Is there anyway to rotate a camera 180/360 degrees without having to move the background around the camera. As far as i can tell, you can only point straight and aim… and this is limiting… especially with a pan. In fact, I have not found a way to pan over a large distance without having to truck left or right to get the coverage I need. Also, I would like to do a sweeping camera move through the alleys of my animated set, however, I seem only to be able to move in a forward fashion with my sweeps. Any advice?
Hi,
For the moment the way to simulate a 3D rotation would be by tweaking your 2D background to represent the rotation as you pan throughout the scene (that is how they do it in feature films and such which are not using 3D elements). The feature you are looking for should be implemented in our higher end software in the future, else then that you would most likely need to design your background in 3D, animate them to be a movie, import that movie in the scene and attach them to the peg of the camera so that the camera always have the focus on the movie you imported which simulates what the camera move would be.
Best regards,
Ugo
Thanks for your reply… How do you simulate a 3D rotation by tweaking your 2D background? I’ve actually tried to do just that by using the “perspective” tool, the “transform” tool, the scaling tool and any combination of all the tools and have not found an adequate way to rotate my background. In fact, it would be a huge help to be able to rotate certain backgrounds and it would save me a ton of artwork. For example, I have a single row of building from left to right across my viewing screen. And I track with the camera as my character moves in profile, past the buildings from left to right. But what I’d like to do is cut to a behind shot of my character moving down the same street with the original line of building now on his left… which I have not been able to do. Is there anyway to do this… or just to simply rotate my backgrounds on a 360 axis?
Thanks
GSH
Hi,
I am not personally an artist so it would be hard for me to explain this but basically you need to design the background in a distorted way which would allow while moving the camera to fake the rotation. By itself the BG won’t make much sense but if you zoom and pan on it it will seem as if you were rotating the camera. There are most likely books that covers this out there though you might want to get some extra inputs from other animators which may have some tricks on doing that.
In any case this is not to be achieved with any of the tool inside the software, it is a designing trick that is usually done on paper. Also be aware that this may not work in every situation and need lot of planning before you start designing.
Now what you want to be doing would be a very complicated shot in 2D animation (probably would need a sequence of background that would be cycled). In such a case it might be beneficial to design your background in a 3D software as explained earlier.
Best regards,
Ugo