Parented camera spins in flyby

Support Basics & Interface
1

I’ve parented a camera to an empty in order to have it “orbit” smoothly around an object (I don’t know if this is the best way to do this as I’m still pretty nooby, but it seemed logical).

If I leave the empty in the original orientation, I can point the camera where I like using flyby. However, as soon as I rotate the empty and try to reorient the camera using flyby (as I want something a little more that a straight “orbit”), the camera spins wildly on the same axis that the empty was rotated on and won’t stop.

I’ve tried this using the default model you get when you launch blender (parent camera to cube, rotate cube, try to enter flyby mode from camera) and it happens then as well, so it’s not specific to my project.

Does anyone have any ideas? Is this some consequence of the parenting process I’ve missed? Using 2.49b on Ubuntu if that helps.

Thanks in advance.

2

Go into your IPO editor for both the empty and the camera and make sure it looks O.K. (You have to know how to read the IPO curves.) Any wild or radical movements should show up. It will at least allow you to read and figure out more. Hope that helped.

3

Thanks for replying, but the IPO curves are fine. It’s not when I render the animation that the camera spins wildly - that works as intended. Like I said, I’ve replicated this on the default scene without actually putting in any keyframes or animation, just parenting the camera to something then rotating the parent object.

To try and clarify, this is how I recreated the issue outside of my project:

  1. Take Blender default startup cube/camera/light setup.
  2. Parent camera to cube.
  3. Enter camera view (Num 0) then flyby mode (Shift F) - camera flyby works fine and is user controlled.
  4. Go to overhead view (Num 7), select cube, rotate around Z axis using R key.
  5. Return to camera view (Num 0) then flyby mode (Shift F) - camera view spins wildly around Z axis.

I’ve tried it on 2 computers and the same thing happens, though admittedly both are running the same Karmic Ubuntu, Blender 2.49b combo. I could reposition and rotate the camera, but I like flyby as I find it more intuitive.