I have been trying to find a good tutorial on how to move a camera along a path in Blender 2.59, but I haven’t been able to find anything… other than maybe turntable style animations, which isnt what I am seeking… I am looking more for like how to make a model of a jet plane fly through a city or around mountains and valleys…
Did this technique get changed around somehow? It used to be easy to find tutorials on the subject, but now even tutorial authors like Neal Hirsig and CGCookie dont seem to have it on their sites.
Any help much appreciated.
Thanks,
Dawg
P.S. Manual camera tracking, not the tomato branch, which is a whole different can of worms.
just parent the camera to a curve of type ‘path’. and if you want the camera to remain fixed on an object, select the camera, then shift right click to select the object, and press ctrl T ( make track )
(edit) it doesn’t have to be type ‘path’. most curves will work.
The problem parenting to a path is that you lose control over the camera movement (speed, direction etc…). In simple cases it will work fine, but if you want to vary the speed of the camera over the curve then you start running into problems. (YMMV)
When I need additional control over the camera movement (other than a simple one speed path) I do the following:
selected the curve
shift S cursor to selected.
created an cube
created a camera (all three now have the same origin)
selected the camera
SHIFT selected the cube
presses tab to enter edit mode
selected 3 verticies
pressed CTR P to parent the camera to the verticies
pressed tab to leave edit mode
added a track to constraint to the camera (pointing at the vase)
added a curve modifier to the cube
keyframe the x axis to move the cube.
While it seems there is a lot more to this than simply parenting to a path, it also gives you a lot more control over the camera. After you have built this rig a few time it takes only a second to do it. I use this method when ever I have any camera movement I need to control.
