Creating a MoGraph Sports Intro Animatic: Animate Shot Five's Main Camera

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Instructor Raymond Olsen

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  • Duration: 12:11
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  • Made with Release: 18
  • Works with Release: 18 and greater

In this video we’ll use a motion camera on a spline to fly thry the final scene. Towards the end of the spline we’ll morph to our existing preview camera to end the move.

In this video we’ll use a motion camera on a spline to fly thry the final scene while using three targets to control the camera’s focus. Towards the end of the spline we’ll use a camera morph to transition from the spline camera to our existing camera.

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Transcript

In this video, we'll use a motion camera on a spline to fly through the scene. Go ahead and open up your latest version of shot five. Let's go ahead and change this to 240 frames, that'll give us 8 seconds to animate it, and we're just going to do a little bit of optimizing to speed up our viewports. For starters, I'm going to kill our light bank and our city. It's still pretty laggy in the viewport, and that is because of our plays being wrapped around that spline. So let's go ahead and just collapse those. So in your Conveyor With Plays group, you can grab that cloner. Hit C to make it editable, and then middle-click to grab all the children. Right-click, Connect Objects and Delete. Now, that's just one object with a bunch of polys. So do that in the other group as well. So you've got your Conveyor Belt cloner. C to make it editable. Middle-click to select all the children. Right-click, Connect Objects and Delete. Immediately, I can tell a difference in that. Lastly, I want to make this floor a little more uniform. To do that, I'm going to grab the main floor plane, just crank that up to 200 by 200, and I'm going to kind of reorganize the Boolean here. So I'm going to get rid of our Floor Boundary extrude, and now I'm going to jump into the original Trench group and I'm going to make a copy of the Trench Wall Spline extrude. I'm going to get rid of the floor boundary, and that should just leave us an extrude of that spline. We need to make sure caps are on both sides, and that'll make it a closed object. I think we can just go ahead and pull this out of that SplineMask, Null. So now, we've got a knockout for our floor. We can put that back into the Boolean, and now you can see through there. Then, back up here, we also don't need this SplineMask. So we can pull this Trench Wall spline straight out of there, and then delete the SplineMask and the boundary. Then, lastly, turn the cap off. So now, this leaves us with just the spline extrude for the trench wall, and we have a nice, even floor to fly over. So now, our scene is pretty fast. So we should be able to animate easily. Close the groups up. Over here, in my right-hand view, I'm going to draw a Camera spline. So with the Pen tool in B-Spline mode, I'm just going to start over here at the beginning of our trench. We're going to kind of fly down into the trench. Then, we're going to fly back up. Then, we're going to be over one of the belts, and then we're going to fly back down, almost hitting the floor, and then back up to look at our logo element. If I unhide my cameras, you can see my spline ended up just about where that camera is. So now, if we go to the top view, and I'm going to use the Structure panel to select my verts on this Camera spline, I'm going to move this to where we're kind of centered in the trench. We're in the trench, and we're transitioning out of the trench. Over here, we are over the trench, kind of going back to the floor. So that's our rough camera move. So I want to name this "Camera Spline", and I want to change the intermediate points to Subdivided. That will smooth our camera move out as we fly down it. So with the Camera spline selected, create a motion camera. You can see the little guy it made. That offsets the camera. I don't want that. So I'm going to override the rig dimensions, and that puts us directly on the spline. I'm going to ungroup and delete this Null, just to keep my scene a little cleaner, and rename this camera "Spline Cam". In the animation, here's our Camera spline, and here's the position. So at zero, let's just drop a keyframe at 0%, and then around 150, we need to be at the end of the spline. So I'll set a keyframe there. You can see it's traveling down the spline. I want to jump into my Curve Editor and pull the Spline Cam in. We're actually going to have several camera tags. So I'm going to start naming my tags as well. So this is "Spline Cam Tag", just so we don't have a bunch of different morph cams in here all with the same name. So I want a linear first keyframe, and then we'll ease into the second one here. But that way, we're not easing into this move. It just starts out full-speed. If we look through the spline cam, we indeed are cruising through