In this lesson, we're going to create our render cams.
I'm going to go to create cameras, camera, then I'm going to pull up the move manipulator and move
the camera back 10 units.
And now the ideas, I'm going to attach the camera to a motion path, but I want to do that through
the means of a locator so that our camera is still freely animated.
And I'll show you what I mean here in a minute.
So let's create a curve.
Scale that up by 10, because we know we moved our camera back 10 so that the render cam and the curve
line up with each other to see the render cam view and our perspective.
At the same time, I'm going to go to layout's to pain side by side in the right view.
I'm going to hold down spacebar left click the Maya icon in the middle and drag and release my left
mouse button over perspective view in this panel.
I'm going to choose the new camera.
I'm also going to rename it by double clicking in the outliner and calling it a render cam hitting enter.
Now I'm going to turn on the resolution gate, hold down the backslash button on your keyboard.
That's underneath the backspace or delete key.
And I'm going to to the pan and zoom out.
We're not actually moving the camera.
We can see see it's still staying where it's at.
The other thing so we can see both views.
Update at the same time is in the render settings.
You want to make sure under time, slider, your playback is set to update you all.
Now I want to create a locator for our motion path for the camera.
Go to create locator before we attach the locator to our curve.
I want to extend the timeline out to frame one twenty again, which is our bowl frame, because when
we attach this to the curve via a motion path, it's going to automatically set a key frame at the beginning
and end.
And we know that our Lupul frame is on frame one twenty.
So that's why we want to extend it.
Before we shift, click the circle and go to constrain motion paths attached to motion path.
Now our locator is animating along the curve that we've just created and we want to attach our camera
to that locator.
So let's rotate the circle around 180 degrees and Y by typing and rotate y 180.
Now, because of the scale the ten and our camera is moved in ten, we know that the locator and the
camera are lined up with each other.
So I'm in the middle mouse button, drag the render cam into the locator.
That means the render cam is now a child of the locator.
It's going to follow it.
So now when I scrub, we can see that the camera is actually following the motion of our motion path.
What's special about this relationship, though, is the fact that if you look at our inner cam channel
box, none of these transforms have attachments or connections coming to them.
Whereas if you look at the locator we cuts attached to motion path, you can see that these transforms
are locked because they're already in use by the motion path.
So that means that we cannot animate the locator, but because the render cam as a child of it, it
will follow and we have access to animating these transforms if we want to add more animation to it.
But first, let's get the camera moving exactly how we want it to.
I'm going to select the curve and rotate it to the correct start position that I want to have for our
animation.
So I want to just move off center just a little bit and I will scrub forward in time to about the same
distance apart on the right side of this.
If you're looking at the grid here, I can just hide this Skydome for now by holding control h to hide
it.
And you can see that the animation of the camera can be roughly even on either side just by scrubbing
forward in the timeline.
Now I can see the curve or the locator.
Go to the Ashry editor and choose motion path to right.
Click on the value instead of keyframe.
Now you can see that frame pops up as a key frame in our motion path to get access to these key frames
in our timeline, I needed to select the motion path by choosing the select button here.
I can go to the frame here, right.
Click and choose delete because now we have our new end frame here, which is actually going to be the
same as the start.
So I'm going to go to frame one middle mouse, drag in the timeline all the way to the end and then
go to the value.
Right.
Click and choose that key frame.
Now we've just copied and pasted that you value to the end.
Now I just need to move this middle key frame to the actual middle of our timeline, which we know half
of one twenty is sixty.
So to move it to frame sixty.
So now if we playback this camera, we have a loop animation that goes back and forth between these
two distances.
Let's jump back into seeing the Skydome light, which is also going to act as our background, and I
just want to rotate this so that the middle frame includes the green background just for aesthetic reasons
of having something green behind our red object.
We'll add some color contrast to this render.
Now, if I want to move the render cam at all, all I have to do is just adjust the actual curve by
scaling and moving it to reframe our object here.
So scrubbing in the time line, that looks pretty good.
I might need to rotate this back so the frame has some more green in frame as well.
So if we wanted to add more hand-held motion to this, we can choose the winner can go to the attrited
editors and I know I only want to animate the rotation.
Someone hit shifty and you can see it'll only set keyframes on the rotation.
So I'm going to go to the beginning and end keyframes and hit shifted to make sure that they match.
Then I can just rotate the camera at different angles throughout the animation to make it have a bit
more of a hand-held feel to it.
And I don't want to go too far off the zero values and I just want this to be a very subtle effect.
So I'm just barely rotating the camera and we have a little bit more of a hand-held feel to our animation
in the next lesson.
Let's take a break from this orb and I'll show you how we can apply this same effect to text.