Subtitles of the Movie

We continue with an advanced lesson on how to work with Motion Paths and Cameras in Carrara 7. We've already created our Camera, we've keyframed some motion into the scene, and then we've converted it to a Path, so I wanted to explain what we're looking at here because it looks like there's a multi-colored path. The Motion Path itself is white. The turquoise-looking lines, the light blue, are the actual handles or part of what's called the Bezier Handles, to control this Spline Path. If you've worked with programs like Adobe Photoshop, or Adobe Illustrator, or other drawing programs like Corel Draw, you're used to actually drawing these spline paths with the drawing tools. We have those drawing tools. Let me show you where they are. I'm going to collapse this Sequencer Tray right here so you can see in the lower left-hand side of the screen we have some tool choices that are very familiar to you if you've worked with some of these other drawing programs. Add Point Tools, Subtract Point Tools, Adjust the Corner Points, and then an actual Pen Tool to draw these paths. I'm going to make sure that my Move Tool is selected. The little black. that separates the two colored lines is actually the handle portion of the Bezier Curve. I'm going to click on top of that and move it now, and you can watch the path itself change as I move this Bezier handle down. I'm getting kind of a little clunky presentation right here, and I believe it's because I have OpenGL activated in my Interactive Render Setting. I'm going to click on this upward arrow and covert this to Software to speed up the performance for the sake of this movie, and choose OK. Now when I drag the handle we can see that we're getting some nice changes to our path. It's a great way to get smooth-looking curves into your scene. In this case I'm going to want the camera to actually move backwards a little bit so it backs away from the logo and then does this charge at it before it winds up at the end. The other thing is I don't want the logo or the camera to actually go through the logo so I need to add a point to this line so I can raise it above the logo. To do that I'll come over to the Add Point Tool, click on it, come back over to the line and simply click about where I want that point to occur. Now we are presented with two additional Bezier Handles to adjust this point and area. I'll come back to my Move Tool so I can change where this point is located by clicking right on the middle of it and dragging it up. I'm also going to click on one of the Bezier Handles and make this a little more straight across. Grab the Camera Motion Path Bezier Handle and drag it down a little bit further so we get this downward progression, it'll slow and curve, and then come flying over the top and then wind up at the very last point of our path. Let me go back to my Quad View by clicking up here at the top of the screen for Four Views. Now we see our Top View, Side View, the actual Camera View, and then the Front View over here in the lower right-hand corner. I'll click the Play button right here and we'll see our camera in motion. The camera moves, we see it go around the scene, and there is our camera ending up at the very last point. If we wanted to change this motion a little bit further even I can go ahead and click on the Bezier Handle of the last point in the line and drag it out a little more flat so it comes over the logo like a camel hump and then comes back to the last spot. I'll go to the Rewind button, we'll rewind that camera again, I'll click the Play button and we'll see our motion in action. Now, the camera stops very abruptly right there. What if I wanted the camera to actually slow down a little bit and come to an easy stop? Well, the way we would adjust that is by opening our Sequencer Palette again. Right in the middle we've got a little feature called Tweeners, the space between points. I'm going to click on this and our Properties Palette changes to reveal a special Tweener function. Right now it's strictly linear, meaning the start and end are connected by a smooth line with no change, so it's a constant velocity. I want to go ahead and change this a little bit. I want the motion to begin slowly, so I'll drag out the Ease Out, or Ease In, and I want it to finish slowly. This little S-curve that we're presented with now lets us know that the distance traveled over the time, which is at the bottom, is slow and then it speeds up, and then it slows down again. Rewinding the Playhead all the way back to the beginning of the animation and clicking Play will show the camera zoom in quickly across the logo and then it slows down so it's not quite such an abrupt finish to the animation. Something else to know when we're working with Motion Paths and cameras is that if I come back to our Left View here Ð I'll zoom out just a little bit Ð and we click the camera, I'll come back to the Motion tab, we have a feature we haven't explored and that is the Distance along a Motion Path. When we changed the length of the path right here we actually added more distance that the camera had to travel in that amount of time. If we wanted to actually stop the camera right here and not fly through to the other end, we wouldn't even have to remanufacture or re-keyframe motion. All we can do is say that, well, I'm going to move the distance along the path to something more like 150. We see the camera right now resetting right here. I'm going to go ahead and oh, let's just drag this to right there and we'll stop it. You'll notice that the camera is not updating or pointing at the logo. It's a little quirk or Carrara. Let me show you how to fix that. When you have a Point At behavior and change an object's location dynamically, sometimes the camera doesn't update. You fix that by going to the Modifiers, simply disabling, and then re-enabling the Point At behavior, and the camera, or whatever object you have, will automatically re-sync with that function and work correctly. So, there's an introduction into working with Motion Paths, how to adjust the Distance over a path. We can see that at the end of the animation, 4 seconds, our camera hasn't made it the whole way, we changed our mind and said, yes, I want this to finish up and go all the way to the end, just simply click and drag the distance along a path to the end, the camera's at the end, it's not pointing in the right direction again, so we would disable and re-enable that feature, and there's our final image. A quick Render shows us we're just where we want to be.