the scene already. But as we travel along the spline, it's kind of looking forward along the spline, and that's what's pointing the camera's rotations. I want a little bit more control than that. So what we're going to do is we're going to make some targets to put in these fields. So go ahead and make a Null. I'm going to duplicate it twice. This will be Target A1, Target A2, and Target B. Let's go ahead and roughly position those. To make them easier to see, I'm going to select them all, and in their Object tab I'm going to change the display to Circle, and crank up that radius just a little to about 127. Then, A1 is our first target. So I'm going to move him down here, and I want him kind of centered in the trench. So as the camera is moving down, it's going to be looking down at this target and that will keep it looking down at the gears a little bit longer. Then, once we travel up to the hump and we're looking down at the plays, we'll need to tell the camera to look down again. So this is going to be the target we look at as we fly over the plays. Then, Target B is going to stay pretty much where it's at. That's the final target, and that'll get us looking back up at the logo element. Go ahead and select your spline cam. Populate your target fields. Now, let's take a look. If we grab Target A1 and we move it now, it's moving our camera's focal point. Kind of scrub through here a little. We're looking down. It looks like we're flying too close to the gears. So I'm going to grab my Camera spline. I think that's Vertex 1. I'm going to move that up a little bit, and maybe push our target a little further back. So now, we're flying over the gears in a pretty cool way. Now, we transition out and we're still looking back at Target 1. So I'm going to go ahead and start transitioning out of that target at Frame 0. So here's our A1 to A2. You can see in my side view here, the target is morphing. So we'll start at zero with a percentage of zero. Right around here, we need to be looking at Target A2. So crank that up to 100, drop a keyframe, and now if we scrub you can see it's transitioning over to Target A2. If we look through here in our perspective, scrub, coming up, and we're looking down. We're a little too close to the plays. So grab your Camera spline once again, walk through the verts, and pull yourself up. So now, we are crossing from one belt to the other. We're looking down at the plays. Now, once again, we're looking back, because we need to transition from the A targets to the B targets. So we'll start that at the peak of the spline. Go back to your spline cam, and here is that slider, A to B. So a keyframe of 0% right there at the peak of that height. Then, right down here, when we hit the floor, let's be looking at that other last target. So keyframe, 100% there. So that's looking pretty good. We've got all the control we need now to fine-tune this camera move. I want to be a little bit closer to the floor here. So once again, I'm going to grab my spline, pull it down a little bit here. So that gives a little cooler view. Now that we've got this roughed out, I actually want to morph from the spline cam to the preview cam we've been using. That's going to isolate this spline cam move. So that kind of gives us a little bit more freedom. So right around here, I want to start morphing, and then right around 150 I want to be at our old camera. So the easy way to do that, I'm just going to travel to the bottom of that valley. I'm going to grab the spline cam, and then I'm going to Ctrl+click our Camera 1, and I'm going to make a camera morph. Once again, I'm going to get rid of this Null. Delete it, and call this the "Main Morph Cam", and this is going to be the "Main Morph Tag". I've got the spline cam and Camera 1, and this is exactly where I want to start morphing. Then, around 147, I want to be done. So if we look through that morph cam, we're now using the spline cam to travel through our move, and then right here we start transitioning to the camera we've been using. Then, we come to a dead stop at the exact place that we've been looking at. If you take a look at my spline cam, I'm at 36. This cam is at 15. So that's a pretty big difference in focal length. I'm going to kind of meet in the middle with 25, and then reposition our Camera 1. Then, take another look at our spline cam and see how that looks. That looks pretty good. Tweak my Camera spline here just a little, get it a little closer to the trench and a little lower. So now, no matter what we do to the end of this spline cam move, it doesn't matter because we're transitioning out of that camera into this camera. We're getting a little boomerang, because my spline ends past the camera. So I'll just grab that last vert, kind of get those close. So if it looks cooler on the way up to have the spline stop way up here, it doesn't matter because we'll have morphed to this other camera by then. Now, we're going to fly the logo capsule in with some MoGraph Effectors.
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