Camera Animation Tips for 3D Artists

all right so today we're talking camera animation and most of the stuff I'm going to tell you in this video will be applicable regardless of what software you're using because I have most of my camera experience not from animating it in a few shots but from doing actual videography in the real world with a physical camera there's a lot of things that I have noticed that usually aren't done very well when it comes to animating a camera things I've done that I think I can help maybe steer people away from so we're gonna start from the basics just a few camera staging and cinematography rules that are just good to know if you don't already know them we're gonna work our way up into some camera settings you need to know about some animation tips for actually getting it in animating the camera regardless of what software you're using then we'll end on some more advanced workflows and other tools that will be useful for you to know that will make your life easier dealing with cameras sound good cool in case you hear hi I'm sir Wade and we do a ton of animation stuff here on the channel so subscribe if you haven't already like this video if you find it helpful and links below to twit you've got to talk about this kind of stuff live to my patreon if you wanna support the channel and so on let's jump in let's do some camera stuff we have a lot to talk about so in Tamiya and those of you who are here for my blender videos have enough here you can use all the same stuff I'm about to show in this video most of my Maya videos are like that they're useful tips regardless of the software but I am best and most comfortable in Maya so I'm gonna be using my a today alright so save got a scene with two characters we've got i f with two different variations and this is an acting scene so these characters gonna talk let's talk about the different shot types we'll start the basics if our camera were out super far we'd probably call this an establishing shot I don't have a set here which I probably should to get the full effect but an establishing shot just shows you the big picture super zoomed out you can see what other props and what the environment looks like so you really establish the scene the setting all that kind of stuff pretty straightforward now focusing on the character with the blue shirt this is what we would consider a wide shot you can see the whole character then I can go to a medium shot usually about the torso maybe a little bit further a close-up which is you know maybe from the chest to the head then you've got the extreme close-up which is just the face and a super extreme close-up is just the eyes these will shift a little bit depending on where you hear the information this is what I was told but these are the general kind of jumps that you would make with your camera but a few things to avoid in the medium shot you shouldn't have the character's head grazing the top of frame most likely there are rules that can be broken in all cases here but you usually don't to have your character cut off at some kind of a joint then these the hips very top of the head things like that so find kind of a center point where that's not an issue also should be noted in the software this is not a good accurate representation of the camera you actually need to turn on the camera preview to see the border of the actual render so you you may need to adjust but for this video we're just gonna go with the viewport as our camera now the distance from the character starts to become really important as you look at the settings for those cameras for example here we have a wide shot with both characters and it's a very static flat shot we're not talked about the interest necessarily here but we've got both characters in full view and that's fine this is a wide shot but if we go in mid you'll notice that the characters at this point they're actually starting to distort if you look at the the shape of their faces they're starting to kind of widen which is weird so the camera is actually distorting them in an interesting way versus this camera view where they're just completely side profile now the camera is actually at the same general angle it's just to the very side of them exactly the side pointing straight towards them there's no difference aside from the focal length which we'll talk about in a second but you do want to keep in mind whether or not your characters are being distorted and what I just wanted to show you in practice that this can really affect your shot for a lot of different reasons now this wouldn't be a camera video if we didn't briefly mention the 180 rule if you haven't heard of this rule before this is a filmmaking technique slash rule that you should follow there's always exceptions there's always reasons to break things but in most cases you're gonna want to listen to this one now the 180 rule is this into when you have two characters that are interacting in some way if you were to draw a line through both of them your camera can exist anywhere on this 180 degrees of the circle your camera cannot cross this line the reason for that is because it would be jarring to the audience let me show you what this means and if you're familiar with this roll bear with me we're gonna get to the advanced stuff in a minute now this rule is usually referring to when you are dealing with multiple shots stuck together you're editing them together that's called a sequence a sequence is composed of many different shots every time the camera cuts that's a new shot and that looks like this orange shirt