Camera Move | Vivek's ArtPortfolio

Method

It was really interesting to animate the camera move as it too had a lot of factors that depended on it.

The main factors were to follow our hero character, the dice and make the arcs look as eccentric as possible, One other important factor was to tie in the transition between shot 2 and 3 which deserves to be discussed separately.

First Iteration had a simple camera move with minimal ease in and ease out as a proxy to animate the dice.

I animated the dice and roughed up the curves to get an idea where the camera should be looking composition wise.

Technical side to Animating the camera

So there were three different approaches/methods on how I animated the camera.

The First Method was Manuel keyframing

- Advantages of manual keyframing were I had complete control on all 6 degrees of freedom the camera had(x, y, z, x_rotation, y_rotation, z_rotation)

- Disadvantages were that It took a lot of time to smooth out the graph editor for all the 6 parameters decreasing efficiency and might not be a good approach if the mentors wanted to art direct the camera move.

- The rotation of the camera was wobbly and was not easy to control in all the 3 degrees.

The Second Method involved making the camera follow a curve

- Advantages of this method were that we had control on how the camera would be moving dynamically.

- One of the major disadvantages we faced in this method was hat it was redundant to animate the camera along the length of a curve.

- Even though it was easy to change the path of the curve it used to affect the length of the curve and hence the animation along, as the keyframes were essentially a function along the length of the curve and not x,y,z coordinated in space.

The Third Method was to make a null node and make the Camera look at it through the constraints network in the camera node.

- The major advantage to this method was that it gave us much more ease to control the rotational degrees of freedom as they were locked by the position of that null node.

- we went ahead and used this method for camera animation.