Staging Spacecraft with Moving Camera using Blender Constraints

This is a somewhat tricky set of problems, so I made a simple example file to test out some ideas.

In the first test, I simply attached ("parented") the camera to the upper stage so that it follows it. I thought this would be really boring, but the changing light creates an interesting effect. This is also reminiscent of footage from cameras mounted on spacecraft (even though of course this particular shot couldn't be done that way).

In the second test, I parented a Bezier curve to the upper stage and animated the camera along it. I then used tracking constraints for both the upper and lower stage to get the camera to try to keep both in frame. Unfortunately this sometimes means the camera is looking at the empty space between them.

In the third test, I moderated this by defining IPO curves for the influence of the two tracking constraints. This way the camera can be set to follow one or the other stage at the appropriate points along its track. A little trickier, but it works.

None of these motions is really "physical". Ideally, I'd like to set angular and linear velocities. That would create more realistic movement, at least for stages separating in vacuum and zero-gee conditions. I might try some kind of simulation approach later.

I'll be applying what I learn from this to work on "Lunatics" ( http://lunatics.tv ).
License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, version 3.0. The music is "D10-2000" by Gregoire Lourme, same license.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• animation
• blender
• 3d
• spacecraft
• staging
• lunatics

[23dornot23d]

Good work - I was ok in the old version setting scenes up and using empties to track the camera to ....... but no doubt I will figure it out again ..... how do you embed the music in the video or do you add it afterwards ...... is it with openshot or something else ?

[TerryJHancock]

@23dornot23d In this case, the editing was done with the Blender "Visual Sequence Editor" (which is part of the Blender application), including the addition of the music, which was edited to size using Audacity.

[23dornot23d]

Cheers .... will have another look at adding sound now ... using shift+f for moving the camera now,

will use audacity too ty,