on the left blue shirt on the right and you just keep it that way no matter where this camera goes no matter what it does you just don't flip it so you can cut from here you can cut from here we can do an over-the-shoulder shot where we are watching one talked to the other you can flip and cut to the other camera you can go back and forth all you want because orange is left and blue is right give you a wide shot you can cut back in you can jump from older to the shoulder to the other of the shoulder you can do a medium shot you can cut back in you can have a super super wide shot for some reason what you're trying to avoid is having this orange on the left suddenly flip to the right that's what throws the audience off and you don't want to do that so just rule the thumb follow the 180 roll there you go and there are camera positioning rules with power dynamics if you have your camera having a character look down at another it makes the character in blue here feel a lot more powerful than the one in orange she's talking down to her even though we know they're at the same height but the camera angle is implying that one character has more power versus this up angle this is in this case it's actually kind of showing us the same thing we're reversing the orange character having more power the blue character looking like she's looking up so it's the same power dynamic but from two different angles and if we're just looking at one character looking down on this character same thing it makes this character feel more powerless looking up at her you get a much more heroic looking off into the distance it's gonna go fight a monster type of deal so this kind of dips into the psychology of how the camera will make the audience feel also very important but trying to go fast so I can show you how to animate the cameras so hope this was a good refresher now let's dive into the settings part and how to actually animate these cameras once you have them in place now something super important that you should consider when you are animating a camera or even if your cameras gonna stay static anytime you're setting up a shot in CG this is something that gets overlooked all the time because having a camera that you can just hit create camera we can really take for granted the default settings but it's an important part to look at the focal length that's like the number one setting that I would recommend you take a look at it can make a big difference in your shot so in Maya selecting the camera icon and coming over to the right control either switches over the attribute editor you can do the same thing in blender by hitting what is it the N key and then it pulls up that menu is that right I think is the I don't know you want to look for the focal length now focal length becomes very important for I guess two or three main reasons number one is the actual appearance of your character their face their body proportions any distortion that might happen the background is number two and number three is kind of like the energy of the way your shot feels for the audience this one's a lot easier to show you than to tell you so let's just let's just do that this is what happened if I look at the character through a 50 millimeter lens I believe this is my as default it might be blenders default I'm not really sure this is what we would consider a portrait photography type of lens and what happens is if we make the focal length smaller the number becomes smaller the angle becomes wider so we see more of the background but it also distorts the character in an interesting way so I go from 50 millimetres down to 24 millimetres you can see we see more of the background but her face starts to get more fish I'd if I go all the way down to 14 millimetres she gets really distorted and we can see more of that cube so comparing that to a 24 see we only at the top of this cube and then the 14 we can see the whole cube but the other objects are being pushed further back behind her obscured by her distorted face so you can kind of see the difference as I jumped between 14 24 and 50 so it changes the way we see the character but it also changed the background if I go up to an 85 millimeter her face gets flatter more round as it compresses the distance you can also see that cone looks a lot closer to the camera if I jump to a 200 millimeter lens it looks like she's like inside of this tourist that met cone is right next to her when we look at the longer lens or the bigger number of focal lengths look at the position of the tourist this ring behind her as we get to the bigger numbers it looks like it's coming closer and closer towards the camera right what's happening is a longer focal length is taking all that that long distance that telescope telescopic distance and compressing it making it all feel like it's very close to us which is why her face back to front is kind of flattening out and we're getting a more rounded shape versus this which is opening up and we're seeing a lot of the sides and it's kind of curving it's a whole thing this is obviously making a big difference to our character so you're gonna want to adjust the focal length to suit whatever it is you're doing now if you just rule of thumbs for you if you are animating some kind of high-energy action parkour or something like that and you want to really dynamic if you have a character moving their arms back and forth like this the distance from the camera in a way is gonna get a lot more aggressive in a smaller focal length a wider angle of view so if you have a say 24 millimeter or a 14 millimeter