handheld camera - in max or in post???

[Dave Buckley]

after watching the third and the seventh videos, i decided i wanted to try adding a subtle hand held effect to my camera to add to realism during animations.

 

now i'm just wondering which would be the best way? i guess could do it in max with some type of noise effect? noise on a path? noise float added to rotation of camera?

 

however is it something i can add later in post? let's say in after effects?

i'd guess not unless i'm rendering out oversized frames then what i expect the final res to be?

 

one last thing i believe may contain my answer is the craft director tools. i've downloaded the freebies to evaluate but not too sure what i'm doing and whether its possible with those tools.

 

how do you guys do it (if you do) i want it to be as convincing as possible??

[Nic H]

you cant really do it in post too much as you dont get the paraalax you get with a 3d camera move.

 

best way i have found is too link a dummy to a camera then noise float on the dummy xyz rotation, maybe *some* on posistion. not super happy with this method as i think it still looks like a noise controller on a camera!

 

another method you could try is to do some really simple camera tracks of really simple pans / moves in boujou and use those cameras. this will give you a lovely natural result.

 

i keep meaning to try director tools, but havent had teh time yet. let us know how it works out

[Stephen Thomas]

Not tried it, but in theory I guess you could try attaching your camera to a biped with a mocap walk cycle.

[Dave Buckley]

yeh i saw that mentioned the other day, only prob is, the guy holding the camera is standing still which i guess eliminates the biped idea, but thanks for both of your suggestions, 'm guessing these craft tools will do the trick when i figure them out

[Chad Warner]

The Craft tools works really well in my opinion. It's very simple to use also...just create the camera you want, add the "humanizer" camera to it, and hit record. You can control the shakiness of the camera through presets, and you can manually add little quirks like zooming/panning in and out as the camera records in realtime.

[Dave Buckley]

ok so i created my camera in 3ds max, then i started craft tools, added humanizer camera to list, but nothing?? i'm missing something, it just created another camera in the scene

[Chad Warner]

I don't remember the specifics, but you have to link the new camera to your camera, and then there's an animate button on the craft tools interface. I'd give you more info, but my plugin isn't working at the moment for some reason.

[Noise]

I am pretty sure that Jorge did his camera shake in max.

 

You can also track a real video camera in after effects and apply the tracked motion to a dummy and parent that to a camera but, as mentioned you will have to render the frames larger so that the edges aren't too mirrored.

 

The craft plugins look excellent but I am not sure how good a result you can get without using a specific input device.

[Bugga_Guy]

Do it post using aftereffects.

 

http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/earthquake_with_32bpc/

[Dave Buckley]

i've done it now and i'm happy with it.

 

i will try and post results somewhere when i get a test rendered out. it looks ok in the viewport.

 

i resorted to using controllers in the motion panel, i think it ended up having a noise positon controller applied along with a noise float on the roll of the camera.

 

really really low frequency's and strengths were used for a stationary camera, bumped up a little bit for moving camera, and to control the difference between when the camera is moving and not moving i used a multiplier curve on the noise track in the track view and added keys to this multiplier curve to allow me to control strengths at different times in the animation

 

that's pretty much it.

[Ricardo Eloy]

I just saw this thread... I know you've done what you wanted,/ but still I thought I could drop my 2 cents... If you have a joystick port in you machine, you can control your camera using the joystick. I've done this a couple times and it's a lot of fun to use (and really easy to set up). You can even add zoom to the camera pushing the joystick's buttons.

[Chad Warner]

Rick-

I didn't know you could do that! How's it done?

[Dave Buckley]

ye me neither, i'm aware that you can use an input device when working with the craft director tools

[Koper]

Also just saw this thread. All you need to do to control objects via external peripherals (as Rick suggests) is to add the 'position motion controller'. By default most objects have the 'position XYZ' controller. When you assign the 'position motion controller' you can bind any input device to any given axis. Then select the object, go to the utilities panel and open the motion capture dialog, Select which tracks to make active (x,y or z, or all of them) and start the motion tracking.

 

Check the help for more info, its all in there

 

 

ps, when you open the motion capture dialog you get a missing midi device error, but it all still works fine

[Dave Buckley]

brilliant news, well its kind of frustrating that i didn't know as i've been sat here all along with my motion controller trying to figure out how to do it

 

going to give that a go now

[Nils Norgren]

A joystick is one way, but you can use the Mouse as an input the the Motion capture controller, it usually takes a few passes, the first to get pan and tilt (x and y rotation) the second to get movement(x and y position) and more if you want to capture some "natural" zooming, all of these can be swapped, but with a mouse you only have 2 dimensions of capture at once.

 

Here is a camera move from a few years ago. From a presentation that covered camera animation.

 

-Nils

[Dave Buckley]

oh i'm sure i've seen that on the area tutorials from you guys all about camera movement. (note to self - go read them again)

 

my camera is stationary though which is why i intially had difficulty producing a realistic movement.