I have a camera following a nurbs path that I did following the steps in a YouTube tutorial (https://youtu.be/5EQdQdtg-ao?si=5gYXHTyR_GLn5B6A). The other two I did worked just fine, but the third one is doing something weird.
The other two paths were not straight, but the curves were rather mild. Like the tutorial says, I keyframed the offset in the Follow Path constrain and it worked just fine. In one of them I keyframed location for the empty it tracks to.
The first two went fine, the camera travels from the beginning to the end of each path at the same speed.
But on the third one, I wanted to do a semi circular path around the main object, but editing the vertices in the path to the shape I wanted. And it works, but not as intended. It follows the path, shows the main object (I also keyframed location of the empty/target), but before it gets to the mid point of the animation (600 frames total, so around 260) it suddenly speeds up for about 20-30 frames and then continues at the regular speed.
I tried everything, including deleting the camera, empty and path and recreating them all over again. But it always gets to that point where it speeds up and then slows down. The first thing I thought was keyframe interpolation, so just in case I set everything to linear, all the properties that are animated have linear keyframes.
Still acts as if I had set keyframes around frame 260 to purposely speed up and slow down, but that’s not the case.
Without looking at the file - I think it is the type of curve.
A path will take the same time to animate between points. No matter how far apart they are. So it is useful to deliberately create a change in motion speed.
Try changing the path to a bezier. Edit Mode > Curve Menu > Set Spline Type > Bezier.
Then the interpolation is along the entire curve, not segment by segment.
Sorry it took me a bit to reply. I followed your advice and changed the spline type to bezier, but it didn’t change anything. The camera still accelerated and decelerated at the same place.
So I deleted that path and created a new one, this time making sure that the vertices were at the same distance from each other. Still same result. So I deleted the path, and this time, I created a nurbs circle, and set the camera to follow it. This time it went at the same speed all around. But I didn’t want a circle, even if it was a kind of circular motion.
So I tried to edit the circle, but it only has 4 vertices, and I didn’t get anywhere with it. So I said, screw this, I’m going to try once more to rebuild the whole thing. Meaning, the camera, target and path. I had already tried that, but it hadn’t worked for some reason. But I kept wondering why did it work at one point and then it got messed up.
So I deleted all three, and created all three again. And this time it worked just fine. And it doesn’t matter if the points are closer or farther to each other, the camera just follows the path at the same speed.
