Advice on pivot points and driving style animation.

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi,

I am currently working on an animation. Where my camera drives through my city. However I run into a few problems.

I tried using the 3d cursor as the pivot point. But on my map, being huge, even a 0.1 adjustment can be damaging to the view. Also this only rotates the map. Sometimes I what to just rotate the camera.

I tried this one, I moved the cursor the the camera position and rotated the camera using the 3d cursor pivot point. Which worked fine by itself, but have a bad effect on my time line bars. They seemed to all disappear, is this a known issue?

Also, is it possible to set up a tracking grid. What I mean by this, is have the camera track different points through out the animation?

Basically, I want the camera to act like a car driving through the city. Is there an easier way of doing this?

My map has different heights, freeway, etc…

2

I would make a path for it to follow, and have it track an empty

3

Good idea.

I did not think about the camera tracking an empty.

Thanks.

4

I often will make two paths as well. Clone the first path, then alter it slightly. Put the camera on path #1 and then put an Empty on path #2. Then you can make the camera track to the Empty. This way the camera can look around as it traveling down the path. Altering the shape of either path allows you to quickly change the animation without messing around with keyframes.