Camera acceleration problem

Started by ssalvador, October 01, 2015, 06:14:31 PM

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ssalvador

Hi all,

I have finally made the leap from Maya to Terragen and I need help with camera animation.  In Maya I was able to easily animate the camera from a starting location and getting it to accelerate gradually to a comfortable speed.   In TG3, I have tried adding keyframes at the beginning but I can't seem to coordinate camera position and rotation properly.  Does someone have a simple method that I can use to get past this sticking point?

Thanks

Oshyan

What specific problem are you having? What is the result of "not being able to coordinate camera position and rotation properly"? Are you using the Animation Panel and all its functions? And have you gone through the documentation and tutorials here: http://planetside.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Terragen_2_Animation_Module_Guide

- Oshyan

ssalvador

Hi Oshyan,

I have read the documentation and looked at the tutorials but it's possible I may have missed something.  I have a scene with a camera which follows a meandering river with mountains on either side.  My camera path has keyframes at 3 camera positions - frames 1, 400, and 800.   With this configuration, my camera starts moving too fast from the start rather than starting from a stationary position and gaining speed gradually.   My first attempt to slow down the starting speed was to add key frames at several positions between 1 and 100 and adjust the position xyz curves in the animation panel so that they are more horizontal.  In other words, I'm trying to make the tangent to the curves at the first frame more horizontal for all 3 coordinates.  When I try to adjust the corresponding camera rotation coordinates at the keyframed positions, I get bogged down trying to reproduce the camera aim that I had before I inserted the new key frames.   In the end I gave up and decided to ask for help. 

Oshyan

Thanks, that additional detail is definitely helpful. It sounds like you might benefit from experimenting with the new TCB value editing controls in the Animation Panel. They're only available in the latest Terragen 3.3 update. When you're looking at the Curve Editor and you have one of your keyframes selected, below the curve edit window and display you should see 3 values with input fields labeled T, C, and B. This stands for Tension, Continuity, and Bias. This was just added somewhat experimentally, so we don't have proper documentation for it yet unfortunately, but you can find some info about these settings here: http://moppi.inside.org/demopaja/manual/interpolation.html
I find the best way to understand them is just experiment with values while watching the affect on the curves in the editor.

Hopefully that helps.

- Oshyan

ssalvador

The TCB controls worked perfectly.  I was able to achieve the desired effect by simply increasing the bias on the first keyframe. 

Thanks Oshyan

Oshyan

Glad to hear it! I'm very happy we were able to add the TCB controls, it really helps improve control.

- Oshyan