Creating a MoGraph Sports Intro Animatic: Finishing Shot Five

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Instructor Raymond Olsen

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  • Duration: 12:35
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  • Made with Release: 18
  • Works with Release: 18 and greater

In this video we’ll add the final camera move to shot five and then animate the conveyor belts and plays so we can render our final shot for the animatic.

In this video, we’ll create the final camera move using a three camera morph. Next we’ll use one more motion camera to add a layer of natural motion at the end of the spline camera move. Then we’ll animate the offset in the spline wraps to get the conveyor belts and plays moving and we’ll finish by polishing the look and rendering the final shot needed for editing.

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Transcript

Let's go ahead and add our last camera move. We can do this quickly. We'll start with the Camera 1, which we're already using, and our Main Morph tag. You can see, we go from our Spline Cam to our Camera 1. So I'm going to duplicate Camera 1 and call it "Camera 2", duplicate Camera 2 and call it "Camera 3". If we look through Camera 1, this is what we've got. If we look through Camera 2, it looks exactly the same right now. I'm going to select our Logo Capsule Shapes, and then pull back. I'm going to tilt up a little. This is going to be the windup of the last camera move. For Camera 2 in the coordinates, I'm going to give it a little bit of tilt. We'll go -10. Then, for Camera 3, I'm actually going to start over. Delete that Camera 3. I'm going to make a new one so it's in the exact same place as Camera 2. Then, I'm going to come out here to my Perspective view, and with the local coordinate I'm just going to push that camera straight in. But we want to be looking through it first in this view. So that's great. We'll just fly straight into that O. So that's how we're going to end the animation. We're going to go from Camera 1 to 2, to 3 with a morph. So 1, 2, 3, make your selection. Go to Camera Morph, and it makes you a new morph. I'm going to get rid of the null. Delete the null. This is going to be our End Morph Cam, and this will be our End Morph Cam tag. If we look through the End Morph Cam, so right here when it settles, if we just animate that Blend from 150 to 240, that's our final camera. We wind up, and then fly straight in. I'm going to go straight out of this curve. So we'll ease into it, into the Blend, and then linear out with the L key. I want to ease out of that a fair amount, so most of the slow part is in the windup, and then we shoot fast into it. I actually wanted to flip my tilt on Camera 3. So I'm going to switch that to a positive 10, because that will give us a little bit of a dynamic move there. So we stop, wind up and pull back, and then shoot forward and that's how we get out. So now that we've got our end camera move, we can jump into our Main Morph tag and just replace that original Camera 1 with our End Morph Cam. Now, those two camera moves, if we look through the right camera, are blended together. So we've got our first one, and then we go right into our second one. So let's go ahead and play. So that is all the bones for our camera moves. It obviously needs more tweaking. But for now, we're going to go ahead and finish this up. So I'm going to turn off my cameras, and then we're getting pretty dirty over here, or pretty sloppy, for the scene. So I'm going to grab 1, 2, and 3 Cameras, the Camera spline, Spline Cam, all of our targets, our Main Morph Cam, and our End Morph Cam. I'm going to group all of those into a Cameras group. Then, I'm going to pull all of our effectors down to the bottom. As we come up here, right here, we have a dead stop. It's not a big deal, but there's a really easy way to add just a little bit of secondary motion to this. To do that, make a new camera. I'm going to add a Motion Camera tag to it. In the rig, I'm going to drop our Main Morph Cam right into the Link tab. I'm going to overwrite the dimensions to get rid of that little guy again. If we look through him, when we get to this part, you can see there's a little bit of drift. If I come into the Motion tab of that camera, switch this preset to Steady Cam 1, you can see it's not a dead stop. It's subtle, but it's kind of nice. So if we play, it just keeps our scene from being completely static at this point. This we'll call "Render Cam". It's just a quick way to add motion or footsteps, or anything you like to give your camera a more realistic feel. Also, what we can do is animate these splines to make it look like our conveyor belts are running. To do that, I'm going to use our Find field, or I'm going to look up "Wrap". Here's our Spline Wraps. If we come over to the Object tab, we can just go all the way to the start, hit 0% Keyframe in the Offset tab, and then all the way up to 