Hey everyone,
I’m working on a pretty complex 1500 frame animation figured the best way to animate the camera was on a path. The smooth, curvy look works well for 95% of the shot, but I need an extremely sharp bend for one section. I’ve tried getting it as sharp as possible, but it’s just not working. It seems that the Path control points don’t have handles to tighten up a curve. Is there an easy way to go about this?
Hi El Director,
if you are using a bézier curve, hit v with a point selected and choose free. You can convert a nurbs to a bézier in case that’s what you’re using.
Hadrien
You could use a camera rig instead. I find it easier to keyframe the movement I want with a camera rig over other methods like follow path constraints.
Good luck!
You could also have the camera focus point follow a path, this gives additional effect of a free zoom camera.
Simply track rotation of the camera to focus empty and also use it for focus object
Then set camera depth of field to 2.4 or so… (or animate it to).
You can get great camera work this way (dual path requires some tweaking but its great).
Thanks for all the tips, I’ll give these a go and see what happens.
Chris
You can have a sharp corner in a Bezier curve:
You do this by selecting a vertex - you will see both the handles and the vertex point selected. using cursor at Individual Origin, key S 0 Return - Sets scale to 0 so the handles are coincident with the vertex point - you then have a discontinuity in the curve so you can have a sharp corner. Bear in mind that if you want a curve after this point, extend it BEFORE you scale its handles to zero. You cannot do this in Blender with a NURB curve, which is perverse in that a Bezier curve should not support a discontinuity in its shape and a NURB (Non-Uniform, Rational B-Spline) should - Oh well so much for maths conventions… :eek:
Cheers, Clock-down-under. 
@clockmender, as far as I know once you scale the handles to zero it is impossible to get them back to normal, am I missing something ? Why not simply break the handles ?
You are absolutely right my friend. That’s why I said to extend before you scale to zero. I am not familiar with “breaking” the handles, perhaps you could explain that here please.
Cheers, Clock-down-under.
I meant breaking tangents just like you do in the graph editor by hitting v and choosing “free” - what’s up with that “extend” thing though ??
If you extend a zero scaled vertex the extended new vertex is also zero scaled.
Cheers, Clock-down-under
…BUT - if you use 3D cursor and place it offset from the vertex that has been scaled to 0 you can rescale it back again.
Cheers, Clock-down-under
PS. What is happening in the good ol’ USA??? Trump in the Whitehouse - WW3 here we come.
Ah I see, didn’t think of this. Nice trick. 
- they signed their death warrant is what happened. Still can’t believe it is real… and my country is bound to go the same way in may 2017. I can see it from here.
Yes - the way to get elected these days is to be a racist masoginistic homophobe. We voted to leave Europe so we should keep quite as well. Glad I am getting near the end of my life rather than at the beginning of it… all we need now is a nutter in the Kremlin and… wait a minute, too late!
On a better note, I hardly ever use Blender NURBS as they are too unpredictable. I much preferred the Bézier curves mainly because they act more like NURBS than the NURBS do.
Cheers, Clock-down-under