Maya: 4 Ways to Animate a Camera

hi there this is about camera nation camera animation is a thing which basically is controlled by the director of a movie so you as the animator have to follow the imagination he or she has that means if you have a view like this and the director ones view which makes this tower really intimidating and high and impressive you would never use a camera which starts moving from this perspective but instead from somewhere down here like this and maybe use another angle of view and focus length anyway before we start just briefly this is a standard polygon plane which is here and I didn't change anything apart from using some mesh tools and in this case it is the sculpting tool sculpt tool that's how I sculpted these dents here this thing here is as you can see a polygon cube it's nothing but this thing here where I used extrusions all all over the place just an example let's extrude this face here right mouse-click face pick this go to the extrude icon and move it out like this then pick the top one press the key G in order to repeat the last command and move it up rotate it scale it or whatever I textured the things here as you will see in a second when I press this icon here this is just a standard grid texture and this is a standard grid texture as well and I'm a really bad UV artist not an artist at all basically what I did what I found out recently is the following I picked this complex object I went to UV and made my show me the UV editor and instead of doing anything here it looked horrible in the first place I create I went to mode modify and clicked on unit eyes so that really helped a lot and as you can see it did something about the new tower which I just extrude it here anyway this is about camera motion and first thing you need to know is there are several ways to animate a camera obviously but the first thing you under any circumstances you need a camera of its own you can animate the perspective camera that's the one we're looking through currently but you need that window here that viewport in order to actually change things and look at this closer for example and this is not a matter of the actual camera movement so you need a new camera and for that maybe you go to the for window view and if you don't need the top window or the front window you go here and create on the panel's perspective because it's a perspective sort of camera not an orthographic camera a new camera which is right here and you see it here in the perspective view that's the camera you just created that's the angle of view you currently have it's called perspective one and I change the name to main cam so that's our main camera now when we move it here in this view here check what's happening here going down and up so we can animate it right here or we can animate it directly here and that's what we do as a starting point what I want to do is I want to animate the camera so that it starts from here like a drone perspective and it lands in front of that red I think it's a sphere so we have the main camera selected we go to the beginning of the animation we press the key s the key s sets a keyframe for this selected object which is the camera currently now I've invoked extended the length of the animation to 1000 frames you can do that just as you like so at the end at let's say actually around 400 frames we want to be very close to that red dot so let's get the camera close to the dot like this and press another time the key s so between 1 and 433 the camera performs a motion now let's have a look what it does is make a smooth motion it's a really smooth performance here of the camera it comes from far away and slowly moves into the scene does a smooth rotation and lands in front of the red dot but it doesn't keep the red dot in focus and that's what we would naturally want now it's sort of looks here that's in the center of the scene now so we could we're currently at frame 161 we could help the camera a little bit getting focused on that red dot like moving it here for example and press the key s so what is the animation like now it rotates a little bit faster and the red dot is really sort of in focus now it's a little bit too low so we can go here and actually rotate the camera a little bit just like this and like this and set another keyframe we're currently at frame 275 so key s so we sort of bringing the camera motion under our control with four keyframes currently and that's a much better animation than the one we started with because it really keeps us focused on that red dot you can look at the animation in the animation editor called graph editor which is here it creates a smooth motion if you focus for example on those keyframes here you see everything is going smooth that's why we have such a really Pleasant motion which sometimes is a little bit too Pleasant nevermind let's delete the camera now we're back in the top view again and create a new camera here this time via create cameras and here we have camera and camera and aim I want to create a camera with an aim and here in the outliner you see it's a group now the camera is not just the camera it's a group and under that group node is the actual camera and a camera aim let's have a look at this right here this is the new camera here and that is the aim so what I can do now is move the aim to the red dot like here and when I move the camera now it will always be looking to that red dot when I move the camera to the right it will actually look straight along that line so that's the way I could animate the camera and it will always look at this point which is the purpose of the aim in this node here the camera aim I can also animate the aim example go to the first frame and we set the actually we go to frame 200 sort of we set the aim the top of that little hill here so I have the aim selected and I set a keyframe by pressing s now a couple of hundreds of frames later I set the aim to the yellow star like here set another keyframe and now go to frame 600 for example oh yeah 600 and I move the aim to that red dot now you could place it more precisely using the orthogonal windows but this is a fine for interactiveness so I set another keyframe here now let's look through that camera how do we do this well we use one of the other windows here panels perspective and now I don't need a new camera because I have it already it's called camera one that's the camera one here the camera is not animated when I select it there are no keyframes here no red lines here but the camera aim is animated so let's see how this works the camera will just sit there and move from one point of interest to the next one so it stays here for one looks that's in the center of the scene to that peak now it rotates over I'm not animating the camera just the aim which is the pink icon here goes to that star and having seen the star it goes to the red sphere so that's another way to animate a camera let's delete that group and create a new camera new camera so our camera is now called perspective one again let's call it motion because we're gonna put the camera on a motion path and the motion path can be very extreme and very conservative you