I'll say insert keyframes and now I have these keyframes so what I can do is here now I can move this guy up and I'll just say replace keyframes and then at frame 120 I could pull him down a little bit sorry oops pull him down a little bit here make sure you're on the keyframe replace keyframes and now we have a nice smooth motion of that happening so let's see what that looks like I hit zero and now you can see if I hit play we have kind of a nice smooth motion alright and if I set that backward you know it could have been like an establishing shot right a nice kind of crane shot so you can play around with this and really get some nice smooth motion going and the really nice thing about the fact that I did this with constraints now is I can change this to my graph editor and let me pull this up so you can see this better and we now have okay if if I kind of go out here a little bit we now have if I hit shift all right so I have a hit home key and you can see everything here what we have is we have the object transforms okay we have the location x y&z location and we also have this empty offset factor right here so we can go ahead and in this interface here we don't have to bounce over to curve and look for that relations and all that stuff we can just do it all in here and select you know it's uh let's go here and we can start pulling things around and you can see that when you move things around in here okay you can start really affecting the entire timing alright if you didn't want it to start off slow and end slow okay you could select say the Z location here alright or we could do the offset factor here and I can select both of these or all of these and I can go to key interpolation mode and I can say linear and now everything is a linear motion okay so it's kind of doing its linear thing and now it's going all the way around so you can do a whole lot just by playing in here and everything is right here and lastly the last thing I want to discuss too is that sometimes you you might not want to and I'll just back that out here all that stuff I just did you might not want to always look at Suzanne right because that's kind of boring you want a little control over where your camera moves right so the last thing I'm going to do in this video show you how to set that up so I'll go back here to timeline and we will now instead of having the camera point at Suzanne we're gonna add in another null object so I'm gonna go add or empty I should say it's called null in a lot of other programs uh empty is in blender I'll go ahead and I'll use a sphere so we could see it and now instead of I go back to the camera instead of the target being Suzanne I'm gonna say empty okay so it didn't call it an empty sphere it's empty oo one choose that and now if I move the empty here I move the target of the camera so I can keyframe this as well so you'll see here if I hit 0 on the Kevon a numeric keypad okay we're doing this nice sweep but we can also a keyframe for this I'll say if I want to move this guy a little bit over here and aim him a little bit differently like over here set a keyframe so I'll set a keyframe here right click say insert keyframes and go out to like 120 maybe insert a keyframe back here a little bit all right insert keyframes okay so now it's not perfectly centered and you have a little more control and I didn't hear you could say I want to look at something else so in this case I'll just hit the G key move him around I can move them independently wherever I want all right keyframe it there insert keyframe and now I have this kind of motion being controlled by something else so my camera is completely completely free it's still being controlled by that curve is still being animated on the curve but I have all these other options where I can aim the camera and I can move the camera up and down so it gives me a lot more control and this is a really nice little simple rig that you can use in a really quick fashion to start getting some nice smooth camera motions going all right so hopefully that helps and if you got something on this video you know hit subscribe hit that little Bell notification so you see more of these videos when they come out share it whatever comment sections open I encourage you to be nice but I'll do my best to help you out if you got lost at all so with that let's close this out and I'll see you in the next video thanks

Channel: Kev Binge

Views: 203,715

Rating: 4.9375339 out of 5

Keywords: blender 2.8, camera animation, blender 3d, blender animate on a path, blender 2.8 animation tutorial, how to animate a camera in blender, camera animation in blender, camera rig in blender, curve animation blender, best animation schools, vfx school online

Id: K02hlKyoWNI

Length: 12min 34sec (754 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 03 2019