Best way to get realistic first person camera motion?

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi all,

Currently working on a slightly ambitious project, rendering a short 10-15 second cinematic from first person perspective.

This is a little test of where I’m at, and I wanted to know if there was a better way of controlling the cameras motion. Currently, I’m parenting the camera to the armatures head bone, but it’s probably a little too intense, and I’m not really sure how to dull it down.

I know about the noise modifier, but that doesn’t really achieve the desired affect based on some initial tests. I also know about the free roam camera, but it’s just very flat and boring, and so isn’t really what I want.

This is about 2 seconds of test rendering, but I feel like the bobble is just waaaaay too strong. I’ve looked at the head bone itself, but there doesn’t appear to be any animation on the bone, so I can’t even look to smooth it’s motion or whatever.

Any ideas?

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Here is a YT Video. The author also has an addon that comes with a couple of presets for this type of motion:

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If you like the bobbing motion but find it too intense, you could constrain the camera to the head with a copytransforms constraint, bake the camera keyframes, delete the constrain and scale down the animation curves

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4

Or get the Z-Location with a separate Copy Location Constraint and dial down its influence.

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5

Thanks for the replies, they’ve helped point me in the right direction.

Didn’t know I could do that, but I think it’s the easiest way to tweak what’s already there.

I’ve gone too far the other way now, and it’s lost a little bit of its weight, but that’s easy enough to weak I think now that I kinda know what I’m doing…

Thanks!

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That looks much better for readability ! but you’re losing a bit of the hecticness of the first version. It looks a bit smooth now. Once in a while I like to draw a sharp slope in a couple animation curves to break up the smoothness, it doesn’t have to get in the way of readability, and it can help sell the “first person view” look.

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Yeah, my thoughts exactly. I’ve added some noise to the curves, which does quite a lot to add the hecticness back. Just dialling it in now, but it’s better than it was for sure.

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Much closer to what I’m aiming for, I think. I’ll likely tweak it more once we’re a little closer to the finish line, but now that I have an easy way to tweak it, it’s gonna be much simpler, and I’m happy enough to move on now.

Thanks again!

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I think that looks great

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