Animating Camera Movement?

Forgive me, but I’m new to blender. :slight_smile:

I was wondering how to do camera movements, as in panning, in Blender. I am trying to have a rotating shot a bullet, so that it could be later added in to a film. :slight_smile:

Any help is greatly appreciated!

~rosecruix

You could use a 4 view screen (top, right, front, camera) to move the camera and keys at strategic frames.
You could use a single camera view and the fly mode of which I never could get a hang of (or cared to…)
You could use the Gkey to pan, Gkey+MMB to dolly, Rkey to roll and Rkey+MMB to rotate the camera sideways and up/down.

All these are nice until you get into some maddening gimbal lock or Zaxis frenzy. To avoid those I make my camera target an empty and then move and key both, camera and target, but only with ‘Loc’ keys. I also find that it lets me have more control.

If you want the camera to track exactly to the bullet as it passes, apply a Track To constraint to the camera and make the bullet the constraint’s Target Object.

If you plan to composite your CG bullet with live action film/video, you may be interested in the info at the BLenses site, much of which deals with scene-matching considerations. The BLenses script may also come on handy, as it can create the kind of constraint mentioned above automatically, as well as helping match Blender scenes to real-world scenes.