Camera not moving during animation

aldarri_s

Hello:

I have ran into a problem with the simplest walking animation.  Neither camera nor view would follow the animated figure (during animation).

When a camera is parented to the figure, it moves when the figure is moved, but it does not move during animation.

When a camera is parented to the figure's hip (or any other part), it moves, but not with the figure, it moves with the figure part.  If the part rotates slightly, the camera swings -- further the farther it is from the figure.

Eventually, I worked around by making the camera orthogonal, but that won't work for complex scenes.

Is there any way to make camera follow the translations of a figure during animation?

 

While at it, what is a good tool to edit animations, and to create them?

Ruphuss

create null

parent evrything to null

move the null

Richard Haseltine

Is the figure actually moving? If you are moving with the hip but the camera is parented to the figure then that would be expected. It would probably be better to animate the camera directly.

Syrus_Dante

Camera movment is an interesting topic.

As Ruphuss saied create a Null is a good keyword.

Also select the camera and have a look at the Parameters pane, unter the Property Group: General>Misc you can find the 'Point At' Property, as Target select the Null. Now the camera will follow all movments of the null to keep it in focus. With that you have a good setup like a camera tracker, if thats what you want. To avoid that the camera leans sideways, once again select it and go to the Parameters pane, select the Z-Rotation Property, press the little gear icon and limit the min/max value to zero - means no rotation alowed on this axis.

 

aldarri_s

I tried using the nulls and groups, but it didn't work.

It works when I simply move objects in the scene, but in this case, motion comes from an animation.  Camera won't move if parented to figure.  It moves when parented to figure's hip, but then it follow's the hip's rotations -- I need a straight line.

Pointing camera at an object makes it worse.

aldarri_s

A bit of clarification -- I don't want the camera to rotate, I want it to stay at the same distance from the animated figure.  

Richard Haseltine

You could try using the Property Hierarchy pane to link the x and z translations of the camera to the figure's hip, leaving the y value constant. If you right-click on the parameters pane to put it in Edit mode you can then right-click on one of the camera translations and show it in the Property Hierarchy, then drag the hip translation across and into its Controllers>1st Stage (additive) section (or show the hip transforms and drag the camera's into their Sub-Components>1st Stage).

aldarri_s

Thank you, it worked.

I wouldn't have found it by myself.

The camera is parented to the figure, figure's hip z-translation is set added to the camera's z-translation's controller's first stage -- via the property hierarchy pane.