you may not want it but what happens is anything that gets closer to the camera becomes very very large compared to anything that's really far away if we just move the camera physically in and out you will see this effect become more or less as you get closer or further from the camera so if you're very far away with a wide lens you may not notice it but as things get closer to the lens they distort more you can kind of see the effect here versus here at 85 as I move the camera I get really close to the character it's not distorting her face really at all you'll usually see more comedy shots set to something less than fifty more dramatic like background blurry TV drama type things those happen in like 70 85 millimeters more longer focal lengths will give you that blurry background really intense focus zoomed in on the character that's usually how those are filmed that blurry background is something you can turn on in the 3d software Maya it's pretty slow blender is actually really fast so depending on your tool you can do it often it's just recommended to not worry about that while you animate do it and post do it as a compositing effect and it's just much simpler that way you talked about in another video for now we got to talk about animating these cameras finally after all this time so let's animate something now camera animation is not the easiest thing to just do it's it's one of the fastest ways to get your shot completely unwatchable if you are trying to do a demo reel I recommend just not doing any camera animation unless you know what you're doing because if you make the camera really aggressive really jerky really fast doing a lot of cuts it just it will completely disorient you oughta ins or make the motion sick and nobody wants that so a few tips as you're animate your cameras to hopefully not have that happen so if you set a key on the first frame of your shot and then you go to the last frame where you want your camera to be if you do just a simple maybe a zoom and a pan to be very simple translation but no rotation that will give you a subtle little zoom so this is just a dolly in a pan nothing crazy keeping it limited to just translation or just rotation will make it a lot easier to control your shot than not to make people just upset watching it having a lot of keyframes for whatever reason is one of the fastest way to get jerky animation so keep the keyframes to a minimum and also know how to adjust the splines in the graph editor if you need any help with that I have a video on the graph editor helps immensely I probably recommend checking that out but jerky animation is bad obviously the background elements are moving a lot both characters are swinging around there's a lot happening and we haven't really done all that much so it's very easy to get out of hand quickly with your camera stuff so a few additional tips are obviously keep the minimal amount of keyframes that you can keep your splines as smooth as possible if we're looking at these these curves are not smooth and usually with animation you're not just trying to make all your splines look super pretty because you may need to keep some organic motion that maybe has some some jagged edges and things like that cameras usually don't apply in that way unless you're going for a very specific look and you know how to get that and you did it on purpose cool but for most of us you you don't want all these little jumpy parts and not that you necessarily just want to start the leading keys like I'm doing now because even by doing that we can still have jerky animation we saw a lot of stuff going on so that's why you need to understand what's actually happening in the graph editor but just know that you want it to be as smooth as possible one of the biggest things to remember is that these cameras aren't just these little floating things in your 3d software they represent real equipment did he represent a small little phone they may be a giant cinema camera on a dolly in this big mechanized motorized thing regardless they represent something that's heavy or at least has some amount of weight so you don't want your camera just zoom into the scene whipping around as if it weighs nothing because in the software it doesn't obviously but you need to really think about not just how is the camera moving but imagine there's somebody holding that camera if it's heavy and they need to whip it to the side they've got to build up momentum and then push it and then slow it down that'll needs to feel real and grounded otherwise your shots just gonna feel really CG your camera's gonna feel very computer-generated and fake here's another big one usually not to do it's fine to rotate the camera up and down its find a movement left it right when you're rotating don't go side to side try not to roll the camera like this that is how you trigger motion sickness it can give you Dutch angles it can give you like being on a boat and different things there are reasons why it can be useful but it destabilizes the ground it gets you off balance which may be in effect you're going for but only if you really know what you're doing that is one of the fastest way to make people seasick or just motion sick and that's why VR doesn't work for a lot of people because you get that sensation and it puts things off balance and don't do it if this rule doesn't apply to you you probably already know that so if you're watching this video and absorbing these things as lessons just take that one as one to follow for now don't roll the camera your viewers will thank you and because of