[Closed] animatable fly through camera from still cameras

the question is not clear for me? try to better explain what you want to do…

Oh, sorry. I have 15 still cameras (not animated) every one of them was placed to achieve a beautiful look (position, clipping and so on) I want now, using these cameras to create a smooth animation, from first till last still cameras.

I don’t know, can you understand now …

now i understand what you are talking about. well…
there are several solutions. let’s start with the simplest one:

fn playCameras master cams times = 
(
	deletekeys master
	with animate on for k=1 to times.count do 
	(
		at time times[k]
		(
			tm = cams[mod k cams.count + 1].transform
			master.transform = tm
		)
	)
)


delete objects
m = freecamera name:#master
cams = for k=1 to 5 collect 
(
	c = targetcamera pos:(random -[100,100,100] [100,100,100]) target:(targetobject())
	c.target.pos = random -[10,10,10] [10,10,10]
	c
)
playCameras m cams #(0, 15, 25, 40, 35, 60, 40, 20, 90)
select m

not good as you can see…

let’s add target…

fn playCameras master cams times = 
(
	deletekeys master
	with animate on for k=1 to times.count do 
	(
		at time times[k]
		(
			tm = cams[mod k cams.count + 1].transform
			master.transform = tm
			tm = cams[mod k cams.count + 1].target.transform
			master.target.transform = tm
		)
	)
)


delete objects
m = targetcamera name:#master target:(targetobject())
cams = for k=1 to 5 collect 
(
	c = targetcamera pos:(random -[100,100,100] [100,100,100]) target:(targetobject())
	c.target.pos = random -[10,10,10] [10,10,10]
	c
)
playCameras m cams #(0, 15, 25, 40, 35, 60, 40, 20, 90)
select m 

much better. using the same idea it’s easy to add fov, range, clip, etc. animation.

but…

(we will talk about “but” if previous solution doesn’t work)

Yes, that’s exactly what I was talking about. I tried both scripts in an empty scene, at it seems to work very well. Except clipping I think it would be correct to work with the speed. For example if I animate a camera, the speed should be constant, so that you could enjoy watching this video. It means, the script should understand the distance between cameras.

If distance (camA->camB) is 2 times > distance (camB->camC) then speed of master camera should be 2 times faster between A->B then B->C.

The animation should be smooth

you will never get an automatic result good enough. this is the “but” i was talking about.

to be able to get anything good you have to provide “tweaking interface”. what will be hard to do with a paradigm showed above.

What about using trajectory(from spline)? Unfortunately I don’t have a clue how to make it nice and smooth, and even the interface… But I think there should exist a good way to go. Good to know that still exist brains like yours

path constraint has constant velocity by default
but it’s unlikely to have any decent animation in such automatic way, just a template for the further tweaking

delete objects

m = targetcamera name:#master target:(targetobject())
for k = 1 to 5 do  
(
	c = targetcamera pos:(random -[100,100,100] [100,100,100]) target:(targetobject())
	c.target.pos = random -[10,10,10] [10,10,10]
	c
)

cams = for c in $cameras where not classof c == targetobject and not c.name == "master" collect #(c, c.pos, normalize(c.target.pos - c.pos))


	
ss = SplineShape name:"CamPath"
ss.steps = 100
addNewSpline ss
for i = 1 to cams.count do (
	
	addKnot ss 1 #bezier #curve cams[i][2] (cams[i][2]-cams[i][3]*50) (cams[i][2]+cams[i][3]*50)
	
)
updateShape ss



tt = SplineShape name:"TargetPath"
tt.steps = 100
addNewSpline tt
for i = 1 to cams.count do (
	
	addKnot tt 1 #smooth #curve cams[i][1].target.pos
	
)
updateShape tt


m.wirecolor = yellow
m.pos = cams[1][1].pos
m.target.pos = cams[1][1].target.pos

m.position.controller = position_list()
m.position.controller.available.controller = path_constraint()
m.position.controller[2].path = $CamPath

m.target.position.controller = position_list()
m.target.position.controller.available.controller = path_constraint()
m.target.position.controller[2].path = $TargetPath

Sergey, that’s a really good start, but I agree that automatic good looking animation from still cameras would be really difficult to achieve.

Thank you both, Sergey and Denis for your efforts