I have a camera that I’d like to replicate in Blender. It has a Main Dummy for movement and Horizontal Orbit. A secondary Dummy for Vertical Orbit. And then it also has two sliders for Width of view and FOV. With these two sliders I can either keep the width constant and decrease the FOV. This will move the camera out and give the classic Hitchcock move. Or I can keep the FOV constant and change the Width slider which will move the camera in and out of my subject normally. I use this setup to go from a telephoto (practically Ortho) view of a patent drawing model and then change the FOV so it looks like the model pops out of the page.
Since Blender doesn’t allow animating the FOV but only the MM setting for the camera, I’m having a very hard time recreating this camera setup. Can anyone help? Thank you.
As far as I know, you are just talking about a “push pull” which as far as anyone who’s ever done it with real lenses are only moving the lens away while zooming in or moving the lens toward while zooming out.
That should be just animating the camera in and out on the axis that faces your blueprint and animating the mm setting. Have you done that? If that doesn’t work, let us know.
Yes, I’ve done that and it doesn’t look good. Animating the two variable separately isn’t accurate enough and having the FOV controlled by the distance (animating the distance) looks really bad because most of the FOV happens right at the beginning (closer to the standard camera settings). So, when you zoom in from an almost ortho camera to a perspective camera nothing happens for a while and then all of a sudden, wham-o it pops. Animating the FOV setting eliminates this and makes it look like a nice smooth transition. I know that they can’t do this IRL, but that’s what makes 3D so much fun.
Here is a video of what I’m looking to be able to do. As the FOV slider goes from 45degrees to .01degrees, the camera moves out to compensate so the width at the objects stays the same keeping all the objects in view.
For small angles and movements that works just fine. But when I’m going from nearly Orthographic (FOV = .01 degrees) to match patent figures all the way to 45 degree FOV, that doesn’t work so well. Just too inaccurate.
