How to Build a Camera Rig in Blender

hey what's up guys in this video we're going to be taking a look at how to build your own custom camera rig inside of blender so a couple weeks ago I made a video on why and how you should use one essentially just makes your camera animation a little bit more realistic and adds a nice touch to your animation but in this video we're gonna be taking a look at how to build one from scratch and I'm going to start with is just this camera object right here it's placed right in the center so to make a couple of things easier as we add a few objects they'll just be added right to the center there so first of all we have to decide when we're building a camera rig exactly what functions we want the camera to do for me I want one thing that the camera can't focus on because it's going to be you know aiming around we definitely want something the camera can focus on that is separate from where it's aiming just in case we want to animate the depth of field really easily we can do that and we want to imitate a traditional camera rig in a sense that it has a nice dolly it has the stand it has the boom arm that can rotate up and down and do all that stuff so it's going to be fairly simple and straightforward so let's just go ahead and get started first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to add an empty so let's just add shift a empty and plain axis and this is going to be what the camera aims at so let's take your convenience let's just rename this to aim and way to have the camera any Matt something is just to use a track to constraint so over here in the constraints tab if we add a constraint and choose track 2 and then choose the aim as the target as we move this around the camera is going to try to always track to it however it's not facing the right direction and we can see that we definitely want it what is now up and down we want to be facing towards the camera and so since we can see on this local axis here that right now the negative Z is where the camera is pointing and we want the Y direction to be the up and down we can easily choose that right here so - we going to choose negative Z and 4 up we're going to choose Y because that's the local direction in which we want these to point so as we move this around we can now see that the camera is following along quite nicely so that's pretty easy second of all we're going to add something the camera can focus on in case we want that to be different than where it's aiming let's add another empty this one I'm going to make a circle now I'll scale it down I just made a circle because it seems like it's fitting but you can make it any shape that you want so this is something we want to sort of always be in between these two and we want to just be able to grab it and move it along now we don't really want to move it in the x direction or the Z direction we want it to stay in between these two so what I'm going to do is I'm going to press N and then go up here to the location and then lock everything scale lock the rotation and unlock everything but the Y location so as we press G and move this it's only going to move in one direction and we don't have to worry about it getting off-track now the only problem here is that as we move this aim this isn't moving with it and we always want it to be in line between these two so an easy way to get it to be in the right spot all the time is to add a bone so let's go shift a armature add single bone and that's just going to add it right to the base of the camera we're going to go outside going to edit or object mode and press shift S on this aim and cursor to selected and that way when we go into edit mode we can take this tip select it shift s selection to cursor and that way it's just going to snap right there and we don't have to sort of finagle it into the right position it'll just be exactly where we want it to be so this is kind of blocking in the way also in the armature settings over here I'm going to go down to display and move that to stick so that way we just have a nice stick and it's not blocking our view now what I want to do is I want to parent this bone to the camera so I'm gonna choose that MN shift selective camera ctrl P parent to object now as I move this camera you can see that it's always aiming in the right direction and not only that it's also going to be you know pointing towards where or that aim is and so what we can do now that it's always going to be facing the right direction we can take this empty I'm just going to name this focus all right and I'm gonna ship select this bone ctrl P and set parent to bone and now as I move this around that's always going to follow pointing in the right direction and as I grab this I can just hit G and slide this up and down and everything's going to work out and so this is really handy because we can now animate our focal length really easily and it'll stay true to what the camera would actually be so unpressed alt G to move the camera back to the center right there and we can start building the second half of the rig so we're halfway there from side view I'm going to build the base of the rig and the arms that extend from it so let's add another armature this time I'm going to add a single bone and I'm gonna move that right down here actually I'll move it a little bit back okay so this is going to be the very base now if I go into edit mode I can move this down here and I'm going to extrude this up on z-axis and I'm going to extra do one more time on the y-axis right over to the camera and so this bone down here is going to be the base so in the bone settings we can actually name each one so I'm gonna call this a face I'm gonna call this stand and I'm gonna call this the arm because it's going to be the boom arm so now we just need to set these up so that they work like they should so right now what you want the camera to always be at the end of this boom arm so what we can do is in the constraints tab for the camera we can add another constraint instead of tracking to it we're just going to copy location and the target is going to be that new armature let's rename this to camera rig so see just easy to find okay so it's use camera rig we can choose which bone we want and we want it to be at the end of the arm and the head tail basically switches between the base of the bone and the tip of the bone so let's just move this all the way to the tip of the bone and now as we in pose mode if we scale this or move it around the camera is always going to follow so I'll just all our LG okay so we have that that is perfect now I'm also going to set this to stick like we did the other one just to make it a little bit easier to see and the last thing that I want to do is I want to basically constrain the stand to only move up and down because that's not something that's going to be rotating you're going to be rotating and moving with the base or with the arm you're not going to be doing anything else except scaling that up and down so just pressing n I can lock the location I can lock all of the rotation and I can lock everything except the Y scale because this is going to be the local Y scale so when I scale it it's only going to scale up and down so now I can select each of these individually and move them around it looks like our aim got a little off track it's now not pointing right where we want it to be so all I need to do is in the constraints tab before the camera let's take this copy location and move it above the track to constraint because what it's going to do is it's going to first copy the location of this and then after that track two so it's going to go from the top of the list all the way to the bottom so now as we take these pieces and in pose mode we can scale that up-and-down scale this up and down you can scale that move it anything you want it's always going to be aiming in the right direction if you want this to stay on the floor you can set it on the floor and just lock all of the locations or lock the easy location so that you don't have to worry about it going up and down in space and you can move it in your 3d view without having to worry about it being all weird so pretty short and sweet this is how you make a simple camera rig inside it slender I hope you found it useful armatures and constraints are definitely very handy and make a lot of complex tasks very simple and easy to use when you're animating so thanks for watching this video and I'll see you in the next one you

Channel: Blender HD

Views: 31,615

Keywords: Blender, HD, tutorial, 3D, camera, rig, custom, rigging, bones, constraints

Id: 5RcgFczzGYs

Length: 10min 4sec (604 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 03 2016