Subtitles of the Movie

Whenever you animate in Combustion, you can get another level of realism by animating the camera itself. Now think about a virtual earthquake. Now, of course you can move the volcano around, you can move some buildings and have things falling, but if you really want to get that I'm there feeling, move the camera around. Literally keyframe it. Move it up, down, sideways, rotate it. But don't worry. We're going to actually rotate the camera and animate that in the volcanic eruption project later on in the tutorial. But we might as well practice now. So let's go ahead and create a new composite and we're going to make it a 3D one. I have ten seconds of animation and I'm going to click OK. We're also going to bring in the shark yet again from the Crunch Folder and I'm going to bring him in as well as the water. So I'm going to click on the water first and I'm going to Control Click on the shark to bring those in and I'm going to make a couple of duplicates of this shark so we can have a really cool composite. So I'm going to right click and I'm going to go to Perspective in the Viewport. I'm going to trackball around and I'm going to zoom out a little bit as well. So on Crunch, I'm going to move him up right about here and I'm going to go to my workspace, right click and duplicate him and move the other one and I'll right click on that one, duplicate that one, move it over a little bit and right click and make this one more. So we're going to have a total of four sharks. I'm going to click on my water and I'm going to move that pretty far back as well. So let me just grab my Position Tools here, go on the Z axis and grab each shark and do the same thing. So I can have a decent amount of space in between them. And I'm going to just rotate around a little bit like this and now I want to resize some of these as well. So on this guy back here, I'll resize him a little bit and grab the middle one, do that one and resize him and this one as well. I'll return to a camera view just to make sure everything lines up properly and I'm going to click and move him up a little bit and move him a little bit like so and the idea is pretty much we're going to move the camera through this pack of sharks. I'm also going to make the water layer much bigger too so it incorporates a larger part of the screen there. And last but not least, I'm going to take this shark, the front one, and I think I'll move him back a little bit too on the Z axis and I'll lift him up. So we have our animation ready to go. I'm going to go to Perspective View so I can see what we have here and I think I'll move him just a little bit more. We're ready to animate now. So click on the Camera and we're going to click on Animate. And what I want to do is make sure I get this just the way I want it and I'm going to start to animate the camera. So I'm going to click at the very last frame and put the camera all the way at the end of the animation. Don't forget guys; one of the best ways to animate is to do your broad strokes first and then refine it. So I'm going to move the camera right about here. I'm going to go the Camera View so I can see where I am. I'm going to move the camera up now. So we're going to go over that shark and I'll go forward a little bit in time and I'm going to move the camera down as we pass by this shark. And I'll even add a little bit of a rotation there. So we're going to spin around just a little bit as we just barely miss that shark. Then we're going to rotate again and then I think I'll move the camera as well so that we head towards this shark. And then I'll move to the end and hopefully we don't get eaten, but chances are good we did get eaten by a shark. And I'm going to right click in the Viewport, go to Perspective and just show you what we have here. We created a motion trail that we can animate at any time by clicking on any of these points and then repositioning. So let's see what we have. I'm going to go back to Camera View and I'm going to click Animate off, go to my first frame and I'm going to Play. Whoa, whoa, whoa! Shark! Shark! So how cool is that? Animating the camera can add another dimension to your work inside of Combustion. It can be just as much of a star of the show as everything else, so don't forget guys; you can always go to the Perspective View and if you want to, even work two-up so you don't always have to switch back and forth so you can have one view as your camera view and one view as the view with your camera so you can see it and you can make your adjustments. Just click on the camera and you can change the path as you see fit.