What's the best way to animate a lot of camera pans?

[Brodie Geers]

I'm preparing for an interior animation. Rather than a few very long walkthroughs I'd like to set it up as a more cinematic feel with shorter camera pans. What's the best way to do that in 3ds Max?

 

Should I end up with, say 40 cameras, all animating in a period of maybe 10 seconds? Or should Camera 1 animate for 3 seconds, then camera 2 animate for the following 5 seconds, then camera 3, etc.? Or is there some other method?

 

-Brodie

[Peter M. Gruhn]

I was thinking you could do it with one camera, just jump location between frame 24 and 25, it just hops to the next scene. But then I worry that that would play havok with camera motion blur.

[Brodie Geers]

Anyone else have any thoughts on this? The animation is probably going to be over 5 minutes so I could have in the neighborhood of 60 camera pans and the final output will probably be going to a render farm.

 

-Brodie

[Camby1298]

I think it would be easier to have only a few long sweeping camera paths, and develop final editing and cuts in AfterEffects, rather than to have to keep track of 60 different animations. Using only 1 path would most likely end up with a lot of unused material; which obviously eats up uneeded rendering times.

[Brodie Geers]

A few long shots isn't really an option here. It's an interior hospital animation with quite a few separate spaces to show. I'd prefer a more cinematic feel rather than having long winding camera paths or having to waste frames which will be cut out later.

 

What I'm thinking right now is one camera that will pan for, say, 120 frames then at frame 121 it moves to a different location and then pans until frame 240, etc. It shouldn't be too hard to make cuts at those spots in After effects and throw in some transitions (although it may take a little time).

 

-Brodie

[Matt McDonald]

My only advice is to mix up the length of the cuts and try to fit in a few different types of camera movements. For example, one rotating tripod shot followed by one moving dolly shot with no camera pan (I love these) and then maybe a Ken Burns-esque zoom or pan on a still shot.

[Scott Schroeder]

If it's a simple camera dolly, just render one frame at a little larger res and do the dolly in After Effects with the camera in there. You can also do this if your image pan is left to right slide.

 

Look what Matt said, Ken Burns style. Even in his simple camera moves you still get some paralax and with a photograph taken in the Civil War or WWII, they weren't 3D. Elements were masked out.

 

That way, you are not wasting render time for needless frames. If you run into an issue where paralax is needed, all you need to do is mask the elements in AE or render what's to be paralaxed in AE as a separate layers from Max, ie foreground and background. Even with render layers, 2-3 render layers is still much less time than 100 plus frames. Masking in After Effects is very easy for most anything other than masking around hair or fur.

 

Render the frames you need and leave the rest in post. You should be able to cut your needed render frames by about 50% in the case of what you are wanting to do with the simpler, yet interesting, camera moves.

 

Anything and everything you'll ever need to know about After Effects: http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/ These tutorials are what you need to know for After Effects. Just because they may animate a guy shooting a gun or exploding, doesn't mean you can't translate the methods to arch viz. Specifically, look at tutorial #106 Animating a Still.

 

Remember, After Effects is not just to put frames together and leave it at that. It's far too powerful if you just want to use it as one of those free home movie maker softwares.