hey, guys welcome back to the channel I'm mvartz.
if you're new to the channel please subscribe to the channel and also like this video. In this
video, we're gonna see how we can easily create butter-smooth camera animations inside of blender.
If you have seen other videos on this topic I'm gonna guarantee you this is gonna be different.
We're not gonna record the camera movements, we're not gonna use constraints and paths. We're
just gonna do an easy camera rig easy to use clean and smooth. So some of the topics in this video
are going to be: setting up the rig, of course, then how are we going to use the rig. What are the
movements, what is capable with this rig, is not even a rig, it's so simple. Then we're going to
see if we can make a handheld feel. And if you're interested we're gonna do a vertigo effect or
also known as a dolly zoom. There's gonna be more, stay tuned! Inside of blender I've built a
scene and of course we want to make a camera inside of the scene. This is going to be the
easiest camera rig you've ever seen, don't worry about it. We're going to create a camera
with shift A, and go to camera, there you go! Where are you? Here you are, moving it to a new
collection, call this Camera.Rig. I want to cancel out all the transformations and move it up on the
z-axis. So we're going to create an empty i like to use a cube again it is in the wrong collection,
but move it to the camera collection instead. With this empty cube selected we can hit
alt S alt R and alt G. Grab the camera, grab the empty, press ctrl P and say object. If we
go into the camera mode you can see we're now on top of the character. Right, so, I briefly touched
on this before but I saw other methods as well that are using the viewport controls to navigate
the camera and then record it using auto key. While playing on the timeline. Of course, this is
nice, and this is a super inventive way as well, however, I'm not really a fan of this method,
because you have to plan out your animation quite far ahead. Also you have to clean up the curves
in the curve editor it's just one step extra and i i really don't see the need for it then again
you can use path and use a constraint modifier but on the other side there's little room for
tweaks make a different turn or make a make the path just slightly different you can adjust the
path of course but it's just finicky yeah this method is easy not much to think about there are
simple controls and let's get into it you know we have set up the camera rig it's super easy let
me explain you how to use it there's not much to it but go into the camera view you grab the
cube and you can rotate the cube move it rotate in all directions you want and i encourage you to
always place your empty on the subject so you can rotate around the subject so this is for example
a nice and easy way to have a turntable you see i'm just going to show you all the movements that
you can make with this camera setup so like i said you can move or you could rotate but also
you could scale the cube and then you move in you're probably thinking well let me go into
normal mode to show this and you're right you could do a translate but however then you move
your empty there and that also moves the pivot point of course so there are some benefits to use
the skill over the translate so but for example for a flyby you can use this and move the mt what
i like to do when i drag my timeline up here a bit i like to keyframe the location rotation
and scale and say go in further in time and somewhere around here and let me go back to
global rotate around the character i wanna bring it down then i wanna scale to move a bit
closer and now i can keyframe the available that keyframes all the channels that we previously
keyframed go into the camera mode camera view what i like to do is in the camera settings i want
to go to the camera settings on the right here a viewport display prosper2 and crank up
the opacity so we can only see what we see through the camera and not the entire scene around
it um just a side note there there you have it there you have a nice little animation this is the
same technique to animate the camera that i used in the zurich video if you haven't seen that one
i leave a card up in somewhere here it's nothing fancy it's just so easy to control what makes
a camera animation smooth in my opinion is that you have nice and clean arcs that replicate the
movements of an actual say a crane a camera crane or you know those tracks right where they move
around like in a turntable right this is just nice you get it for free you know because if you rotate
this you create a nice arc i can show you um if i go and i select the camera and i want to
go into the object tab on the raid i'm going to motion path and if i say calculate say okay
i'm sorry i missed that you can see that we now have created a nice path what i also did and i uh
encourage you to do this for things you use a lot place it under your quick favorites that's
what i did so it's calculate right here um and the quick menu is q the short key
so if you didn't know that there you go like i showed you this is highly customizable i
select this and for example say you want to do somewhere here in between you want to