that you probably don't want to just move your camera around like this because it may move on all three axes you want to be a lot more intentional about which of the three axes you are messing with at time so blender users don't just hit the R key and start spinning you're gonna get that all right now for some advanced workflows here's our camera here is the actual what that camera looks like so they move around kind of see it there a few quick things one thing you can do is let's say you are you're animating a rollercoaster character flying a dragon something like that and your your stuff needs to move through space you may not want to animate the camera trying to keyframe it alongside your character so it would be easier to parent or constrain that camera to your to your object whatever is moving there's a few ways you can do that the easiest way and probably not something you want to do in this way but you could just easily grab the camera and parent it to whatever so in this case I've just created a face cam as the head moves the camera follows it that could be helpful if for some reason you need the camera to follow a character's face then no matter what they do that's gonna stick there this is not something I recommend as a way to animate your characters face for the entirety of your shot I've tried this before as a student I was like ah my character's head is moving all over the place I'm just gonna have the camera locked on and I'll animate the whole face that way this doesn't show you what the face would look like from the actual render camera front of you like where your real camera is gonna be so I wouldn't recommend that maybe to get some lip sync stuff just to get you know general not having to chase your character around and see how it looks but ultimately it's not the full solution now if you're just trying to animate a simple turntable your asset that you've created and a camera op just moving around it there is a really easy way to do it it's in the animation menu set under visualize there's a create turntable button or if you go into there you can kind of decide how this works how long is the turntable in which direction does it go that will automatically create a camera it's been your asset and render it out but that's usually not what we want especially for just a regular shot now rather than trying to actually take this camera and manipulate it in a circle and rotate it and deal with the keyframes no one wants to do that so an easier way is this if you create a locator or in blender I guess it's called an empty if you create some kind of an object like so and then parent your camera to that all you need to do is animate that locator 360 degrees along around that vertical axis and you will have a perfect 3d 360 spin and it's not limited to just doing a 360 spin you can just have it as an easy way to move your camera from a specific point cuz a little bit of tweaking we can make this feel more like the characters going from a cutscene to maybe some kind of third-person video game animation now another good trick this is when you do need the camera to move through a scene you may again not want to just keyframe the camera and try to smooth out the curves so something you can do is there's a whole bunch of curve tools inside of Maya or blender or whatever tool you can draw them manually if you have a Cintiq or a stylus of any kind some kind of a graphic display tablet I have a few recommendations linked below if you're in the market for one I'll also be reviewing this one over here shortly so video coming up on that either way if you create a curve in your software you can attach camera to that path so we take the camera take the curve and have it go up to the animation tool set go to constrain motion path attach to motion paths hit this option box you can control maybe you want to change how long this takes you you want to probably set the front axes so in this case the Z is the front y is up that's backwards from blender you can play with these settings one thing that you can turn on this Bank that is if you want to do maybe like a first-person camera and as it's you know turning it's kind of banking side to side you can have that automatically happen from the curve I'm not gonna worry about that we'll deal with that another time and if you're wondering like what are all these settings how do you mess with this I want more information come hang out on Twitch ask me these questions live I could I do a bunch of this kind of demo stuff live on Twitch so what does it attach for now so if I make a whole bunch of cubes just so we have kind of a world to exist within and we go ahead and hit play you can see that that camera is going very fast but it's zipping around that control path and we can easily make adjustments to where this path will go by messing with the actual curve itself and you can use all your soft selection tools and regular modeling tools that you'd expect and you'll see it moves the camera along that path so if you need to create a rollercoaster for your camera to do its thing you can use tools like this to get the camera animation more dialed in and much more visual than trying to use the actual motion path tool inside of software like my ik is the motion path tools but this is a little bit easier to mess with in my opinion but if you are gonna do this probably don't draw the curve you can see how many just dots there are that's a lot to mess with if you use something like the Bezier tool you can get different shapes with much fewer control points so just a few curves and their handles