since I’m not that experienced with Blender, there is probably an easy solution to my problem, but experimenting myself and reading a lot didn’t really help.
I’m trying to do a camera animation that first slides sideways on a path and then moves forward on a different path.
The best way of doing that seemed to be using two different curves and follow path constraints. By setting different axis for both constraints the camera moves sideways on one path and forward on the other one. With influence IPO curves I could set the second constraint to be active after the first one.
What I didn’t manage to solve was the smooth transition between the two curves. Using the influence IPOs for that, as for example http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Constraints/Constraint_Stack suggests, doesn’t really work and the camera somehow drifts in the transition period. You can see that in the example blend file between frames 50 and 60.
Another possibility would be having the two curves being completely orthogonal, so the camera doesn’t jump at all when moving between the curves, but I found that to be virtually impossible.
I would be great if someone could tell me how to achieve a smooth transition here.
Just convert the constraint influence curves to the constant interpolation mode (T-1 with the curve selected) … You might also want to give the starting point of the second curve a bit of a tilt (T again but in Edit Mode for the curve) since there is a bit of a “jolt” when the camera aligns it self to the second curve …
Here’s the result with some tweaking with the speed IPOs on the paths :
With the constant interpolation mode the camera jumps from one curve to another between two frames, which leads to the jolt. In your file this was quite minimal, but getting rid of it completely is almost impossible.
That’s why I wanted to do a smooth transistion between the two curves. Various tutorial sites suggested to let the influence curves fade into each other, like I did in my example file.
With having a hard transition between two frames I don’t solve the problem of completely getting rid of the jolt.
Thanks!
Daniel
Edit:
Interesting. While playing around I think I accidentally found a solution.
The trick is to have the first influence curve constantly staying on 1 while the second curve slowly goes from 0 to 1. In that period, the camera smoothly changes the position between the two paths. I always tried to increase the second influence curve while decreasing the first, which didn’t work.
