Maya Animation :: Camera Movement Around A Scene / Along A Path
Nov 23, 2010
I'm new to Maya 2011 and simply put, I need to know the basics of animating a camera around a scene, along a path, slowing down and speeding up, how to move the point of interest, that type of thing.
a few things involving cameras. My assignment was to use our plane that we modeled with poly's and animate it on a motion path(used cv curve tool) and have a camera above it follow it. Now I got that down perfect.
But what I don't have a clue on, is how do I attach a camera on the same motion path as the plane and have a camera angle right behind the spinning propeller? Like a cockpit view.
I have two different files that contain data at greatly different scales. I'd like to render out each sequence and composite seamlessly. Is there any easy way to match the movement of two cameras in files that contain data of vastly different scales? I'd rather not merge data. I'd like to animate the camera in one file, merge the camera into the other file and scale the movement up.
When I merge an animated camera from another scene, the movement setting keys for the camera and target are there, but it appears that animated exposure settings are not. Is there a way to import those with the camera, as well?
In my scene i have a fully rigged character, with a walk cycle animation on him. what i would like to have is a row of characters walking around. (kind of like how you see military soldiers walk around while in group). The part that is giving me the most trouble with this is getting multiple copies of the same character into my scene.
What i have tried and failed with: Grouping my full rig and then duplicating. making instances of my character and messing around with particles. i have made multiple attempts at trying to use duplicate special.
the only thing that seems to kind of work is making a scene with just one character and importing it into my main scene and changing a bunch of stuff around. with the amount of copies i need this workflow just feels really degrading and tiresome.
For some reason when using the path option in inventor studio for camera animation the camera rolls for no reason?? I have created two helical curve sketches around my product, the outer curve is the path for the camera and the inner curve is the path for the target. Both curves are the same height and have 1 revolution. When i play the camera it works out fine untill it hits 1/4 of the way through and suddenly flips 180 degrees so now the camera is upside down, once it hits 3/4 of the way it flips back again to the correct rotation. If i dont create an inner curve for the target and place the target directly in the centre of my product with no path to follow the camera spins all over the place when it follows the curve.
I have a hard time copying/pasting graph editor curves from a scene to another, since it`s only a specific part of the timeline, is there some basic rules that are to be observed for things to work properly? Yes after a thousand tries i`m going to have to edit every darn ecking curves accordingly to those i wanted to copy.
Was wondering if there is a way of getting random camera movements? For example, i am doing a fly through of an earthquake scene and as the camera animates along the street it randomly shakes with the earthquake shocks.
I know I could animate it by hand but I wondered if there was a way (perhaps an expression) to make it more simple?
I have problem with animating camera along a spline using path constraint. The spline has been spline normalized before added to the path constraint. Then I add besier floating to be able to slow down the camera.
The final camera seems to move not smoothly. This can notice especially when the camera are further away from the origin (0,0).
Some says it's because of Max's coordinates is not fine enough which can clearly proved when import autocad file which located very far from the origin into max and most vertex will be shifted from where it should be in Autocad.
I've got a Locator attached to a Curve with a Motion Path - the Motion Path is animated so the Locator moves nicely along the Curve. I now want to swap the original Curve with a new one and have the Locator follow it instead.
Is there a way to simply switch curves and tell the Motion Path to use a new Curve while keeping the animated keys in the Motion Path node?
I've tried playing around with the connection editor but cant manage to connect the new Curve to the Motion Path nodes "geometryPath"
I'm currently working on a advertisement for a client and I need to creat a kind of ribbon to wrap around like a present. I thought what would be best would be making the ribbon and then using a motion path add it on but also I would add a gravity field to the ribbon so to moved more like a ribbon.
Also with the motion path I have made them and connected my ribbon and for some reason it doesn't move until the last frame and just snaps to that position?
When I assign an object to a path using the default setting the object sits nicely on the first point of the cv curve in the path. And moves fine going in one direction but as it goes around a corner it is offset from the curve but continues along with this new offset until the end.
I've tried deleting all preferences. I was working with the camera originally then suddenly the keyframes wouldn't appear as red lines (there was only 1 camera) and appeared blank, i deleted these 'blank' keyframes and ever since I've been unable to play the entire camera sequence, the timeline simply sits at 0. I've tried a new camera with it's own keyframing but to no avail, it refuses to play.
edit: I just tried in a new scene also, same problem. It's making it near impossible to preview animations in real-time.
To create an animation similar to the one shown in the page 225, in the tutorial, I created a curve but I am not too sure that was the correct way to create it.
1. Selected the Surfaces Menu.
2. In the font view, using the CV Curve Tool, created the first half.
3. Using Duplicate in the Edit Menu, I created the other half.
4. In the Edit Curves Menu, selected Attach Curves and connected two curves.
5. I, then selected the Animation Menu and created an object to be used as an aircraft and followed the same steps shown in the tutorial and it worked nicely.
I am trying to attach an object to a motion path but when i do the object goes to the beginning of the path but when i move the time slider nothing happens and when i move the object it isn't attached to the path.