can basically create a motion path through the whole scene if you want but that is not really very sexy so what I'll do now is I create a curve using curved surfaces and this icon and I place the starting point of the curve somewhere here actually why not here and then I go around here and then I land here I press ENTER that's the curve I just painted or drew in the in the viewport here now it's sitting on the ground plane let's lift it a little bit like this let's check that it doesn't penetrate anything in the of our ground so we press f8 in order to make the Seavey's the control vectors visible so I select that one which looks quite okay and now with the arrow keys arrow left and right I can move from one dot to the next one and adjust the curve so it looks all right now so f/8 again and I'm back in object mode now I'm gonna attach the new camera which is called motion camera to the curve and the way you do it is exactly this the sequence you select the camera first and then the aim of the camera so where the camera is gonna be constrained which is the curve so first the camera and then the curve now where are the constraints now they're not here because you find them under animation constrain motion path and let's use the checkbox here it sets the emotion to the time slider range which is currently 1000 frames which is very long why not click here and go from one frame from frame 1 to say frame 400 so the motion path will be 400 frames long and we leave the rest as it is and apply it and you see the camera has jumped and the animation goes like this now which is the roller-coaster sort of thing keeps very close to the ground and it stops here that's not very interesting but basically it follows the rule that we're following the track now let's inspect the camera how the camera actually performs here and as you can see it starts here and it looks into the inside of that half circle instead of along the path well how do we change this well here when you have the motion cam selected you have the motion path which is an abstract node really it's a note which tells you something about the motion along that path it but it's not the actual path and it's not the camera so it's not the curve neither the camera so it's something abstract in between and here you have a u value and that you value is the animation value it goes from 0 to 1 I'm going to jump to the beginning of the animation it shows zero here in the middle it shows something like zero point eight and at the end it's 1 so the motion path has been performed totally which means one point zero I could for example if I like this view here like this you here select the motion path and now you see the keyframes here and I can set another keyframe here for the motion path wait and it will be set here by pressing the key s now it's here actually it keyframes the front twist and the up twist as well I can now middle Mouse drag and that's important this keyframe to say 270 and press s again basically what I do is that the camera stops here can you see and now it starts moving again that's what I did with this extra keyframe here and the windows animation editors graph editor you see that stop that's what I just did and I think I can delete those keyframes it won't change a thing really so all we need to do now is we want the camera to look along the path and how do we go about this it's in the motion path again and here you have the front axis and how about changing it to Y it makes the camera point down which is interesting for some experiments really and in Zed it follows that path does it really follow the path well sort of backward which is a nice motion especially when you're going away from the skyline but if you want the camera to look away from the skyline you click inverse front and it looks that way so that's how you do the path animation and you can tweak things quite a bit so that's our animation now following that smooth curve really nice wait here for a second and land at the goal I mean a camera which ends here camera motion is just pathetic because there's nothing to be seen here but anyway you know what this is about now so let's delete the motion cam and the curve and what I'll do now is I create a camera cut and that's the last thing I'm going to show you the panel's perspective new I call the perspective one camera cut camera a camera cut is basically the camera goes from here to there then it jumps somewhere else shows us another angle of view and then goes to another angle of view usually you do that in the post-processing procedure but you can do it here as well and for visualization it's pretty cool actually so let's select the cut camera and start from this point here like this set a keyframe here at one and then go to frame 204 well whatever frame and just approach a little bit like this and set another keyframe then we go just a little bit further and we shoot to our red dot like this because we only went a couple of frames further this will be quite a jump it's not a camera cut yet let's see how it goes very slow approach so we're introducing the scene and now whoof we go to that ball here now with the arrows with the orange strokes here you jump from keyframe to keyframe let's go back to the last keyframe like here that's when we arrive here actually we want to stay here for a little bit of time like this so let's set another keyframe but now we go one frame further that's the basics of a camera cut he changed the perspective of your camera within one frame so that's that I can so I'm at frame 260 now with it 259 just previously and now we just move away like this and set another keyframe now here the animation goes like this we're jumping now to the dot and now we're far away from the dot we stay here for a while set a keyframe now we look at the dot from here set another keyframe so that's how it goes now and one step further we go here and look at the dot from this side set a keyframe so that's the jump now one frame after the next one and we slowly approach it like this set another keyframe go one frame further and now let's have a look at the star set another keyframe stay there for a while set another keyframe one frame further now we want to see both objects here the red one and the yellow one set another keyframe so this is how our animation goes now with I think four camera cuts no camera cut yet first cut comes now second cut now third cut and fourth cut so that's how you create camera cuts you can constrain your camera if you like for example if you have a dynamic animation with particles or falling objects you can attach the camera to the following objects lots of things you can do and this is just a starting point I'm actually quite happy that the texturing here Jesus UV texturing is such a horror have a nice day

Channel: Uhr

Views: 37,206

Rating: 4.9327297 out of 5

Keywords: Autodesk, Maya, Maya Tutorial, Tutorial, 3D tutorial, Modeling, Maximilian Schönherr, Tutor, www.maxschoenherr.de, Camera Animation, Camera Tutorial, Motion Path, Keyframing, Aim Constraint, Camera Cut, Camera with Aim

Id: Vx3Ht2M0WeA

Length: 23min 47sec (1427 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 30 2018