Camera Orbit animation

Steel Rat

I'm trying to do a simple camera orbit animation around a figure, using a user-defined camera. Starting at frame 0, then to frame 100, all I do is orbit the camera around a figure about 180m degrees, no zooming or changing of perspective other than the orbit. But when I run the animation, the camera zooms in for most of the animation, then zooms back out once it reaches the last frame. How can I fix this?

Richard Haseltine

What frames did you set? If you set one at 0 on one side of the target and one at 180 on the other side then as far as DS is concerned it is translating across the scene, it doesn't know it's meant to follow a circular path. Most people, I think, handle this by parenting the camera to a null node (Create>New Null) at the target point and then animate the rotation of the null (and in DS 4.12.x.x you can now control the interpolation to get a smooth rotation without slowing or speeding, which before required plug-ins or scripts).

Steel Rat

I thought about this while I was at work, and yeah, I didn't consider that it was just taking the start and endpoints and going in a straight line to get there. I think Poser does it differently, that's why it was unexpected.

I'll try the null thing.

Thanks!