move a bit more out set a keyframe there and calculate the camera well
there you have it you adjust it and you have a nice clean motion
even if we add more keyframes to this and around 60 again we want to
be a bit further along the line right there but we want to be a bit more in keyframe that calculate there you go so this
is the motion path right now let's say you want to tweak it you can go into the graph
editor shift uh f6 that's what i'd like to do let's say we go to the scale we select
auto scale channels shift h select old a and hit the period key to bring it up and you
can see how you can easily tweak this of course so something like this and now you adjust the path
in a different way but it was still quite easy uh you have a nice motion path here so you
go in you go out and the timing is a bit slow but i hope you can see that this is so easy to
adjust you don't have to worry about a lot of controls that's super easy so so now that you
have seen how i create my motion path let's get into the next topic so first i'm going to delete
all the camera keyframes and reset this keyframe lock run and scale go a bit further to around
here doesn't really matter timing wise we want to zoom in and maybe a bit of rotation there you
go so yeah we set that keyframe go further in time go out if you double tap an axis for
example the x uh you get into local mode and that's important because otherwise
you get a bit more of a dutch tilt um and maybe rotate a bit more like this for example
set another keyframe available i set up this quick animation it's not that brilliant but i want
to talk about a handheld feeling how can we do that uh it's pretty easy so because we're only
animating the empty here we can add another layer on top of this camera animation by selecting
the camera itself it doesn't really matter what channels you're going to set the keyframe for
but you want to go into the graph editor again i want to animate the z rotation so i'm going to
select the z rotation here say n and that brings up the end panel in the graph editor let me make
it a bit bigger and go to modifiers in this tab right here add a modifier and say noise and that
is going to create this graph that is displaced with a noise modifier sort of that adds this
shaking animation to the z rotation channel now you can play with the stretch and or this is
the skill this is the stretch sorry about that and there you go so keep in mind that you can do this to every
channel so for example if someone is walking towards the subject you have an up and down
motion and maybe also a slight tilt in the camera up and down and maybe even left to right you
can do that as well so you can say it's the y because that's the local transformation and
you can say add noise and then you have a up and downwards motion and probably have
to scale it and stretch it a bit more so now you go up and down that's a bit too much of
course so keep it a bit tighter and there you go and then use the x rotation again
that's a local transformation x rotation let's isolate that one with shift h say
add modifier noise there you go again it's a bit much stretch it out so yeah this is a bit too much
as you can see um but still you you get the gist of it i hope so i've deleted the modifiers and
i want to talk about for the next bit i want to talk about focus how do i focus and create depth
of field for my scenes well that's pretty easy in this rig i say select the cube cursor to
select it and add a new empty and this time i'm gonna choose the sphere i'm gonna yeah it's in the
right collection i'm gonna rename this to focus maybe i like to go into the object data
properties and adjust the size a bit a bit smaller maybe so there
you go i go into the camera camera options down here if you haven't selected
already enable depth of field and you could set it manually and if you want to do that you
can go to the viewport display show limits and adjust the distance and you can see that
this cross now is getting closer or further away but what i like to do is say i use the
focus object so we're going to use focus type in focus it's the fourth value there
you have it and now i have a separate object to control the focus now if
we would render this for example so now that this is rendered you can see we have a
bit of a depth of field here i would like to point out that in the camera settings you have the focal
length the focal length determines the zoom of the camera if you didn't know that you can zoom in or
you can dolly in to dolly means to go forward or backwards on a dolly track so what i would like to
point out is whenever you use a high focal length you get a shallow depth of field so if you want
your background to be more out of focus i suggest moving backwards with the camera and using a
zoom lens or cranking up the focal length that's how you get a more shallow depth of field and that
brings me to my next point i highly discourage you to pair these two together like so and it seems
like that would be a good idea because the focus point always moves with the empty that seems like
a good idea but i can assure you i tried this many times and a lot of times you have to counter
animate because you want to keep your focus for example in the same place and that is just a
