Dynamic camera-setup.

© Mads Tuxen. 2003.

This is a setup to create a dynamic camera. 3d movements are often too perfect and lacks noise and jitters from the real world. There are several ways that you can add noise to the movements. This one is really fast and allows you to make changes quickly.

1. We are going to make 3 particleobjects each containing just 1 particle. These particles we will use to control our camera by linking them with springs.
Create a 3node camera (camera, aim and up) and a poly-cube (rename it to "camera_control"). Extrude two faces to get a camera-control like the picture. Move the faces to the aim and up points by point-snapping them.

2. Create 3 particle-objects with each one particle. We place them as we create them using the particle tool. (Found under the "particles"-rolldown) To place them right use point snapping for the aim and up and grid snapping for the camera. The camera-particle should be placed at <<0,0,0>>. Rename them "camera_particle", "aim_particle" and "up_particle". You simply choose particles> particle tool and then holding down the "v"-button (to point-snap) klick on the aim, a read dot appears. Press enter to stop the particle creation. Continue with the up and camera. (I have changed the rendering type to sphere to make the particles visible to you).

3. We will create springs from the nearest vertexes to the particles. Select the vertexes, and then the particle. Go to the soft/ rigidbodies rolldown and choose create springs. Do the same for the aim and up particles. Rename the spring-objects to "spring_up", "spring_aim" and "spring_camera".

4. Now we need to make some connections. Open the connection editor. On the left side load the particle_aim-shape (choose the particle in you window and press the down-key to get to the shape.) on the right side load the camera aim- locator. On the particle shape roll down to find the "world-centorid" and connect it to the "translate". Do the same for the camera-camera-particle and the up- up-particle.

5. Now you are almost done. You could just stop here, animate the camera-control and adjust the springs to get the result you want of dynamic noise. I will leave the fine tuning of "damping" "stiffness" and "rest-length" up to you. But here is what to do to make things a little nicer to work with.

6. Rename you camera to "dynamic_camera". create a new camera, name it "control_camera". Parent your "camera_contol"-polygon to the new camera. Now you can animate the control camera looking through it and then render the dynamic camera. To get rid of the shading on the polygon simply choose it and click the in and out-connection button in the hypergraph. find the connection between the poly-shape and the initial shading gorup and delete it. If you changed the particles render type change it back to points.

You can control the noise by moving and scaling the vertexes as well as adjusting the springs attributes. I find this method very easy to use, fast to compute and easy to fine tune.
Heres what the outliner looks like.

Thats all. A quick and efficient setup!

Any feedback welcome!

© Mads Tuxen. 2003.