Someone please tell me how do I make the the sides of the book. The bulk of the book is a single mesh. If u look closely then u will find that the sides of the book doesn’t look like that it has pages stacked. It looks like a rock.
Furthermore during animation u will notice that the camera moves towards the book in a wobbly way. How do I rectify that easily. I actually made a path & made the camera follo it. Later I stepped frame-by-frame and rotated & slightly moved the camera so as to make the book visible throughout the animation.
Ur comments & suggesstions sincerely sought after.
In mine I made the pages thicker than normal and offset them a little to add depth. Don’t know how well that applies to you since I can’t see it right now.
For the camera, you probably have a couple of keyframes that are out of place. Either that, or you adding the rot. keyframes is making it wobble on the path. You may need to go into the IPO editor and delete some of the keyframes to make it smoother.
Or you can track the camera to the object. That will probably get rid of wobblyness. That will make the camera follow the object as it goes down the path. You shouldn’t have to worry about setting rotation keyframes then.
See it now. Are your pages planes or narrow cubes? If they’re cuby, select the side faces and give them a new material. Alternate a couple of materials. Make the colors a little different so pages right next to each other have a little bit of a tint difference. If people can see a color difference between pages, even if slight, it will help simulate depth. I believe you can render the edges of a mesh, too, but I don’t know how.
The camera, dump the path completely. You don’t need it for something like this. What you are basically doing is “trucking” the camera towards the book and “panning” to the left while doing so. Trucking is physically moving the camera. Panning is moving the lens to the right or left while the camera remains still.
Start simple on frame 1 where you want the camera to be. Make sure the cam is selected and add a keyframe. Now go to the final frame, position the camera how you would like it and add a keyframe.
Now go through the intermediate frames. Only add keyframes to adjust the track where needed. You could also do pretty much what you are doing now by leaving the camera still. You could then just keyframe the camera rotation and the zoom. In a shot like this, zooming will probably give you smoother results.
One more thing. Lighting is the most important aspect of 3d animation. Google 3 point lighting and start from there. I’m not saying you want 3 point lighting for this scene, but it’s wise to always start with it and work from there. In actual production they almost always start with 3 point lighting, then add or remove lights to create the mood they are looking for. You can be the greatest animator in the world, but if you can’t light a scene well you won’t get very far.
Thanks for the reply. I will try out ur sugesstion once I get over my cold. I will report it back here. As for the lighting-- I have thought of adding a candle & table to the scene. Then I am thinking of addind the lights.
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