Creating a MoGraph Sports Intro Animatic: Shot One Morph Cam

Photo of Raymond Olsen

Instructor Raymond Olsen

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  • Duration: 06:12
  • Views: 1775
  • Made with Release: 18
  • Works with Release: 18 and greater

In this video we’ll animate the camera move for shot one with a morph cam rig and render out the first hardware preview for the animatic.

In this video we’ll place cameras at the beginning and end of our camera move and then learn a shortcut to auto-populate the camera fields in the camera morph tag upon creation. After the setup is complete and we animate the blend, we can adjust the camera move to our liking as the scene is played in a loop. Next, we’ll export a hardware render using the settings we configured earlier.

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Transcript

In this video, we'll build our camera move using several cameras and a Morph tag. This method of camera movement will allow us to adjust the move by simply repositioning one of the two cameras in the viewport, eliminating the need to adjust to animation curves. Let's start with opening the latest version of Shot_01_3D, and it should just be your light bank low res XRef. Now, let's hop into Explorer, take another look at our storyboard, and kind of take note of the angle. Move that aside. Then, in your viewport, do your best to adjust and get close to the angle of the storyboard. But the good thing about doing the move like this is you don't have to be exact. So just get it close, somewhere around here, and make a new camera. I'm just going to call it "Camera 1". Then, I'm going to go into my four view, and we're just going to want a slow push along these lights. So for the ending camera, I'm just going to select Camera 1. I'm going to go in here into the right view. I'm going to switch my coordinates from Local to Global, so that way we can just drag it along the global Z-axis. I'm going to Ctrl+drag it forward in Z. That'll give me another camera. I'm going to rename it "Camera 2", and I'm going to look through it just to make sure it's cool. I just wanted to make sure that we weren't past the boundaries of the cloner. So now, we'll set up our Camera Morph tag. So let's reorder these. We'll put Camera 1 and Camera 2 in order in the Object Manager. Now, go ahead and select them both. Come over here to the Camera icon and select Camera Morph. This is going to give you a null, a new camera called "Morph Camera", and the Camera tag. If you select that, you'll see Camera 1 and Camera 2 have been populated into these fields. So if we look through the Camera Morph and play with this blend slider, it's morphing from Camera 1 to Camera 2, as you can see down here in the right view. So now that we have that set up, let's go ahead and animate our Blend Curve. We're going to keep the range at 90 frames, which will give us a 3-second animation. Just select the Morph tag and keyframe by hitting the little circle at zero frames, 0%. Go to Frame 90. Plug in 100%. If you just hit play, we have camera move. But you can see, it's easing in and easing out, and I just want a linear camera move. So I'll go ahead and stop. I'm going to hit Shift+F3 to open our timeline, and we're in Dope Sheet mode, so just hit Tab to get to Curve Editor. I'm just going to select this curve and hit L. What that does is set your tangents at zero length. So if I undo, it's the same thing as Key, Spline Types, Zero Angle, and Zero Length. Where alternatively, you could just hit Linear Keyframes. Any of those options will give you a linear curve. So now, it'll be a steady, constant motion. So if we go back to our Morph Cam view, hit Play, you can see our camera move. So if we want it slower, I can just select Camera 2, move it over, and now our camera move is slower. I'm going to go ahead and go into our Perspective view here. Select Camera 2, activate Rotation, and we're in the local axis now. So we can just rotate Camera 2 a little bit, and now we have a slight rotation. Or we can drop it down in Y a little bit, and we'll get a little bit closer to the lights. So as you can see, it's really easy to edit your camera move without messing around in the Curve Editor. So go ahead and just get something that you like. We'll just use this. Actually, I'm going to undo my last move, because I kind of like it just tracking straight over the lights. So I'm going to keep mine like this, for now, and go ahead and save my file. We've got it in Shot_01_3D_V1 still. Since we've got all of our render settings set up correctly, all I have to do is hit Render. I'm just going to fit it to screen so we can see it, and I'll scrub through. There we go. So now, what we do is save this file, and then save it incrementally. Now, the render we just output will have the same name as the file that we used to make it. So if we go to Sports Animative, our scene one is V1. V2 is the file we just created. If we go to Footage, Previews, V1 is the camera move we just made.
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