EasyCamMorph: Still available anywhere?

#1

It appears that Rich Nosworthy (sp?) released a plugin of some kind for c4d that allows camera morphing to be done by camera index rather than percentage, and which then automatically adjusts if cameras are added, subtracted, or rearranged.

Social media presence for the dev appears to have died a few years back, though, and product links are dead.

I’m not asking for a torrent for paid software or anything like that, but posts I saw did not clarify if it was distributed as freeware. Does anyone know if this still works and/or is available anywhere? (Or similar functionality some other way?

#2

Aside from an explicit full blown camera rig product…of which a number died over the years…

You have the following at your disposal:

  • Keyframing to switch active cameras
  • The stage object that adds background and other control items to switch (it’s a bit dated)
  • A morph camera to blend camera position, angle and attributes
    First select the cameras you want to blend then select ‘Morph Camera’
    -The Motion Camera is interesting as you can do anything from rack focus to handheld camera shake to making your camera fall to the ground and capture the footage.
  • XPresso Control of cameras
  • You also have some handy tags:
    —Align to spline tag where your camera position tracks along a spline
    —Target tag. With it you can auto-lock the aim of the camera on an object or null.

There have been some amazing camera plugins over the years but R20 deprecated the code that virtually all of them used.

This may be an area where a plugin vendor will jump in as currently we lack some tools we had 2-4 years ago.

#3

Got it. I was afraid of that.

I’ve got the morph cam working just fine for now. (kludgey though it may be caluculating the right percentages). Just sounded more user friendly to have it by index and not have to redo them all if anything changes.

Is there a known xpresso script of something that just does that? I’ve already had to redo my percentages and related keyframes half a dozen times, and I’m just getting started.

#4

I think the stage object would be better for what you want.
You can easily switch cameras with just one keyframe, no percentage guess.
I usually use it to basically edit a scene with different cameras inside of Cinema 4D before rendering.

#5

Just watched a tut on stage object, but it looks like it’s just doing a jump cut between cameras. I need to smoothly move from one to the next over a time determined by keyframes.

As I get deeper into this, it’s rapidly becoming a major waste of time having to continually redo the percentages each time I add to the scene… with hunreds more to go.

Is there something… anything… that still works in r20 that just allows indexed camera morph?

#6

This camera index for morph camera thing is turning out to be a much bigger problem as things keep growing. After many wasted hours redoing all the keyframes multiple times, I finally resorted to creating 101 dummy cameras ahead of time, and entering all of them preemptively into the morph camera so there’s a 1 to 1 match between every integer on the blend input and the exact location of a specific camera.

What would be ideal is what the plugin did that apparently could handle the reordering of cameras automatically. Just a simple numeric index wouls be a huge step up, thogh, and this 101 camera nonsense seems unnecessarily kludgey (though roughly effective).

I have no experience with xpresso, but hopefully someone does and can work out:

User enters camera index of CURRENT camera © … assumedly in the existing blend field.
C4d either counts the number of TOTAL cameras (T), or if necessary, user enters that separately (but somewhere else so keyframes don’t need to change each time cameras are added).

Script takes those variables (C and T), and calculates and passes to C4d what it needs which is percentage ( P )

P = (C-1) x 100 / (T-1)

How can this be scripted?

#7

Hi,

I was looking for the same thing, ended up using your formula and making a simple script from it.
Here are screenshots of xpresso setup. I added user data to camera, where you control C (current cam) and T (total cams).

xpresso
xpresso.png2835x1242 274 KB

Also here is a link to a sample project.

Thanks for laying out the logic for script!

#8

Thx for working it out. In the meantime, since I didn’t know anything about xpresso, I already set up another system of 101 dummy cameras pre-loaded into the morph cam so each time I need a new one, I grab the next in line, and every integer in the blend tab now matches the exact index of one of the cameas. Kludgey, but it works for now, and I’m knee deep in it.

Will give your script a shot next time (and hopefully someone will work out the trickier bit about automatically reordering cams since they’re called by name rather than numeric index like the old script apparently did.

#9

Janus’s file uses Coffee, which is deprecated in R20 and future versions.

#10

Oh, didn’t know that. IceCaveMan thanks for pointing out.

Here is the script which uses Python.

kanicki, can you explain the logic of automatic reordering, how should it work? In morphcam tag you can set order of cameras just by adding them to the list one by one.

#11

JanusU,

Nice work.

I’ve barely dabbled in Python and was curious to inspect your script. Are you just using it (in this case) to store and call variables?

I was able to substitute the Python w/a Formula node and seemingly get the same results but maybe I’m missing something.

#12

IceCaveMan,

thanks!

Yeah, I’m using Python only to make a calculation (C-1)/(T-1). I started with Formula node but was confused with type of data used: degrees or radians, so I was thinking of using bunch of Math nodes with subtract, divide operations and ended up using COFFEE/Python script (I’m not very familiar with xpresso).
I checked it again after your note and yes Formula node works fine as well, no matter what type of data it is since it is just a number.

#13

I never was able to use the old one, so I’m just making assumptions from the descriptions. Upon second read here, though:

https://lesterbanks.com/2015/02/control-camera-morph-tag-by-index/

I may have been overestimating what it does. It says it can fix issues if cameras are added later, and I originally read that to mean if the camera was added to any point in the camera sequence, it would reindex. Adding a camera to anywhere other than the end of the sequence, though, would require reordering the list. In other words, if you insert a new camera BEFORE camera 2 of 5, The old one your bumping back doesn’t just become 2 of 6, but rather 3 of 6.

Upon closer read, though, it never actually stipulates that… only that it recalculates percentages when a cam is added. If it only meant if a cam is added to the END of the sequence, then your script should already cover that as it recalculates when user enters new T value, and none of the previous C values need to change since you’re just tacking on the next one to the end of the sequence.

Already up to my neck in this 101 camera list nonsense I concocted, but I’ll definitely be using your script next time around.

#14

Ok, I get it. That probably requires different type of scripting.

Good luck battling with 101 eye monster!