camera animation help

[andy.engelkemier]

I'm probably going about this wrong, but who knows.

I created a camera and I'm starting by doing a path animation. That seems to be the closest way to animate camera's to every other animation software I use. Only, you don't have very much control, so I'm doing my best to add that back in.

I got a camera wobble because I Basically have a moving camera target. Ok, so I created one. I made a box, animated that with translate. Do I really have to actually just say how much I want it translated, rather than just setting two positions? Fine, so I do some math to figure that out. (I hate math, that's why I have a computer).

So now I can accomplish my camera move with only a start and end point, and it's following my cube position. So now I realize that I can't make my object "not renderable" in keyshot by turning just the cube geometry off. Ooops. So now what, My hunch is to make a material that hopefully doesn't add anything to the scene, then scale it Waaay down, just in case it has some adverse effects at render time?

Ok, this experience is awful. What am I missing?

The other way I can think of to add a slight camera rotation, camera translate to move down slightly, and a rotate, then just keep playing with the numbers until things look right. But I've got to guess that can't be how anyone would design animation software.

I'm quite curious if there is a decent way of doing animation. I thought I'd save myself some time since I'm only doing camera animations since keyshot cuts the scene setup time down. But I'm debating moving things over to blender or max since animation is taking so long to get what I was looking for.

[mattjgerard]

Make it emissive, turn the intensity to zero and de-click all the "Visible" tickboxes under the advanced twirly-downy-thingy.

This is using "Null Objects" to control animations and is why most modeling packages have something of the sort, its actually pretty common practice for situations such as yours. I do not do any animations in KS, I'm just more familiar with doing it in my modeling software. Its nice that KS provides the camera animation stuff they do, but for some things you might need to look at another tool to get what you want.

[andy.engelkemier]

Thanks for replying. That's a good suggestion.

I figured I'd go here since I might hand it off to have one of the designers add materials and light it so I can get back to editing some other footage.

I ended up just stacking a bunch of animations to make sure I didn't have any problems, which is a Lot of trial an error.
I crashed once with linking objects, so I decided to not go that route. I also noticed another bug when sending to render on the network. I'm on 7 though, so that could be fixed in 8. No clue.

So far, every camera has needed inclination, dolly, translate, and orbit. With a regular camera, these would require no more than 2 sets of keyframes. 4, if I decide to use a target camera.

So for keyshot, I think that's it. I just figured they would have a basic keyframe style animation figured out by now. It's not a great experience, but I got it to work.