Slow Down Walkthrough

[edub]

I have a walkthrough that is all set up, but the client wants to have it slow down/ pause in a few places. Right now it more or less a constant speed, but with various turns.

 

what is the best way to edit my camera path?

 

should I copy keyframes and stretch the time line out, putting a clamp on the f-curve for the pause interval? this seems like a tedious task...

 

I would rather have a gradual slow down, coming almost to a stop, then speeding up again.

 

are there any tips to doing this succesfully?

[leed]

edub

 

if you put a key frame in were you want to stop then set 'slow in' and slow out for the interpolation.

you can adjust the percentages to adjust the timing.

 

be careful though this will speed up the in between bits. it may be worth just making the animation longer just to fix the speeding up.

 

hope this helps

 

lee

[thinice]

Just one productivity tip

 

You may want to make yr animation slightly slower than necessary and then fine tune the speed in post. Could save you a lot of time when your client start commenting whether it is too slow or too fast.

 

Although it is even faster to render at a faster speed and try to slow the animation in post, i would not recommend it cos it tend to degrade the quality of the animation.

 

hope this helps

[edub]

thanks for the tips guys. I actually went in and flattened the f-curve at certain spots to slow down - then had to stretch the keyframes in the timeline to avoid speeding up at those spots.

 

I'm pretty happy with it, but I wish there was a more accurate way of "preserving" the length of the walkthrough. By this I mean, if I have a 1 min walkthrough, slowing down in 2 spots w/ 2 sec. pause, each (60frames@30 fps), I've effectively added 4 secs to the length. How do I make sure I only stretch the final length by 120 frames?

 

Does that make sense? I guess I want to quantize the movement of a keyframe selection, which doesn't seem possible.

 

Thinice:

How would I go about speeding in post? what program do you use? I have final cut express - will that do it?

[thinice]

edub,

 

I have never used final cut but I am sure the functionality is in there somewhere. If not, you may have to get final cut pro.

 

I use Vegas and it is a matter of adding velocity envelope and than creating a spline curve that correspond to the speed. Eg. At one point, you can set the velocity to 50% which increases linearly to 100% at another point. It really is a life saver with fussy clients.

 

If you are doing a lot of animation, it really is worthwhile to get a full strength editing software. I suggest you upgrade to final cut pro or something like that. There are so many things that you can do in 30 seconds that may take you like 2 hours using pure 3D application.

 

Eg. I use a lot of light rays effect for logos. Yeah, I could do that with volumetric lighting in Lightwave but it may take me 2 hours to render while I could do that interactively in Vegas.

[raysyu]

yes, "slow in" and "slow out" are good idea to make smooth transiton. But it seems not enough. You still have to define the camera path with great patience. for instance, if the distance between two vertices is too long, the camera will move faster than shorter one. So, carefully refining the path with reasonable vertices defination is another method to control the camera speed as i believe.

[Frosty]

Are you using a path spline and an align to spline tag?

[raysyu]

yup

[Intern Harry]

Sorry I cannot help you but I will monitor your progress as I have a similar project. I have been searching for postings concerning animating a Cinema 4D walkthrough of a building that I created. Are there any animation tutorials for a beginner that would help me get as far along as you got?? Any tips, tricks??

[leed]

this is a quick test.

I first set up the animation so I was pleased with the speed. where I wanted to stop I put another key point, in the frame before and after input 2 more key points.

then just move the key points apart, keeping the relationship between the keys, you want to keep the same. so you just end up adding frames were there is a stop.

dose that make sense.

have a look at the file v9

 

lee

[leed]

sorry i think i got it this time

[leed]

how do you upload files, do you need to zip them