Camera Question

[Darby Edelen]

[djelder] “Basically because it’s on a sphere, I feel it would be very hard to achieve what I’m looking to achieve.”

Actually, because you’re dealing with a sphere I think it would be much easier to achieve. If I understood what you’re trying to do then all you really need to do is set the camera’s point of interest to the center of the sphere. Then as you move the camera around in 3D space it will constantly re-orient itself to be facing the sphere (and consequently one of the sphere’s faces).

I’m not sure how the script sets things up, but it shouldn’t be too hard to create a 3D null and use that to control the location of the center of the sphere, then use an expression to link that null’s location to the camera’s point of interest.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Daniel Elder]

That sounds about right, but since I have 130 images to move through, is ther any way to use keyframes to tell the camera’s point of interest to go and find a particular image, or would I just have to manually do that for each one the images?

[Darby Edelen]

I think it would be difficult to write an expression that would handle this for you. You won’t want to animate the point of interest, you want the camera to always be looking at the center of the sphere. The only thing you need to animate is the position property so that the camera moves.

You might be able to devise an expression based on Dan Ebberts’s excellent tutorial here:

https://www.motionscript.com/mastering-expressions/random-sphere.html

That would allow you to specify a distance (radius) for your camera to maintain from its point of interest and animate sliders for the theta and phi values to have your camera move in a perfectly spherical fashion as well. However, this will still require numerous keyframes to get your camera to look at each of 130 images. You might try posting in the AE Expressions forum for more help, Dan Ebberts cruises through there and he often comes up with brilliant solutions to things I dismiss as ‘too hard’ =)

[Daniel Elder]

Cool, I will give this a shot and see what I can come up with. Thanks

[Darby Edelen]

Well now, that’s a much easier way to approach it =) I’d recommend rotating the sphere instead of moving the camera as Dave suggests.

[Delete]

If you you rotate the sphere instead of locking your camera’s point of interest, you’re not limited to a single camera angle. You could have cool stuff like your camera craning in to a rotating (world like) sphered surface then arcing up and rotating to match the head on angle needed to see the picture. Just remember to use easy-ease. ☺

Oh, and 130 key-frames is nothing in my book.

Back in my early days of AE I animated over 1000 individual leaves on a tree “growing” in from buds. Yes it looked cool, yes it took forever to render, but I didn’t know any better.

[Daniel Elder]

THANKS FOR THE ADVICE (I’M RENDERING RIGHT NOW, THAT’S WHY I’M ALL CAPS) I WILL GIVE THE STATIONARY CAMERA A TRY AND HAVE THE IMAGES MOVE FOR THE CAMERA. IT SEEMS TO HAVE A SMOOTHER FLOW THAT WAY. THANKS AGAIN.