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Animate camera on a 3D Spline

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overkill4

Mechanical
Oct 6, 2005
152
Hi All,

I have an animation where I'm trying to get a camera to follow a 3d Spline. However when I adjust the cameras final position to 100% of the path it only seems to be approximately 25% of the way down the path.

Anybody run into this before?



60% of the time, it works every time.
 
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What I do for this is mount the camera to a "sled" part (yeah, even though you don't "have" to do that in v2007 and beyond). I use a point to mate to the spline curve. By the way--make sure your spline curve is a single entity, and not several of them strung together, or it won't work.

So--you mate the camera to the sled, and the sled to the spline, and you can drag the sled to move your camera--thus operating the sled as a part that moves in your animation instead of a shifting camera view. It seems more robust most of the time for whatever reason. And I don't think you need a solid body for your sled, so you can simply create some sketches to grab. If I'm wrong, make a solid body that's well out of the view of your mounted camera so the body never obscures the camera view.

And the last piece of advice is that you need to move your camera along a curvy spline in increments--you probably won't get it to work as a single move. Break it into several moves, one after another (much like rotating a part more than 90° requires). In fact, this method may even work for your current scenario without using a sled.



Jeff Mowry
A people governed by fear cannot value freedom.
 
Thanks very much Jeff I'll give that a shot.



60% of the time, it works every time.
 
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