The Secret to better KeyShot Camera Path Animations

one of the things i really like about keyshot is that it's super easy to use it doesn't take a lot of experience for someone to be able to produce passable renderings or animations now today i want to talk about animation and specifically the camera path animation most of key shots other types of animation are very simple they move either the model or the camera in one direction typically now the camera path is a little bit different it actually allows you to create a custom curve in 3d space to move the camera along almost like a roller coaster car that's on a track that you get to design now one of the downsides of the camera path is that some people can find it a little bit difficult to control either hard to keep your model centered in frame or hard to update it and today i want to go over some best practices and ways that you can get the most out of keyshot camera path animations let's go to download your free project files visit willgivins.com click on the file vault link and either sign up or log in to enter the file vault there you'll find links to dozens of project files and hundreds of other product vis resources so to save time during today's tutorial i created a keyshot package file that we're going to use and it will cut out some of the time associated with setting up the scene once you get that ksp file drag it into your real time view and release we're going to open the file click open and at this point keyshot asks where should we extract these resources to now the way a keyshot package file works is it grabs all the associated textures models environments things like that and it puts it into a folder so all keyshot's doing is saying hey when we unpack this where should we put it and today i'm just going to work off of our desktop you don't want to click resources because then it will put all of these items in your keyshot library instead go ahead and click browse and for us we're just going to put it on the desktop today so once your ksp has been imported it should look something like this go ahead and hit a on the keyboard to open your animation timeline next we're going to go to the camera tab in the project panel and we're going to create a new camera to create our animation add a new camera and we will call this one path animation one next we're going to create our path animation and the way i like to do this is by right clicking on our camera going down to animation and then just choose path and what happens here is we get a new dialog box and it's recording the position that our camera is currently at so if we change our camera we can then add a new control point so what i want to do is click and drag in the real time view to establish the next control point and for me i'm thinking something like this and i'll move this down a bit and i'll click add new control point i'll continue along the path and i want to say end up with something sort of like this and i'll hit add new control point and at this point we're done we have made the camera path we have recorded three coordinates or places in our space here and we want to leave the rest of these settings as is and go ahead and hit ok so the first thing that you see is that along the animation timeline we've got this blue bar this indicates our animation we built actually what it is is it's a transform it is a camera transform and it's transforming our camera through space so if we click and drag above the blue bar we can scrub through the animation timeline and in the real time view we will see the animation or the transform being played back now unfortunately you're probably wondering why the model is not staying centered in our view so we're going to fix this don't worry but in order to work on this we're going to open the geometry view so go ahead and hit m to close the library panel and o to open the geometry view oh if yours is not docked on the left hand side it probably won't be grab by the word geometry view left click and drag all the way over until your screen becomes blue and then let go that should allow you to dock it now from here if you left click and navigate through the geometry view the same way you would do in the real-time view you will see that the geometry view gives us an overview of our scene we have various lights throughout the scene those are the squares that you're seeing we have our model in the center of our scene right here we have our camera pointing at our model the red square is the field of view so that is showing us what is being able to be shown in the real-time view and then we have this camera path and along this camera path which is the red swooping arc we have these different cameras there are three these are called control points and we are able to manipulate those control points to shape the camera path right now our model is not staying centered in the frame of our animation and this is because we don't have a camera target if you can see in the geometry view as we scrub along the timeline the field of view the red square is not staying focused on our product and that's why it's not showing up or remaining in the middle of our frame so we're going to fix this by setting a target all we need to do is click on the blue animation in our timeline and then we get the animation properties down below on the right hand side if you're looking to take your keyshot skills to the next level then check out the keyshot rendering master class inside i share the exact process i've used and refined over the past 10 years to deliver renderings to some of today's most recognized brands with over 15 hours of content broken into 100 plus bite-sized beginner-friendly videos this is the most comprehensive key shot course available when you enroll you will learn how to turn a boring cad model into beautiful photo real images stop wasting time searching for tutorials on youtube and fast track your learning by enrolling in the keyshot rendering masterclass click the link in the description below to learn more and see what other customers have to say about it so i'll drag those up so you can see what i'm looking at over here on the right side we have the option to leave it set to walk through or target and we're going to change it to target now we're not quite done we need to select a target so we'll click on pick and we get a list of parts in our scene that we can choose from and i want to click the top level of the power bank this is choosing the model and when you do that it will find the center