Hi everyone,
I’m facing a problem with camera animation.
I would like to make a mouvement that goes over my object from front to back, with a 180° twist to keep back side well oriented.
But if I make a inclination animation + twist animation, the camera path twist too. Inclination direction is modify by the twist.
Anyway to avoid this and keep camera just twisting on the inclination path?
Just inclination (path I would like to keep)
Inclination + Twist:
Thanks.
Mmmz I was trying and wonder what the answer is. It would have been much easier if the ‘translation’ not only could move the camera but also rotate it.
I tried to cut the inclination animation into two parts and put a fast twist between them since I think you basically want that just a quick transition.
What I didn’t try yet but might work is using two cameras. So you just do 90 degrees with one and the other 90 degrees with a camera which already has the right rotation.
I tried the second option, using two cameras. It kind of worked, but the twist in the middle became really rough and looked pretty wierd to me. It did give the desired behavior apart from that though, and perhaps there’s some way to fine tune it to look better. I work way too little with animations to know if that might be possible or not.
Faced the same problem, and solved it with Path animation. Isn’t a perfect solution, but the only way to quickly fix this translation, for now, I think.
Thanks for your replies.
I’ve tried too with camera keyframe, but as I want to stay perfectly aligned with middle plane, azimuth parameter switched from -90 to 90 instantly. I had to turn everything by 90° on X, now I’m not using the inclination but azimuth from -90 to 90 (or 0 to 180)
But it’s still not that good as I would like to stay not twisted at the begining and the end so there is no easing on the twist.
I’ve tried Orbit + Twist but same as Inclination + twist, path is deformed.
What do you think of this? I couldn’t resist to do another attempt 
It’s just by 3 keyframes and if you play a bit with the tension I think you get quite the thing you want.
I’ve uploaded the scene here so you can play with it if you want: https://we.tl/t-R7R3LKWM8n
Thanks Oscar,
I’ve done quite the same thing, but it doesn’t fit what I want. I need to show something on top of my product, and the camera movement will be around 10 seconds, which makes weird stuff in the middle of the movement, twisting is to fast and not easily editable.
Also, in the last update (2023.2), you’ll find a new option in keyframe animation properties: Orbit instead of Path, which keep the distance betwen object and camera and disable the tension slider. Really interesting for that kind of movement.
Ah, I understand! I just tried to basically use 3 cams and a switch event. So start with keyframes than switch to a cam which does only a twist and than keyframes again.
That seemed to work pretty well until something got messed up and movements got really confusing. And I got even more confused. The way KS handles rotations is a pain for me, if I put in 720 degrees I want to be able to put in 720 degrees. I want to be limited by 89.99 since that doesn’t make any sense for my brain at least.
Might give it another go later today.
Attached is a ZIP file containing KSPs for two possible solutions to this admittedly peculiar problem 
note: The scenes use Camera Keyframe animations, so you will need at least KeyShot 2023.2.
Neither solution is particularly elegant, but it works 
Let me know how it works for you.
Dries
Camera Keyframe Animation - Passover.zip (79.4 MB)
I think the problem is the ‘twist’. If I open your camera switch version even if I put in 0’s for the twist it will just ignore me and just put in a -90 for the twist again.
But for me the way KS does rotations is completely confusing, same with non-animated transforms. If I put in a rotation on for example the Y I don’t want to see it getting changed and divided to different numbers on the X and Z as well. That might be the same result but is imo terribly confusing.
Thanks,
I think I’ll change how the feature is shown in my video. It sounds really complexe and time comsuming to find a way to acheive and manage this camera movement.
For now, the easiest solution I found seams to use both camera movement and object rotation.
But yes, rotations in KS are really a weird stuff.
I am unsure if this is what you were trying to achieve, but I assume you are talking about the camera flipping over after reaching the median point when you are directly above the object.
The way I finagled it to work out is I created another camera animation for the back half, but for the frame right after the median point above, I changed the twist from -89.673 to +89.673. I merged the animations back together with a Switch Event Animation.
Since the flip seems to have to happen due to how the camera is program to work when going overhead the object, flipping the twist 180 degrees corrects it to match the Azimuth the camera wants. Because it is on the same frame that the flip happens, this switch in twist is not perceivable in the animation.
Hope I understood correctly what you were trying to achieve.
In hindsight, I believe the single keyframe animation version I included in the ZIP file I posted above is the most robust version for editing down the line.
When playing back the animation in real-time, it may look like the camera flips 180° at the median position, but that is only a visual artifact of real-time playback. If you skip through the frames manually, this does not occur. Neither when rendering the animation offline.
The only drawback is that a single duplicate frame is created at the median position (due to the double keyframes there), but this is unnoticeable at normal playback speed, especially at higher FPS.
In these “corner cases”, you would also want to avoid exact values like (-)90° for Inclination or Twist. The animation will be better behaved with an unrounded value like (-)89.99°. This is a side effect of how the animation system currently does interpolation between the camera parameter values.
Dries