I am doing some animations involving sine waves, and I can make an expression that controls the translation of an object such that it travels along the path of a sine wave, but I can't figure out how to dynamically create an editable sine wave curve.
Is there a way to have Maya generate a curve based upon the path that an object travels upon?
For instance I have a sphere that is moving along the X axis with time, and also moving up and down on the Z axis back and forth. I would like to make an editable curve object of this path of motion.
I can see in Maya 2012 we will have motion trails where we can see the actual path an object is moving along, and that we will be able to interact with this path to alter the animation, but what if we could take that path and make it an actual curve or NURBS object?
I have a mocap cycle cleaned up and read to cycle, with and without translation, the cycle with translation is perfect because it avoids the sliding feet probelm.
Is there a way to give this cycle a path to follow so it can walk along this path and take curves and those things?
I'm looking around the net, but I don't seem to be able to find anything, the only thing i was able to think of is the path contraint, but, if i'm right, it won't respect the cycle translation, and i can use it without translation but it will be hard to avoid the sliding feet problem.
Any way to evenly distribute Locators on a motion path along a nurbs circle? Its for a mouth/lips rig. and I need it to be symmetrical with out manually inputting values.
i have been using the drivenTime node to create walkcycles that follow motion path curves where the out time is connected to some attribute via a unitToTimeCOnversion node.in previous version of Maya.
When i try to connect anything to the Out Time of new drivenTime node the connection never works, not even keyframes?
I have a video clip I need to place come rendered objects into. How can I extrapolate my camera movement from my video and transfer it on to my camera in my MAX scene?
I edit in FCPX and do effects and stuff in Smoke2013.
I have a shot done with handheld camera from helicopter. The camera is hung by a system, and we have a small gyro on it. But not yet a wiscam or other cool stuff.
So, in fcpx I can us load and lock X and it is really a beautiful steadycam shot. How do I do that in smoke.
The auto stabilizer does not give me a smoothcam version. And normal stabilizer is just for doing 2D stuff....
The shot, is a helicopter flying around an oilrig, and a nice horizon as well. It is orbiting the platform. So I have at least 90 degrees flying around the platform/oilrig.
Say I have 400 boxes and I want to animate each box to move up and down along the z axis randomly. How would I go about doing that? I assume somehow with the noise modifier, but I can't figure out how to get it to work with motion and not the shape of the object.
It only seems to affect the viewports in which I am locked to a camera angle - e.g. top, side, and front. I can zoom in perfectly fine, but as soon as I zoom out with the scroll bar it immediately puts the camera back to some sort of preset distance. This makes working on the model an incredibly annoying and disruptive task.
While also on the subject of cameras, my zooming in the viewport in which I am able to freely move about, the zoom in and out strength seems to have increased tenfold and is also causing problems. To put it into mathematical terms, the zoom in/out seems to be multiplicative rather than additive. This happened at about the same time the other thing started happening. Is there any way to set the amount of scaling with each movement of the scrollbar
How does one implement the use of two pivot points to control movement concurrently in the X- and Y-plane?
I 've added a Link Constraint to the salmon colored component which is linked to the red cylinder pin at far left. This pin has a Path Constraint to an Arc path which is orientated left-to-right and arching up. The pin at right has a line Path Constraint that moves down and to the right. Still image 01 shows the retracted position. Still image 02 shows the animation at 50%, the Fowler hinge follows nicely the path of the left most pin quite well. Notice no movement occurs in the down direction that would be imposed by the right pin - if it worked/was set up properly.
In the track view window, the Move Keys Horizontal and Vertical Buttons should restrict the movement of keyframes on the horizontal (time) or vertical (value) axis, but do not in my version of 3ds Max 2012 SP1. Work around include using the dope sheet or using the Keys > Slide or Keys > Scale Value menu items.
I am in the process of creating a Action/War scene where the characters will be still (Meaning not moving or frozen), but there will be a camera that moves/pans around them showing the different characters and the things they are doing. Now, I have two questions to this. Since there will be some weapons (mainly guns and such), is it possible to create a muzzle flash while making it appear frozen to the eye? As in making a muzzle flash and using only a piece of it (make in mid flash) and using that as the still visual effect. Can this be done? Because from what I remember...creating a Muzzle Flash requires particles, which has a moving animation to them.
My second question is....Which one would be better at making a actuate muzzle flash (in this case a still muzzle flash), PF Source or FumeFX? Which one would make a really actuate looking muzzle flash and while preserving a frozen action look?
I've been playing with Scene Referencing, and have a question about skinning. Is the ability to bind a mesh that is part of an Assembly Reference something that will be coming in a future release? I'd like to be able to bind both a high-poly and a low-poly mesh to one rig using scene assembly. That way I can swap armor parts, weapons, etc on one rig without cutting/pasting animation between rigs.
I've attached a picture of a sample of what I'm referring to. If that isn't workable, any other workflow that is comparable?