I’ll start with - I’m definitely being dumb here, but after 2 days of trying to execute I’m out of ideas.
I want to make a camera orbit fully around my 3D rendering - think when you’re customising a model in some 3D game and it does the auto-pan thing so you can see all the angles (sorry that’s the best description I could manage I know it’s bad).
I can use the GUI to get it to orbit around a single plane by adding an orbit track via the camera options in animation view.
I also managed to adjust the orbit positions to get it to take a different path using camera position in animation keyframes, then moving the points on the orbit that appears.
Trying to use the correct terminology (from adjust camera options box), but probably poorly, I think I essentially want to both roll through 360 degrees, and adjust the azimuth through 360 degrees in such a way that we can see the whole object in one orbit?
Sorry if this is incredibly simple, thanks in advance for the help.
You cannot ‘Roll’ with the Orbit mode. You need to go the hard way with the Interpolate (spline) mode.
In this mode you can specify an exact camera for each keyframe. You can use the Custom ViewPoints feature to create some point of view, and then use them in the KeyFrame editor.
For your information, I’m not sure Roll is what you want.
I have a bunch of figures with differing symmetries, to the intention is to have a single ‘full’ orbit which allows me to see all possible angles, so regardless of the figure I can just use a single orbit.
I’ll give the spline interpolation another shot I guess, my last attempt it kept like zooming into/going through the object…
These two also kind of show what I’m trying to do because I know my explanations are terrible:
You can definitly do what you want with the spline interpolation. But note that you may want to define lot of points of views in order to have something like an orbit.
Another way to do that is to use what we call a Cinema Database. That is not exactly an animation but a collection of screenshots.
In PV 5.8 it is in the View / Export Inspector.
Then in Image Extracts, select ‘Cinema’ (instead of PNG), check the chekbox, click on the ... button on the right.
In the popup, set Camera Model to ‘PhiTheta’, and setup how many values you want for elevation and for azimuth (phi and theta divisions). Ok.
back to the Export Inspector, points ‘Root directory’ to where you want to write the files
File / Export Now to exports the cinema database. Note that it may take a while as it take lot of screenshots (nb of sshot = phi divisions x theta divisions)
