Flying through a tunnel?

[billy pelser]

Hi
Im trying to animate a camera flying fast through a loooooong tunnel in 3ds max 9.
Sounds simple, but its tricky to make it look good just like in the movies.

Heres what ive got so far.
1. Draw spline, duplicate it(copy will be path for the camera).

2. In the modify panel.Give original spline a thickness, check enable in viewport, enable in renderer and give it 4 sides.

3. Add lots of equally spaced instanced omnis in tunnel.

4. Add a map to tunnel and flip normals if needed.

5. Add amount of frames needed.
6. Attach a free camera to the copied spline with a path constraint. Check follow and y-axis boxes.

I find that the camera doesnt stay exactly on the path spline when zoomed in. This causes my camera to move out of the tunnel a few times.
Does anyone know of any 3ds max tutorials available on the web or of a better way to attempt this???
Thanks.

[Claudio Branch]

How about a link to the animation or at least some screen shots?

[Jon Rashid]

Use a target camera with the camera and target linked to a dummy with path constraint. This makes the dummy control the movement along the line and allows you to put a secondary layer of animation on the camera if you wish. Align the camera once the dummy has been attached to path and finally link to dummy. Should solve all your problems.

[Brian Kitts]

nope you pretty much got it in your steps. The only things I would mention is to be careful when you make you spline, and the size of it when you make it renderable.... making sure to use realistic values, and use enough steps in the splines interpolation values, based how far apart your vertices are so that you have a smooth run.

I gave it a quick run through off your steps and didn't have any problems, only modification I made was to give the spline more than 4 sides, and gave it a 15' width. Might be a fun little project, you should look in to playing with greeble and motion blur as well. Could make for a fun little video.

http://www.envisage26.com/animations/tubin.wmv (2.5mb)

Jon's method with the dummy object is great, I typically do that when I'm animating on a path, but for this simple test it wasnt' necessary.

[Martin Norris]

add banking to the path and smooth vertices, could give a more relaxed look