Cameras in Maya- Camera and Aim

hello everybody in this video we're going to take a look at a special kind of camera a camera called camera and aim so first of all let's take a look at this character that i have in my scene here i'm currently looking through my perspective camera and if i play we see that the character walks off screen now i typically recommend creating your own cameras that you'll use for rendering from and keeping your perspective camera as a working camera so that's exactly what i'm going to do i'm going to create a new camera this will be just a regular camera and i will name this my camera and i'll look through it i'll change my uh what appears to be my front viewport up here right now i'm going to change that to my camera and i'll position it and once again if i hit play we'll see that the character will walk off screen so what if i want the camera to follow the character well of course i can animate the camera and that's exactly what i'm going to do here so i have my camera selected and i will key it scrub in my timeline and aim my camera i'm going to aim it simply by rotating it from the top viewport until i put my character back into view here and let's go ahead and key back camera and rewind and play so let's take a look at another way that we could get this same effect this time i'm going to create a another camera but this time instead of creating a regular camera i'm going to use a camera and aim and when i create one perhaps i'll name well actually i won't rename this one uh but what i'd like you to take note of i probably should rename it but it's in a group here called camera one group and if we expand on that group you'll notice that nested inside is my camera and a second node the aim node let's take a look at what those do i'm going to select my camera node here and i'm going to look through that camera and i'll zoom out so that we get a better view of the character here and i'll hit play and similar to the earlier example the character walks off camera now if i go to my perspective viewport normally the easiest way to position your camera is to simply look through it as i am doing here with my perspective camera and place it wherever you want using your alt and left mouse button to rotate the camera your alt middle mouse button to pan it and alt right mouse button to move in and out with it the camera and aim however works a little bit differently and here's the camera i'm looking through and it will also allow me to zoom in and out but what i'd like you to take note of is that we have these two nodes here we've got a camera node and an aim node let's see what happens if i select the aim node notice that in my top viewport i have my aim node selected here and if i move this aim node you'll see how it's affecting uh the view here in my camera one so the camera is staying in the same position but i'm rotating the camera by moving this aim node here so let's see how we can use this aim node to our advantage i currently have the aim node selected and i'm going to key it i'll scrub in my timeline here and i'll move the aim node so that it once again focuses on my character and i will key that as well and if we rewind and play you'll see that the camera more or less follows the character so let's take a look at yet an easier way that we could accomplish that and what i'm going to do is with my camera aim node selected i'm going to get rid of the animation on it and i'm simply going to take that aim node which i currently have selected here i'm in my perspective window which is why we're not seeing anything happen if i move it you'll notice that it does affect the camera here what i'm going to do is i'm going to make this aim node a child of this control on the character and i'll just reposition it a little like this so now you'll notice that the aim node which is here and i have currently selected is actually a child of this main control this control here on the character and if we come in here to our camera one view and play you'll notice that the camera very nicely follows along with the character now one of the advantages of this aim camera is of course that we can animate not only what the camera is aiming at very easily but also the camera's position in 3d space so that's what i'll do here i'm going to select my camera now and i will put a key on it scrub in my timeline and let's go ahead and just move the camera perhaps we'll move it over here and i'll key that scrub in my timeline and play so perhaps not the best effect here but uh well we can try moving the camera elsewhere instead maybe i'll get rid of that last key get rid of both of the keys actually key the position of the camera in 3d space or perhaps first we'll move the camera where we want it and then key it scrub and we'll try moving the camera this time over here and keying that so now we have both the camera and of course the aim moving independently of one another but always with our character in focus here we'll take a look at another example where we'll do something very similarly and what i have here is a rocket ship and it is animated on a motion path and if you want to know how i attached it to a motion path you can watch one of my other videos where i demonstrate this now one thing i should mention is that i am using two different end particle systems in here which means that i cannot conveniently scrub in my timeline that if i scrub in my timeline as i'm doing now it will be unable to do the calculations necessary to actually figure out what the end particles should be doing so to make it a little bit easier to work with i'm going to very quickly create a cache for my two particle systems by selecting them going to my effects menu and cache create new end cache now that i've created my end cache and remember this is really only important if you're using dynamics if you're using a system such as the n particles as i am here but now that i've created that cache i can easily scrub back and forth in my timeline without maya having to make the necessary calculations for the n particles the particle effect in essence has been baked into it now so like the previous example i'm going to create another camera i'll go once again to create cameras camera and aim once again it creates a group nested underneath it contains the camera itself and the aim node for the time being i'm going to leave the camera at uh the middle of my 3d uh space here so its position is that translate x y and z zero zero and zero do take note however that the rotation of the camera is actually being affected by something else