Animating a Camera along a path

[ahp]

Hey,

I have footage from a drone. From the overall footage I chose frame 360 to frame 864 to work with. The goal is to have an animation of a spaceship flying through the captured footage (3D tracking).
I have solved the camera motion and the camera is set-up… I also made a path that roughly follows the camera movement. To this path I parented an object (for now: a cube, later: the spaceship) and chose the option “follow path”. Under the path’s object data button, you have a subgroup: path animation with options “Frames” and “Evalution Time”.
I set the Frames to 504 (864-360: length of my footage) but the trouble lies with the evalution time. I can’t set this lower than 360 because the drone footage only starts at frame 360. So I have an animation where the cube starts with an evalution time of 360 of 540 frames, while I want it to start at 0 if that makes sense.

I also would like to control the speed at which the cube follows the path (accelerate, decelerate). Is this possible with the “follow path” (as opposed to keyframes)?

Any suggestions?

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[Hadriscus]

@ahp the way to go is to use a follow path constraint, not this evaluation time thing - it is a remnant from the old days, don’t know why they don’t just remove it.

[ahp]

Hey Hadriscus,

Thx for the tip. I tried using a follow path constraint but the cube kinda jumped to a random location in the scene instead of starting at the beginning point of the curve. I suspect I have to set the orientation of the cube constraint (forward and up?). How can I determine what I need to set these values to ?

Big thanks!

Attachments

[ahp]

Clearing the grabbing seems to have done the trick… (alt g)

[Hadriscus]

Ah sorry, seems I misunderstood. Yeah, you need to make sure the origins of the curve object and the constrained object are in the same place.