Can I animate by just moving the camera?

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I was wondering if I can animate a scene by just moving the camera instead of moving the object(s) in front of the camera. I starting on the first frame and pressing “i” then Loc, and then moving the cam and going to frame 100 and pressing “i” and Loc again, but nothing happens when I press ANIM. I know there is some simple thing I’m missing here but any help for the newb would be appreciated greatly.

thanks:)

2

Good question. It ought to work. You’ve got lights in the scene so you get a render that’s not solid black. You’ve checked the IPO window with the camera selected to make sure there’s an xyz loc curve, and it’s not a straight line between 1 and 100 (at least one of the curves changes). Your start and end frame settings are 1 and 100. You didn’t accidentally press the “Do Sequence” button below the “Anim” button. When you scrub the timeline in the IPO window (drag it back and forth between 1 and 100) the camera moves in the 3D window. You didn’t accidentally switch from Blender Internal render to Yafray render with no Yafray installed. In the Render Layers panel, all the layers (or at least the layers with the camera, objects and lights) are selected.

I can’t think of anything else that might cause nothing to happen. What sort of nothing is happening? No render window? Renders the same thing over and over? Renders once only?

3

Yes, that should work.
You can also do an ALT-A (animation preview) to see if the camera is moving, before rendering the animation (ANIM button)
Things to check -

  1. Do you have the camera selected when you do the first “I” / loc
  2. You have to be looking through the camera to see the resulting animation (NUMPAD-0)
    (Or if you’re viewing through the 3d view, you should see the camera object moving around
  • Select the camera, then have an IPO window open at the same time, move the mouse over the IPO window, press HOME to re-center the curves, you should see animation curves for the camera.
    If you still can’t get it to work, post the .blend file to somewhere (4shared.com is a good free site).
    Mike
4

Also make sure your 3d window is in camera mode. Click 0 (numpad)

Edit: ops, looks like Mike_S already said that. Sorry.

5

Yes! I got it to work. Thanks for all your quick replies. The problem was that I was in the render settings window instead of the animation window…and that I also had checked “Do Sequence” but it appears to be working well now. Thanks again for the help. :slight_smile:

6

Oh, another question. Why is it that the rendered output is in images instead of video format? I had it selected as AVI Codec (uncompressed).

7

If you have AVI codec selected it should render to video file. Are you sure you are not looking at a previously rendered image sequence? (I’ve justed tested and AVI codec/uncompressed gave me a .avi file.)

If you are looking for uncompressed, you could choose AVI Raw.

8

Final Question: Now that I have made one animation…how do I delete the keyframes from the first and begin a second?

EDIT: I have tried going into the Timeline, but it will not let me delete the old keyframes for some reason

9

If you want to start over completly, go into the IPO editor for the camera and do the usual A - X to delete all the animation curves.

For just one key, you’ll need to use editmode and just select that one curve point, for each relevant curve, I believe.

10

thanks, that works well.