Camera path craziness. What's up with the bezier curves?

[Terrafied]

Question:

How do I fix my camera path? It has some serious bezier curves in between my keyframes and I can't figure out how to get rid of them. It's an 800 frame animation with 4 keyframes for position and rotation of the camera. Pretty simple. But how do you control the curves. There is some sort of auto bezier function. If anyone could tell me how to fix it, it would be great. I've attached an example of how far the camera is jumping off course. It's quite dramatic and in no way can I use it for final output.

Thanks,

B

[Henry Blewer]

I used to use a start keyframe then an end keyframe in Lightwave. This gave a nice straight line. Then I would add the middle key frames, keeping the straight path.  When they were at the right frame locations in the time line, I would move them to form the curve I wanted, add the camera bank and pitch. Last would be to recalculate the curve for smoothness.

[Hetzen]

Are you trying to fly and look straight down with a rotation? If so, you've just met gimble lock, which throws the camera off wildly as it tries to correct itself.

Terragen has a preset camera rotation order of Z,X,Y, which conforms pretty much to how you would use a camera on a tripod. The problem faced by all 3D apps is dealing with what happens when two rotation axis align during it's movement in an intuitive way. Have a look at these to videos to explain why....

http://vimeo.com/2649637

http://vimeo.com/2824431

The only way for the time being to get around this problem, is to link a Z,X,Y rotation order camera to a camera that doesn't go through gimble lock in your desired animation, in another 3D app, then bake the keyframes, and re-import into terragen.

[cyphyr]

Terragens internal animation system is in its infancy at the moment. Most people are animating in a third party app and importing the resulting motion path in to terragen via its support for the .chan data format. I know of methodologies for C4D, Lightwave, Maya and Max for exporting camera data and converting it to .chan format, search the forum for the posts. "importing camera animation" might get you what you want. If your already using one of these methods then its likely your breezier errors are happening in your source app.
Good luck
Richard

[Kadri]

...
http://vimeo.com/2649637
http://vimeo.com/2824431
...

Hetzen thanks for the explanation  and the links . The videos are really helpful . I am kind of a visual man it makes to understand better 

Kadri.

[Terrafied]

Thank you all. I will check these out. I forgot about gimble lock. I use to have that problem in Lightwave.  I will also try changing the path of the internal camera.

If you do have a link for C4D camera export, that would be great.

Thanks again. I'll let you know what I come up with.

Thanks,

B