Chaos Vantage tutorial — Camera animations for better visual storytelling

[Music] hello everyone and welcome to this short vantage tutorial today i'll be talking about creating camera animations like the ones you're currently seeing and building a presentation video just like you would for a project pitch i'll cover some of the most frequently used camera movements which will elevate your storytelling with vantage before we get into it i want to show you a great example of cinematic animations in this awesome visualization by boc studio who have used v-ray and vantage to render it thanks to blc studio for sharing the video make sure you check their work using the annotation in the upper right corner or the link in the description i love seeing the amazing projects users are creating with vantage so continue sharing on youtube and social media and i'll be happy to feature them in my own videos on to the tutorial today i'll be using vray for sketchup to export this cosmos demo project as a vr scene we can export it from here once the scene is loaded i also turn the radio termination performance optimization to get a better frame rate i'll turn on the auto exposure to make sure the brightness of the image is consistent while i'm working the scene has some overexposed highlights so i'm going to adjust the highlight burn to soften them great now let's check one of the simplest camera animations it uses a fixed camera position while the camera target is moving horizontally or vertically to demonstrate this i'll use this camera position as a starting point let's create the starting camera i'll also enable the composition guides overlay to assist me with finding a good angle i'll quickly update the camera and now using the right mouse button i can rotate the camera in the direction i need and save this as a new camera here is a tip you can use the x hotkey to level the camera and remove any pitch so that it looks straight ahead i'll level the first camera as well like so all right and update that now in the animation editor i can drag the two cameras one after the other and vantage will create animation between them automatically let's preview the result great i'd like to mention that the animation editor has two modes one is time driven which displays the length of the animations with respect to the timeline if the animation is visually longer it will take longer to animate between the two cameras the second mode is shot based and it focuses on the order of cameras and the type of animation between them in this mode the visual length of the animation does not change and does not represent the time duration of the animation in this mode you can cue the animations and set their duration easier note how the visual length does not change when i set a new duration say 5 seconds let's move to the next animation in this animation both the camera and the target move at the same speed and the camera is facing the same direction typically this movement is either horizontal or in vertical direction let's position the camera here and save that as a starting point i'm going to name it properly and i'm going to use the middle mouse button to reposition the camera over here as in the previous part you can use the x hotkey if you feel the camera needs leveling i'm using the 3ds max navigation presets so in your case the key may be a different one again i'll drag both cameras on the timeline i'll delete the animation between the pan and the truck and set the truck duration to 3 seconds i'd like to talk about animation easing simply put this is acceleration in the beginning and the end of an animation you can see in this example that the camera starts moving slowly then speeds up only to slow down again at the end of the movement this means the animation has both an ease out of the first keyframe and an ease in in the last one this kind of animation feels more complete since it has a distinctive beginning and ending however the truck and pedestal animations work really well with linear motion that is to say without easing so let's see how this can be done i'm just going to right click on the animation i'd like to change and select linear from the list you can see there are different combinations of easing which can be mixed to create different moods let's play the animation the movement now feels unfinished and cut as if it is part of a longer continuous movement here is a tip joining several linear animations is often used to give a sense of larger scale the camera dolly is just like the truck but the camera moves forward instead of sideways to set it up i'll start here adjust the focal length and create the first camera alright then using the right mouse button and the w hotkey i'll move forward like so and i'll save this as another camera and rename it now just like before i'll drag both cameras on the timeline and select the easing of choice in this instance i'm going for an open opening type of shot that introduces the space so i'll choose the quad in easing let's increase the duration as well alright something like this okay i can later follow this animation with a sequence of linear animations that the ones that i showed you in the previous chapter i'll preview the whole animation and see how it feels like yep that seems good alright so let's move to the next one the zoom animation does not affect the position or rotation of the camera it actually only changes the field of view or the focal length thus closing in on the subject or revealing more of the environment let's position the camera over here and save it as a starting point all right something like that i'm going to save it i'll change the focal length to something higher to achieve a telescopic effect like so let's save and rename the camera i'll actually update the first camera so that i keep only the zoom without the rotation now just like before i'll drag and drop the two cameras select linear easing and also adjust the length of the animation there are several animations on the timeline already so previewing the last one might be easier if we change the starting point of the timeline to do that i'll drag this little green flag to a time position near the animation i'm working on now the playback starts from here like so let's quickly preview the other easing options another tip is that a common technique for smaller zoom animations is to render your sequence at a higher resolution and fix larger field of view this way you can achieve the same effect in post by scaling the image and you will have a bit more flexibility over the animation changing the camera focus does not involve moving the camera but can be used to guide the user's attention from one subject to another to set it up i'll frame the fruits better i'll turn on depth of field and set these parameters in this case i'll use a low f number i'll set the blades to 9 and adjust the center bias to get some ringing effect i'll send the focus distance using the interactive pick focus tool to my starting subject and create a camera from the state all right then i'll pick another focus distance and create another camera i only need to drag and drop the cameras and preview the animation i like to use both easing and out on these focus changes since it feels more controlled once again i'll increase the duration like so if i play the previous animation and look at the cut to the change of focus you notice it seems too abrupt in this kind of situation i like to put a pause after the cut to give the viewer some time to adjust before changing the camera focus to do this i'll click this little plus sign and select add pause from the menu this will add a pause after the camera cut and will hold the first keyframe for one second before starting the animation great now having all the animations already in the timeline i'll make sure that i set the in marker at the beginning this way i can render the whole sequence but before doing so i'll enable opacity tracing so that the leaves are properly rendered i also enable the filmic tone mapping and adjust the colors a bit in the rendering setup i can also queue separate parts from the timeline by specifying custom frame range different settings and adding these skew entries perfect these are my five go-to camera animations and how you can set them in case vantage i hope you like the tutorial and i can't wait to see how you use them in your next project so please don't forget to share your work also make sure to subscribe to this channel so you won't miss the latest vantage updates and the upcoming tutorial content if there are specific tutorials you'd like to see please leave them in the comments below thank you for watching and see you next time you

Channel: Simeon Balabanov

Views: 16,826

Keywords: chaos vantage, chaos vantage tutorial, chaos vantage animation, archviz tutorial, real-time rendering, learn chaos vantage

Id: uyQi4YIwVag

Length: 11min 58sec (718 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 26 2022