lot of counter animating i promise to show you how to do a focus pool so let's get on to them so
while i open up this new scene let me tell you what focus pulling is focus pulling is basically
pulling the focus from one object to the next and you see that a lot for example in movies
where they want to direct the viewer's attention to a specific point in the scene i opened up a
new scene right here and as you can see i have the exact same setup for my camera as i did
before because i i don't need anything else so what i did here is let me see if i can find it
here's my focus point it's a bit smaller so let me make it a bit bigger uh there you go and all i
did is i animated this and switched between the two of them and of course you could have done
this by hand so you would go into the camera settings again open up and say limits so you can
see where i highly recommend to do this you always have a visual reminder so enable limits and open
up depth of field and then you should animate i could have animated this this setting right here
but however the longer your sequence is the longer your shot is the more you want to replace the
focus the better it is to have a focus object in my opinion i can just pick whip it and now
the focus point follows the empty as you can see so that is basically everything i think
you should know about focusing in blender moving on to the next part and the next
wire is going to be a vertical effect a vertical effect is also called a dolly zoom
if you're not familiar with the dolly zoom the dolly zoom is the official name in the industry
but it's also known as the vertigo effect and basically it comes to this technique so for this
effect and for my situation i dull it towards the character and i zoomed out with the camera so the
effect of that is that the character in this case stays relatively the same size but the background
and the perspective of the background changes so in this case you can see that the hallway
becomes a lot longer and feels more stretched so practically in blender this is with the
setup pretty easy to achieve all you have to do is go to a frame you want to start so this
is my starting frame this is my starting setup and i set a keyframe for lock rod and scale then
i moved to frame 100 that's the frame i wanted to end and i would scale inwards like so then i set
a keyframe of course and to counter that animation i selected the camera went into the camera
settings and from there i started at keyframe 1 again keyframing the focal length at 82
millimeters and that was again keyframe 100 and i keyframe the focal length here to 24
millimeters giving again the following effect there you go so as you can see this is pretty
simple to achieve i combined it with the focus object as you could see because when i don't do
that and i bring this back like around five so this is the right focus point for now and as i
play it you can see that the focus point moves so that would mean that i have to go in set a
keyframe here go to the ending frame and then set a keyframe again tweaking it and like that and
that's where the focus empty comes in again super handy you don't have to do any animation for the
focus points it's just spot on alright so far the vertical effect the last thing i want to show you
is and i go back to my previous scene so the next thing i want to show you is switching cameras
what i like to do i want to select this cube i want to press ctrl plus to grow the selection
now i have the rig and the camera rig and if i want i can select the focus point as well now i
have them all selected i want to duplicate these and if you want to be organized you can rename
them so with rear camera to select it i can delete these keyframes rotate rotate again to some other
position i select this camera say control and zero now i switch to this camera this is now the active
camera we're not really switching during animation yet but you can see we have now a different
perspective on the character if you would like you can zoom in a bit for example and there
you go say during this animation i would like to change up the camera let's do that i would go and
say this is our active camera for the beginning play the animation there you go we go in we go
out and probably at this point i would say i want to switch how we're going to do that is mark this
on the timeline marking you can do hover over the timeline at the frame and press m for mvrs we can
go out of camera mode so with the second camera selected we can go into marker and say bind camera
to marker there you go now it says camera 2 right here let's go back to the beginning do that again
create a marker with m select this camera now using the short key control b we bind the camera
1 to that marker now if i play the animation you can see that we're in camera 1 and at this point
we switch to camera two and of course you could make your animation with this camera as well so
that was the last point i wanted to discuss with that said let me know in the comments down below
which of the techniques you're gonna use first if you enjoyed this video smash that like button
if you want to see more content in the future hit that subscribe button and the notification bell
as always stay creative see you next time ciao you