40, just give it a 10% offset. Jump into your Curve Editor. I'm in Automatic mode. That is Alt+A. That just shows whatever you tell it to show, and I have some hotkeys set up to remove objects. So if I pull these down into here, this is all it's going to show me, so that makes it easier to work with things. So we're going to grab that and hit L, and now that's just a smooth, constant motion for the Spline Wraps. So if I hit View, Remove Selected Objects, you can see I have a couple hotkeys set up. That just makes it really easy to come in here and edit whatever you've animated. Again, that is Alt+A. So if we come back out, hit Play, you can see now we have running conveyor belts. I'm not sure if it's the Motion Camera, but at some point in my projects I started to get this stutter. That goes away if you play all frames. So I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the motion and the Steady Camera. But don't let it bother you. It goes away upon render. So as long as you can work with it, it's no big deal. You can see my conveyor belt is intersecting my plays. It doesn't have quite enough resolution. So I'm going to use the Search field again, look for "belt". There's my conveyor belts, and I just jacked up the segments in Z to 300 to give them a little bit more resolution. So you can see, once you start to get into a heavy project, naming is really helpful, especially if you need to just find something without having to twirl down all these hierarchies. Another thing about the Motion Camera tag is you have to rewind twice to get it to reset. So if you use my little method, remember to rewind twice before you hit your Render, and that will reset everything. After talking with Donovan over at MAXON, it actually turns out that the stutter is coming from the priorities in these MoCam tags. If we set the priority over here in the Basic tab in order as we use the cameras, that gets rid of the stutter. So we start out with a Spline Cam. So I'm going to drop the priority on that to 80, and the lowest priority goes first. So after that, I want the End Morph Cam to get solved. So I'm going to do that. Then, the Main Morph Cam blends between those two, so that'll be third at 100. Then, the Render Cam will be last, so I'll make that 110. Now, when I rewind, it goes straight back to the correct frame, and when I go to the end frame, we're nice and tight up in the logo. So if you're using multiple tags like this, make sure you order them properly, or you'll run into those stutters, which is something I've been dealing with for a long time. So it's really good to know. So now, I'm just going to kind of tweak everything that I have and I'll fast-forward. I'll get my camera move looking good, and then we will render it out. Okay. All I had to do was move a couple verts, and play with a couple of keyframes. I've got this looking pretty good. But one thing I noticed is I never added an up-vector. So there's very little roll and it's still a little bit jerky as it travels down the spline, in terms of the camera's Z rotation. So to solve this, we're going to make another null, and this is going to be called "Up-Vector". If we look in our Spline Cam tag in the targets, there is a space for that up-vector. It's right here. Before I drop it in there, I'm just going to move it just above the center of the scene somewhere. Now, if we add an up-vector, you can immediately see a small shift in this camera, if I pull it up and down. Well, right now, we're in the middle of the scene, so you can't really see it. But let's go back here to where we're over the belt, so you can see if I pull this gown closer it gives us more roll, and up higher it flattens out the camera. I want somewhere in between. So now, if I play my move, it's much smoother animation and it gives me the roll that I was looking for. So I think we're good enough to go ahead and turn everything back on and render out a preview, so we can drop everything in the right sequence and see how we did. So to do that, come back in and turn on your light banks and your city. Jump into Gouraud with Lines, which is NB. Since we're using all the MoGraph, it adds a lot of white texture. So just drop this dark texture on whatever you want to be dark. Our lights have a little bit too much geometry for me. They look a little dark. So I'm just going to add a Display tag and make those just Gouraud Shading. I'd like a little bit of contrast with my plays. So if you jump in your trench groups, you can drop a lighter material on the plays. Just the plays. Let's go ahead and turn SSAO back on in the viewport. I don't really like the spider web on the logo backer. I know that's called "Backer", so I can just grab the logo backer. Again, I'm going to put a Display tag and we're going to go Gouraud Shading. That looks pretty good. So I'm going to rewind, save my file, I'm up to V3 now, and just hit Shift+R to render to Picture Viewer.
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