point of this model and that's what it's going to focus on so i'll click on power bank we see the orange outline and we hit ok so immediately our model is snapped to the middle of our frame and to help with this we're going to go to our camera grid and set it to haves this way we have a vertical and a horizontal line and where the intersect is the middle of our frame okay so let's try scrubbing along our timeline now and you'll see that our product stays pretty well centered in the middle of the frame that was the biggest thing we had to do for the most part that's going to solve most of your issues with a camera path animation looking strange but what if we want to make some updates or some edits to this well that's where the geometry view comes into play so for example let's say we want to finish our animation and we don't like how this is framed we don't like how the bottom of the product is so close to the edge of the frame and i want to center a little bit more well we can do this by making a change to the control point in the geometry view so i'm going to click on this last camera and it should highlight yellow the reason we don't see a highlight is because our active camera is overlapping it so if you scrub back a little bit you'll see the control point that you select in the geometry view turns yellow and then that means that we can now edit it what i want to do is move my active camera to the end of that timeline so we're seeing the position of that control point so select that last control point and then right click on it and choose move control point and we should see the option to drag this in one of three directions as we drag this we will see the real-time view update so if we move this to the right a little bit you should see in the real-time view it moves to the left slightly so as i nudge these arrows around i should see the updates in real time and this will help me center my product in the frame so i'm pretty happy with that now if we want to make a change to any of the other control points we just follow the same process i'll hit the green check box to accept that location and if i scrub back we can see that about halfway through the animation this is where we're looking if i want i can move this control point the same way select it right click move control point and we can see i could kind of move this down or over maybe further away if you make a big arc over your product and at one point the camera becomes vertical like up and down it will cause an unwanted effect in which your camera will spin a 180 throughout the animation so i'm going to go ahead and see if i can reproduce this let me go ahead and get a little closer i think that that'll do it what happens is if we play this back you'll see that in the real time view it does this weird rotation that i don't totally want that's not horrible but in the geometry view you can see what will happen is at some point the camera becomes vertically oriented right here our red camera is up and down more from this angle and as soon as we pass that vertical uh once it goes past vertical it kind of swivels around does a quick rotation so if you're not careful by taking this arc uh over the product so your camera becomes vertically oriented that's where you can get some strange chaotic rotation that you're not going to want my biggest suggestion for you is try not to let your camera path orient the camera vertically so in this case to avoid it what i want to do is move my camera so it's not quite so high up and down at a lower angle maybe a little further away there we go so i'm happy with this if i scrub through the timeline we can see we are basically doing this kind of complex rotation and orbit that would be really difficult to do if we were not using the camera path animation and the one thing i noticed that i don't really love about this if you watch in the real time view right here it pulls out then in then out again and it kind of looks weird i don't really like that i kind of want it to not look so jarring like i want it to have a nice smooth arc and the reason it's looking like that is because the distance my camera is from the animation here changes our anime or our camera gets a little bit closer then a little further then a little closer than a little further so the way we can work with addressing this is by changing the tension on the path so if we look down in the settings on the right the properties for this animation we have the option to change tension if i take tension all the way to the right the camera path becomes just a straight line between two points and this looks really unnatural if we take it to its default setting of zero it's what we started with and it's not too bad but i don't love it and here's what i find helps a little bit if we go the opposite direction watching the geometry view what happens as i drag the tension to the left it kind of bows our path out if i go ahead and move along this path now in my mind it looks a little bit smoother it's not perfect minus 0.5 maybe minus 0.3 you can play with that value to see exactly what you like but to me it smooths things out quite a bit and of course if you really wanted to you could add another control point just to move it further away i try to keep my camera path animation curves as simple as possible i try not to add more than three control points but if you need to you can always go and right click on a control point and choose add control point after so at this point you can see what that did it kind of created a weird wobble in our animation and this is why i try not to add them after the fact it can look a little bit weird but of course we can always go in and move this control point so let's say i want to pull this out a little bit you can play with it if we take some of the tension we put on there or took away out that'll smooth this out quite a bit as well so now our camera's not coming in so close before finishing i just preferred the way it looked before so i'm going to right click on this control point and delete it so now we're back to where we were and i'll use my negative 0.3 to take away a little bit of tension on there so generally speaking those are the big steps now if we want to take this up a notch and make it a little bit more interesting we can also do something called motion easing that's down below the time settings right now it sets a linear meaning it moves the same speed all the way through and if you want to play it back you can always hit this play button to see how