This week on MacBreak Studio Steve Martin from Ripple Training (check out the brand new completely updated website) and I dive into Motion in order to respond to a viewer’s question, who wanted to know how he could fly a camera by an object, while having the camera continue to look at the object the entire time.
As with anything in Motion, there are a few different ways to accomplish this task. I chose to demonstrate how you can do it using behaviors, specifically the Sweep behavior.
For the uninitiated, behaviors are “procedural animations”: they are devices that allow you to create a huge variety of animations without needing to work with keyframes, which can be time-consuming and complicated.
Motion contains behaviors for animating text, shapes, replicators, particle emitters, filters, masks, and more. In this case we head to the Camera behaviors and use the Sweep behavior, which does exactly what the viewer asked for: as the camera moves, it remains trained precisely on the object that it starts out “focussed” on – the object in the center of its focal plane.
You can quickly adjust the arc of the movement by setting the starting and ending angle, as well as the quality of the movement – I almost always prefer to have the camera ease into and out of the move since it looks more realistic.
In this example, I perform a full 180-degree arc as the camera sweeps over the top of the objects, which has the unfortunate side-effect of ending up with an upside down view of our scene. This problem is quickly remedied by using a second Sweep behavior to add a camera movement around the side of the objects. Behaviors play well together, combining both animations, and we end up with a graceful arc around our scene. Check out the details above.