💻 Orbiting an object manually¶
Info
The steps in this exercise were partly shown in the presentation as well, but that was mostly to illustrate keyframe animation. Here, you can redo those steps in detail and experiment with them.
To orbit an object the camera needs a circular path around the object's location.
- Load
orbit.blend
The scene contains a single monkey (centered at the origin) and a camera. Note that the animation has a length of 100 frames, starting at frame 0.
As a first way of doing an orbit we're going to add keyframes for the camera position, as it rotates around the monkey, using the 3D cursor pivot mode.
- Set the Pivot Point mode to 3D cursor (bring up the Pivot Point pie menu
with period
., select3D Cursor). - Make sure the 3D cursor is located in the origin by resetting its position with
Shift-C. This will also change the view to fit the scene extents. In general, you can check the current position of the 3D cursor in the sidebar (Nto toggle) on theViewtab under3D Cursor - Select the camera. Verify that as you rotate it around the Z axis the camera indeed orbits the 3D cursor, and therefore also orbits around the monkey head.
- Add 4 keyframes at intervals of 25 frames and 90 degrees rotation around Z to complete a 360 degree rotation of the camera around the object over the full animation of 100 frames
- Play the animation with
Spacebar. Is the camera orbit usable? Why not? Also check the camera view during playback. - Check the graphs in the Graph Editor. See if you can improve the camera orbit, either
by changing the graphs, inserting more keyframes, or both. One way to influence
the shape of the curves is to edit the handles attached to each control point, or to change
the keyframe interpolation for a control point with
T.
Tip
If you have only a single object in front of the camera around which you want to orbit, an alternative approach is to simply rotate the object itself while keeping the camera in a fixed position. However, this might not always be feasible or preferable.