Week 2-Path Constraints

During today’s tutorial I learnt how to use path constraints to guide an object during the animation. To do this I began by drawing a shape, in this case a sphere. I then selected a circle spline and drew this around the sphere. After this I selected the sphere and then went to the animation menu, down to constraints and across to path constraints. The last step was to draw the line between the shape and the spline.

I then repeated this process using different shapes and splines. The last thing I tried on this animation was to add a camera to a path. For this I used a circular spline and attached a target camera. I did have some trouble with the target point of the camera as to begin with it appeared that some of the shapes were not moving, however with some slight changes to some of the paths and also the cameras focal point I resolved this problem. I am quite pleased with this animation as it was my first attempt at using motion paths. Here is the final animation.

When I had completed the first task I went on to create another animation, once again using path constraints. For this I tried to create a virtual walkthrough of a building. To start I created the building itself, firstly by using a plane for the floor and then boxes of different lengths to create the walls. On a couple of the walls I used Boolean to create doorways as I felt it would create a more interesting animation than if all the walls just had gaps. Also, I used different colour boxes and placed them on the walls to imitate pictures so the animation was not too boring.

I then drew a spline for the camera to follow and added a free camera to the path. Until this point I felt it had gone very well, but once I played the animation back I found the camera was travelling backwards and too fast, as well as the camera appearing to travel through the walls. To overcome these problems I increased the number of frames in the animation to make it slower and clearer as well as using the rotate tool to position the camera correctly. Initially I drew out a spline with pointed corners, but when I played the animation I found this was unsuitable as the camera appeared to go through the walls. Due to this I drew out a different spline, but this time I used more vertex points so I could create curved corners when I wanted the camera to change direction.

At this point I watched the animation again and was much happier with the outcome, however I still felt it needed some more alterations as the camera did not follow the line completely. To solve this I went to the motion panel to the right of the screen and checked the ‘follow’ tick box. This kept the camera facing forwards throughout the animation.

After these alterations I am much happier with my second animation and so have included a copy of this below.

I feel I have learnt a lot during today’s tutorial. Firstly, I found using paths to be an easy task to complete. It is much simpler and quicker to animate objects and cameras in this way and I feel I will be able to create a much smoother path using this method than auto and set keys. I also learnt the difference between target and free cameras and how each would be a benefit (or disadvantage) when placing them on paths. Lastly I found out how to make the camera face the direction the spline takes, this being by selecting follow.