turn around an object / IPO sinus curve

Support Animation and Rigging
#1

Hi

I’m tryint to make my camera turn around an object during my animation but I don’t know how to do that.
I think I should have in my IPO window sinus and cosinus curves (one for X location, one for Y). I make some Bezier curves but it’s not exactly sinusoidal, so you see during the animation that the camera doesn’t make a circle.
Do you know how to achieve that ?
Thanks

Mildred

#2

The sinus /cosinus thing is a little confusing . I assume you mean sine/cosine . But since you don’t have to really deal with that to get what you want I guess its all moot .
Here is one way of doing what you want (I assume you already have a timeline for your animation - just go to frame 1 before you do this) :

  1. Create an empty . Move it to another layer so you can see what you are doing . Center it to your character (by having both layers selected) . Parent your armature or mesh to the empty .
  2. Select your camera . Move it to the layer the empty is in . Then select the empty . make the camera child of the empty . In the Object Panel (F7) add a track to contraint on the camera (Target:OB:Empty-if you did not rename your empty that is- To:-Z Up:Y - these settings work for standerd Blender Y axis up mode)
  3. Keyframe the rotation of the empty . You may want to do this from top view to see better . In the IPO window select RotZ and select curve Extend Mode to Extrapolation . Set Curve Interpolation mode to Constant . You can edit the speed of rotation by pressing N with RotZ selected in the IPO window and changing Xmin-Xmax, Ymin-Ymax values (less slope slower) .
  4. Go into camera view . Alt-A to see how your animation works . (remember to have both the camera-empty layer and the layer your mesh is on selected before rendering other wise it won’t render) . You can position your camera any where you like - will always follow the rotation of the empty .

Hope this helps

#3

Parent your armature or mesh to the empty .

but won’t this cause the mesh to rotate with the empty as well? So the camera remains pointing at the same spot on the mesh, even though they are both rotating, nothing appears to move. I think you mean parent the empty to the mesh, ie: the empty is the child.

#4

Well yeah I mean making the empty the child - I guess I ment to “parent” as to “make the parent of” - sorry if that was confusing - the whole parent terminology gets confusing to me . Maybe I should stick with “make the child of” instead from now on .