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Getting Camera to follow a Particle
Hi y’all!
Thanks again for all help so far, it’s made the process of learning C4D much easier. But now I have a new question.
I’m trying to get a camera to follow a single particle (a standard particle, not a thinking one). There is an emitter that emits a single particle and it collides with another particle and I want the camera to follow the first particle movement (which is effected by wind and turbulence). I’ve seen a lot tutorials about how to get the camera to follow an object along a spline, but that’s not really the “look” I was going for. Is there another to do this? Trying draw out a spline for the camera to follow is difficult and doesn’t “track” the way I want. Is the motion camera what I should be look at?
Thanks!
Erinn
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5 Replies
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I don’t think there’s any way to do it directly with standard particles, but you could use mograph and some xpresso to achieve the desired effect. Basically you’d clone onto the emitter, then create an xpresso and connect the cloner’s object out port to a mograph>data node. Set the index of the particle you want to focus on (some trial and error) and then connect the data node’s global matrix out port to a null object’s global matrix in port. Then have the camera target the null.
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Use a Tracer Object on the Emitter to draw a path. In the Motion Camera have the camera target the Tracer. You can let the camera follow that path as well and play with the motion camera controls to give the camera a more organic feel. Hopefully I understood your question. See attached file and pics. Good Luck.
http://www.mographcandy.com
Twitter: @mographcandy -
Using the Tracer seems to do the trick! Thank you so much! The file you uploaded was super helpful, Dan.
The only issue I’m having with it so far is that once the original particle collides with the second one, the camera stops following the first particle and instead just follows the path it had been following. I tried making a second Tracer for the second particle but it doesn’t seem to help. Any ideas? Or do I just have to suck it up and use xpresso for this one?
A million thanks,
Erinn
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What are you doing to make them collide? In the attached scene file on this post I added a Dynamics Tag to the emitters. When the particles collide the camera still follows the original particle. I turned up the Steps in the Dynamics Project Settings to make a more accurate calculation because there was a lot of jitter at first. I also turned up the Follow Position and Follow Rotation in the Dynamics Tag.
6178_tracer2dynamics.c4d.ziphttp://www.mographcandy.com
Twitter: @mographcandy -
Sorry for the late response!
I also used the dynamics tags on the emitters, and it still followed the original “track” from before the collision. And what even weirder, I made new file and put the camera in first, and it works like a charm in terms of camera movement, but now I’m having a heck of a time trying to replicate the particle movement from the original.
Its probably easier to see than to describe 6212_camerafollow.c4d.zip
(guess I should have put a file up a while ago, my bad!) Anyways, this is the original file, where the particle move correctly but the camera keeps going in a straight line. I’m sure its probably something stupid I forgot.
Thanks again, this has been a huge help and I never would have been able to figure it out on my own!
Erinn
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