Camera on Path Offset editing in Graph Editor cumbersome

grandesballo · October 22, 2019, 10:43pm

Hello, I’m having issues editing my camera on path animation in the Graph Editor.
I’m working on a 4000 frames animation with a single camera movement.

The camera needs to fly among planets and slow down when it approaches each one, then move away again.
I’m keyframing the various camera positions along the path with Offset, but i can’t fine tune the bezier curve on the graph because the Offset curve spans between 0 and 1 values: each tiny edit of any handle moves the camera to the end or the start of the path.

Is there a different way to edit that curve, or a better way to move the camera on path?

Thank you

pko8462 · October 23, 2019, 2:12pm

Have you tried using the “Evaluation Time” in Path curve data to control the camera position along the path?
The horizontal axis of Graph Editor will be displayed in Frame no. or Time in second (selectable in the View menu).

bandages · October 23, 2019, 3:54pm

Then zoom in on the graph editor? You can do zoom independently in X and Y axes by ctrl MMB dragging on an axis. Well, at least you can with my Blender settings, not sure how yours is set up.

grandesballo · October 23, 2019, 5:09pm

I tried this before I decided to use Offset: something wasn’t working the way I wanted, but I will give it another try

grandesballo · October 23, 2019, 5:10pm

Thank you, that’s what I tried to do but I didn’t know how. I thought that the normalize button would do that. I will try as soon as I get home

grandesballo · October 25, 2019, 5:12pm

I’m sorry but that does’nt change the relative scale of the y axis, it only zooms in. What I neded was to see a good portion of the x axis while being able to fine tune the handles of eack keyframe. Thanks anyway, the shortcut you suggested works with my blender as well and will be useful for something else.

grandesballo · October 25, 2019, 5:14pm

Thank you, I realized that I had dropped this option because I got that error:

I solved it by disabling the f-curve modifier:

bandages · October 25, 2019, 5:53pm

Ctrl MMB drag on an axis. Dragging horizontally changes X axis zoom. Dragging vertically changes Y axis zoom. It doesn’t matter which axis you drag, it matters what direction you drag. (Not how I would have designed it, but.)