it's a lot easier to tweak it and make those changes then something with a million control vertices now there's one more camera tool that I need to talk about that's called the camera sequencer inside of Maya I don't have time to talk about it it's gonna take me far too long this videos long enough already so if you want to know more about the camera sequencer come hang out on Twitch I may do have another video in the future where I tackle this but just to give you a brief idea of how this works what you do is you create different cameras you put them where you want them in your scene tight it's best if you do that first makes it easier and then what you'll do is you'll create a shot you'll go to the option and you'll give that shot a name keep a sequential be more specific is up to you and then you pick the camera that you want this shot to correspond to so if you already have out your cameras in place looking at the right spot right angles then you just pick the one from the list you give it a frame start time so if it's you know frame 40 through 350 or something and that's the time that you want that camera active you tell itself and it'll ask you where you want it this is for kind of editing reasons so you just say after current shot that's probably the best way to do it you can also set an image in this case I have an image set from when I was using this on stream that's if you've storyboarded your sequence and you want your cameras to match that it becomes an image plan overlay and it becomes very easy to move your camera around and overlay your geometry so that things line up but regardless you don't need to have that but ultimately what you'll end up with is you'll have a bunch of different shots which I can kind of just show you the idea is you can have a bunch of different shots and you can layer them together and you can create a sequence where your cameras are switching between the active cameras and you put together and you edit within Maya your overall animation the thing is you can also do cool stuff where you maybe have each camera kind of jump back in time so it doesn't have to play from one to a thousand in order you can have a play from 1 to 100 and then from like 80 to 200 so it kind of plays and it goes back in time on the next camera if that makes sense so you can do all your editing inside of Maya and when you go to export you can play blast a selected shots all the shots a certain sequence you can get really complicated you can drop an audio personally I've never done all that I just mix all myself outside of Maya but you have the ability to create a whole camera sequence with what camera comes first and where's it go and someone as a thing that you should know about the camera sequencer exists and that is the proper way to have multiple cameras within one sequence if you have one camera just keyframed jumping around and teleporting around your scene to get the different angles if you render with motion blur it's gonna totally break it but if you just play blasting it's fine no matter that'll work just just well enough for you and it's the thanks for sticking around this long here's one more tip that should be very helpful less is usually more when it comes to camera cuts you don't need five different camera angles jumping back and forth for an entertaining shot it's usually better to just leave the camera mostly stationary and not cut to another angle let the audience really see what's happening is zoomed out enough that you can see what's going on when it comes to live-action they have to cut to cheek things to hide things you know - actors probably don't want to punch each other in the face so you need to trick it with angles and maybe editing to make it look like they hit each other and put a sound effect and animation you can do whatever you want you can have a character punch straight through the other person's head probably a little aggressive but you can do whatever you need so you don't have to do all the same cheats that live-action directors need to mess with so show the action let your audience really appreciate all your work if you enjoyed this video if you learned something please at this button some more people on YouTube see it subscribe if you haven't already the links below to twitch if you want to talk about this stuff live or ask any questions also there's a link to the discord down below which has four or five thousand people in it different artists all hanging out learning from each other a great community to be a part of but hopefully this video gives you an idea of some of the things you can do with your cameras some different ideas to make working and animating with cameras easier and just overall making your shots and more enjoyable experience with people watching but thanks again for watching this whole video will all wait at the end I do appreciate it and I will see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Sir Wade Neistadt

Views: 39,215

Rating: 4.9618182 out of 5

Keywords: camera animation, how to animate cameras, maya camera animation, blender camera animation, blender camera, maya camera, 3d camera settings, focal length, focal length comparison, how do i animate cameras, 3d camera tutorial, animation cinematography, animation staging, animating cameras, 3d camera, 3d camera moves, maya camera tutorial, blender camera tutorial, camera sequencer, blender render camera, maya render camera, maya, blender, animation layout, camera settings, 3d

Id: 43ID41Jrhjs

Length: 23min 24sec (1404 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 24 2020