rotate plane to align to active view?

[Mbamkaikato]

any easy way to make a plane autorotate to face the current active view? i want to use it on planes that i have placed 2D trees on and need them to face the numerous cameras i have in my scene. lookat constraint is not what i want, i need something that will make all planes face the current camera i am viewing in my active view

[datacrasher]

confused

 

you use can animate the plane rotating by using an the autokey and setting the keys on the time slider but i would group the plane and tree together or select both then rotate them

 

If the camera does not look at the plane then try align it it to the plane then use the path contraint tool under the animation drop down menu.

 

If this is not what you want can you give more details?

 

Tony

[Mbamkaikato]

Hi tony! I have used planes with a 2D tree image (with opacity channel) to represent trees behind a building i am rendering, and am looking for an easy way to make the planes automatically face the active view that i will render. is there an easy way of doing this? do i have to manually rotate each tree every time before i render my views?

[AubreyM]

Just animate the planes.

If you have 3 camera angles for example. select the first tree and rotate it so it is facing the first camera. hit Auto Key, move the time slider to 5 and rotate the tree to face camera 2, move the time slider to 10, rotate the tree to face camera 3.

Do that with all the trees (I assume you only have a few) and then when you want to render camera 3 just move the time slider to frame 10, to render camera 2 slide it to 5 etc. Each time all the trees will rotate to the proper camera.

Personally if you only have a few trees I would think of 3d trees as being easier.

[datacrasher]

as i said you can group the trees together on the plane then use the auto-key to key in the animation if this does not sink up to what you want then i would use the CV (curve editor) to move the keys to where you want them to be or you can copy the keys in the time line!

 

I don't think there is any otherway to my knowledge

[Justin Hunt]

You are almost there with the "look at" constraint, just have it look at a dummy object rather than the a camera, then animate the dummy object to sit on each camera for each consecutive frame. Then render the relative frame for each view.

 

Its a bit painful if you render the wrong frame for a view. One way around that is to have one camera and animate it to each position and link the dummy object to the camera.

 

Or you can use a little known program from archvision called "RPC Creator" and make your own RPC's which will automatically rotate to face the active camera.

 

jhv

Edited March 19, 2012 by Justin Hunt