How turn off / disable / pause Aim Constraint on camera during animation ?

#1

Hi all,

I have an animation with a camera aim and up which follow object A with “Aim Constraint”.
There is a moment during the animation that I want to camera stop following the object A / stop the aim constraint.

Can’t find my answer, all the websites explain how to aim constraint but not how to stop, pause it and restart it again.

Hope to find here some simple answers :slight_smile:

#2

In general you can’t do this directly: constraints always control their target. Also, in general you usually don’t want animations that “stop” and remain in their previous state, since if you seek to that frame it wouldn’t know where to point.

One way you can do this is:

  • Create a locator in the same position as the object, and aim constrain that instead.
  • Create another locator alongside it.
  • Orient constrain your control to both locators. This will make the control follow the average orientation of both locators.
  • On the orient constraint, you’ll see two weights, one for each target locator. Set one to 1 and the other to 0, and it’ll orient to just that locator. Flip them and it’ll follow the other.

You can then key the weights to control which locator it’s following, and key the second locator’s orientation to control the orientation when it’s active. There are more elegant and complex ways of setting it up (switchable coordinate space rigs), but this is a starting point.

#3

You can use the numeric value on the aim constraint itself. It is set to “1.0” default as the “on” switch. If you take it to “0” it will stop the aim constraint and as soon as it you switch it to above 0 it will snap back on again.

I think what you want though is probably some way to smooth blend weight the amount of aim constraint which requires two aim constraints. With two aim constraints you can then blend the amount smoothly with keyframing instead of just having the constraint on/off with one constraint.

You have to keyframe the 1 value of the first constraint down to 0 and the second aim constraint up from 0 to 1. If done over a few keyframes it will smooth blend between the two aim constraints (or any constraint you use).

Here is an example scene. I used two locators. One is just hard parented to the cone. The other is just free floating. When you add more than one aim constraint you will still only see one aim constraint in the outliner under the object constrained, but you will see a second added to the list and can then weight between the two using the 0 to 1. The numbers go above and below 0-1 but the useful values are between 0-1.

#4

Turning off the aim constraint won’t help, since you still can’t keyframe the target. (Not without using pairBlends, anyway. Those are an absolute nightmare, you really don’t want to use those.)

#5

Thanks everyone for your time, much appreciate!
I will see if i can make it work or not.