-
“hand held” 3D camera?
i’ve got a simple comp consisting of a scene with a character and background – all knocked back into 3d space
I want to animate the camera to zoom in and move around a bit, but i want it to have that sort of fluid, shakey hand-held feel we see a lot these days (one example is the end seqence to Smokin’ Aces seen on voodoodog.com – under titles).
I thought about videoing a picture on my wall -jerky hand held, and then motion track the shake of that video to my 3d cameras point of interest or position (if possible?)…. or i might just add some sort of wiggle, or could try and use motion sketch, or expressions from a null (I’m quite new to this)!?
anyone got any tips as to what would be a good procedure for controlling the 3d cam. I have tried setting individual position keyframes but this takes forever and doesn’t have that “organic feel”
many thanks for any responses
-
3 Replies
-
The quickest way would definitely be to apply wiggle() to your camera. I haven’t done this myself, but you probably want to wiggle the point of interest more than the position of the camera. People tend to have a harder time keeping cameras pointed at the right thing. A shift of half a degree in orientation is very noticeable, where as the camera moving half an inch isn’t nearly as noticeable. I think you’ll probably want to parent your camera to a Null to move it around so that the point of interest maintains a constant distance from the camera (otherwise the wiggle would be exaggerated when the point of interest gets closer to the camera).
I also like your idea of motion tracking some hand held footage, but that data would also need to be interpreted some how.
-
Wiggling will be fast, but I have used your first idea — to motion track a shot you shoot hand held of some square object attatched to a wall. (I used a poster). It worked like gangbusters.
I motion tracked the corner of the poster, then mapped the tracker onto the camera’s x and y position coordinates using the pickwhip. I moved in by keyframing the z coordinate, but I suppose you could augment the shakiness of the effect by wiggling it instead. I left the point of interest steady, which resulted in the camera panning back and forth as it moved to keep the main object centered.
One more key with this effect — make sure your foreground and background elements are sufficiently separated in z space, because then you see the relative motion better.
Hope this helps.
-
In the past, I’ve made the comp slightly bogger than I will finally need it to be, and then nest that comp in a comp the right size.
Then I wiggle the comp as needed.
Depending on the shot, you may not need to wiggle in 3D and this is an easy way to do it.
May not be what you need though. If you want the motion to make other objects shift in the perspective (which is actually not that natural, but a popular effect these days), then this won;t work. Buit for a realistic camera shake, it really works.
I used the technique in this old project a lot:
https://allbetsareoff.com/video/Nihatsu_Fusion.mov
Particularly in the cave shot, the bloodstream, the tube (with litle hairs) and the viruses (purple shot).
—————————————-
Aharon Rabinowitz
arabinowitz(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com—————————————-
Click the link below to subscribe to the Creative Cow After Effects Podcast, and get free AE video tutorials:https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=111087911
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up