long it's taking to move through that animation if we don't want it to repeat just click on this little button here the loop button turn that off now what i want to do is change the motion ease from linear to custom we're going to put a s-curve on this and this is going to be akin to speed ramping this will make things you know when they go fast and slow then fast this is basically what we're doing now in this little box down on the right we're going to take the first control point this bezier handle hold shift and drag it down and to the right and then do the same for the other bezier handle this creates what's called an s-curve so the way to interpret this green line is that to the right is time on the x-axis and then on the y-axis is the position so once we've added our s-curve if we scrub through our timeline you can see that it starts out slow and then it kind of speeds up in the middle and then slows back down toward the end the more aggressive you make this s-curve the faster it will go in the middle so the more vertical this green line gets the faster it goes so if we play this back now it's going to snap from one position to the other now i'm going to speed this up just a little bit and the way we can do that is grab our blue box in the timeline and i'm just going to drag it down to four seconds so now instead of five seconds it's only four seconds long cool so i'm happy with this but there's one major limiting factor that you might have noticed and that is that once we established a camera target our product stays centered in the frame meaning it's always in the middle what if i want my product to be off-centered so i have room to add some text callouts or something like that which is a pretty common thing to do we're going to go on over to the scene tree hit control 1 on the keyboard and that's going to add a cube to our scene we're going to go ahead and take our cube and grab under the advanced option here click on this cross hairs and then choose the power bank once again now we're going to click on this snap to pivot to snap the cube to the middle of the power bank and lastly i want to scale this cube down a little bit so in the scale properties under the scene tree i'm just going to pull that down a little bit there we go so at this point what if we actually made our camera target the cube and not our product well we can also do that we can click on our animation and change our target so click pick and then this time we're going to choose our cube and i'll hit ok but what if we move the cube now i can go to the scene tree grab the cube hit the move tool click on global to make the axis in the right location or orientation now if i drag this to the right and hit ok and i adjust my timeline you'll see now we have snapped the cube back in the middle of the frame which pushes our product off to the left this gives me the control i need to still have the same path of motion but control how the object is framed up we can push it all the way off to the side or whatever we need now we can take it a step further and actually animate the position of that cube so let's say we want to start with our product off center but finish with it centered go ahead and move that cube over a little bit further and when i again scrub the timeline it updates great so the product is now off to the left but i want to finish it not off center like it is but centered very easy to do all we do is animate the cube grab the cube right click add animation sorry that's off screen we're going to choose translation go ahead and set the translation y to zero and in this case we want to just translate it along the z axis so left to right right now the translation's happening over one second so let's drag it out to a full four seconds so it matches now all i need to do is change the translate z value so if i try like 20 and hit enter now it pushes it further in the wrong direction so i'm going to choose a negative value for 20 maybe minus 25 close enough for me so that's pretty much all we need to do and we could you know make it move up or down or whatever but now what's happening is if we go back to the beginning we're starting with our product off centered and we still have our path animation defined as we want with the custom curve and we also have that cube as the pivot moving our camera in the right location if you want you can actually have that cube's speed curve match that of the original camera path and the way we would do that is actually go to the first camera path that we made we can right click and copy the curve down here where the green s is go to the cube change it from linear to custom and right click and paste curve and now if we play them back it's almost as if you can't tell that they're two separate animations so at this point we just need to make that cube disappear and that's actually surprisingly easy double click on it we're going to change it to an emissive material set its color to black take its intensity down to zero and turn off visible to camera visible in reflections and two-sided now we can't see it but to be extra sure we're going to scale it down so in the scene tree take it scale down to one that'll be one millimeter now it's embedded within the middle of our product and we truly are not going to see that when we go to render so back i'm going to turn off my camera guides and at this point i'm just going to go through and render this out but now you know hopefully how to get the most out of camera path animations keep them simple use the geometry view to make edits choose a camera path to keep your product centered and then if you need to choose an alternative camera path on a primitive piece of geometry and then animate that as needed i really like working this way this is how i've done a lot of my professional animations for big clients and i encourage you to give it a shot till next time happy rendering

Channel: Will Gibbons | 3D Rendering

Views: 77,943

Keywords: will gibbons, wil gibbons, will gibbins, will gibons, will gibins, keyshot, rendering, tutorial, animation, studio, freelance, 3d animation, product design, 3d animation tutorial, keyshot animation video, keyshot animation basic, 3d rendering, 3d animation software, 3d animation video, keyshot camera, camera path animation, keyshot path, keyshot camera canimation, product visualization, product rendering, product animation, marketing visual, render artist

Id: uoAr4HDnI78

Length: 19min 49sec (1189 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 30 2021