I have a ship that is merrily on its way into a wormhole. It’s a short opening intro video to animate that. All is well … except for the camera. The opening scene has the ship following a path and moving into the shot. Once that is done, I want the camera to start moving to catch up to the ship, from above, down to the level of the ship and behind it. I want it to get steadily closer to the ship every frame until it’s a certain distance behind it. The camera begins as a stationary object but once the ship is in the scene the camera needs to start moving. I tried “child of” but the camera maintains its elevation above the ship. I have track to; that is working without any problems. Any ideas?
Is setting keyframes for the camera not an option?
make a rig for your camera and use constraint on the bone system.
or parent your camera to an empty constrained to the parent/child to be able to move the camera freely.
Camera_Rig_Crane_2_Following_Ship.blend (2.0 MB)
The advantage of using rigged camera is that you’ve got a controle by articulation in local mode and it’s easier to figure out how to achieve motions with few tracks.
The problems with 92nd party libraries crashing within Blender became so incessant, in addition to a 13 hour marathon fighting auto movement of the camera and other anomalies that weren’t wanted, I ended up creating a script that copied the camera path, converted the copy to a mesh, took as input the starting camera coordinates, used “track to” the wormhole entrance, and manually created a keyframe for every single frame, storing the camera’s interpolated path along the curve in each keyframe. 13 hours. I wouldn’t quit. Despite the dev team’s best efforts, I beat them and made it work. I’m sure they’re out searching for an array of next-level-of-junk 93rd party libraries for the next update. Don’t want to reinvent the wheel, right? Let’s just make it so unstable that it’s effectively unusable. Who codes anymore? Just use a billionth party junk shortcut library that takes 10 times longer to contend with than they ever would need to simply code its junk functionality.
What does all of that mean?