that's why we have these little blue tick marks here that something else of course is the camera one aim node now i'm going to change my top viewport here to actually look through my camera and in fact i'll go ahead and name my camera my camera [Music] and um in my top viewport here i'm going to go to panels perspective my camera i'll select the camera that i just created so that we'll be looking through that camera in this viewport as we're doing now and i'm going to do something a little different this time from what i had done last time if you remember when we attached the camera aim to the character i actually physically made it a child of one of the controls on the character but this time i'm going to use a constraint so i'll select my ship here the spaceship and i will select the camera one aim node and i'm going to change to my animation menu set go to constrain point constraint so now my aim constraint is actually sorry my camera aim node is actually constrained to this rocket and if we play the animation in this viewport here you'll notice that my camera will always follow along with the rocket let's see if we can make this a little more interesting what i'm going to do is create a very quick environment for my scene here i'm going to start with a cube perhaps scale it up i will do a mesh smooth on it maybe add some divisions here we'll scale it a little larger like this and create a new material for it i'll open up my hyper shade and create a new lambert for it and we'll go ahead and apply the lambert to the sphere double click on the material go to its attribute editor and under the color channel we'll go ahead and apply a texture in this case we're going to try just uh we'll try the noise texture here press 6 on my keyboard so that i actually see the texture applied to my mesh now under the noise tab of my material here the noise that i've applied to the color channel of my texture i'm going to try to adjust the frequency as well as the density to get something maybe that looks like a star field so let's go ahead and bring up the density i'll bring down or sorry the frequency i brought up the frequency and i'll bring down the density and i think this makes a pretty good star field here but in fact i want to do more than just use this for the color channel i think i will also apply this same texture to the incandescence found here on on this material so i'll open up the hypershade with my material selected we'll look at its input and output connections here and i'm simply going to drag the i'm going to connect the noise color to my incandescence channel of the material now that i've done that i'm going to select my cube here which is now more of a spherical shape i will go to my modeling menu set mesh display i'm going to reverse the normals so that they're actually pointing inward and this is not necessary but i'm going to go ahead and turn on backface culling as well so that we can see through this and we'll go ahead and just come in here inside our little environment i'm looking through my perspective camera right now you can see that the ship flies through this environment here however if we look at it through my camera that i created earlier we'll get this okay now perhaps my star field is a little too dense so i'm going to go ahead and go back to its noise node adjust some of the parameters a little bit to maybe reduce the number of stars here perhaps something like that and maybe a couple other things that i might do is come over here to show none turn off the grid go to show polygons and show n particles because we've got n particles in here and here's what we have finally we'll take a look at one more example so here we have a scene that has an n cloth object along with some passive colliders and if i play it you'll see the interaction that i get what if we want our camera to follow along with this ball that drops through this little obstacle course that we have here so once again i'm going to create a camera name here's my camera and here is the aim node as you see when i move that aim node it does affect the way the camera is pointing and what i'm going to do is something very similar to what i did with the rocket example previously in other words i'm going to select the object i will select the aim node found under the group here go to my animation menu set constrain and we'll do a point constraint let's go ahead and look through this camera i'm going to move the camera a little bit over oh we'll move it over here perhaps find a good place where we can get a good view of it we could try this and let's go ahead and play the animation and see what we get so here we ran into a little problem the problem is that our point constraint will not work with uh with this ncloth object so let's go ahead and break that constraint that we have on our aim here i'm simply going to delete the constraint we could try taking this aim constraint and making a child of this piece of geometry as we did with the very first example with the walking character so let's just find out what the object is called it's called pq1 i'm going to go ahead and take my aim constraint drag it into the pcube1 to make a child of it we'll go ahead and play and as you can see that didn't fix our problem either let me rewind and i'll take my aim constraint and put it back into the group because we need to find a different solution here so to get this to work what i'm going to do is select my geometry the end cloth object that is going to be falling and going through this obstacle course here i will control select my aim con my camera aim node and i'm going to go to constrain but in this time instead of trying a point constraint we'll try a geometry constraint so when i apply that and then play my camera now follows the end cloth object so that's how you can use the camera with the aim along with dynamics in this case with an n cloth example now remember that we still can control the camera itself we can still uh reposition the camera if we want or even animate the camera because it is in fact the aim node that is constrained right now so looking at my camera here notice that if i move my camera itself it's always aiming at my end cloth object i can position it here for example play and you'll see that it still aims at our end cloth object i think i actually like it better where it was positioned before you

Channel: Vad Almafa

Views: 2,197

Keywords: autodesk, maya, cmt 223, cmt 229, animation, camera, camera and aim

Id: Uvitjgm81HE

Length: 25min 19sec (1519 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 07 2020