hand camera movements

[DesignDawg]

Yes, I have a great method

A friend at Weta Digital remembered my method and actually had me write up a tutorial for him and his friends in the animation dept. there.... :)

I'm not going to go into huge detail here, but I can tell you the basics.... (It's very late, I'm still at work, haven't been home in days, and my wife is in the bed at home (25 miles away) waiting for me....

Get the mousincapture script from Highend3D.com. This script allows you to "motion capture" using your mouse. There may be other scripts, but this is the one I use.

Create a locator, and aim constrain your camera to it. Select the locator, select the translate channels, and run the script. While the script is running, move the locator around in a herky-jerky manner to capture the hand-held type of movement you want. The movement you have just created will be baked into the translation channels of your locator, and, in turn, the camera will follow. You can bake the info into the camera's rotation vchannels if you want to lose the constraint now. You may want to manually add a little bit of camera tilt on the Z-axis later on. A little dab'll do ya. It takes very little to add something to the motion.

If you also want to do pop-zooms the same way, you can create another locator and write a little expression (or set up a driven key) connecting the focal length of the camera to one of the scale attributes of the locator. Again, select the scale attributes in the channel box, run the mousincapture script, scale the locator at will, and when you are done, your camera will be manually pop-zooming all over the place. :)

This technique has been very good to me. It's very easy to very quickly rough in some really organic camera motion. Another good way I've found is to set up lots of reference, and actually shoot some real footage on a camera, and use Maya Live or Boujou to camera track. Can't get much more organic than that! And you can still exert a lot of control over your camera move that way.

Ricky

EDIT: I just edited this to fix a couple of careless errors I made when I originally posted it. It should be more accurate now. (The things we'll say when we're coming off a 100-hour week....)

[two.oh]

very cool tips man, much appreciated.

[wgreenlee1]

Very good info!

[DesignDawg]

OOPS! I have to go back and edit the instructions I gave! As I mentioned, I was in a hurry when I wrote them, and I made a couple of mistakes! Sorry about that....

You should be selecting the TRANSLATE channels of the locator, not the rotation. Also, this information will NOT be baked into your camera's roation channels unless you do this manually. The information WILL be baked into the locator's translation channels. Again, sorry for any confusion I may have caused... I have edited the original post to reflect these changes. I can't believe how careless I was when I posted! :surprised

Ricky

[GrafOrlok]

I have also had some luck using the mouseincapture mel, but I use my Wacom pen, held a few millimeters from the board, to simulate the movement. This gets totally chaotic and unpredictable, just like a hand held camera and it looks great. I've also used it for animating eyes with great results!

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