camera question

# 1 21-10-2006 , 05:31 AM

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I have animated my whole scene and now it is ready to render. My final question on this matter is how do i go about setting up a camera to pan around and follow what is on the screen. If anyone knows of any good tutorials on this as well it would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers Leon

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# 2 22-10-2006 , 02:48 AM

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I've knocked together this little tutorial,

CLICK ME

hopefully it'll be of some help.

Take it easy,

Mat.

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# 3 22-10-2006 , 04:54 AM

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sorry matt but it is not working. I try to open the page but get this message.

The site happymat27.co.uk has been disabled. Please contact support.

if you can get it working it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

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# 4 22-10-2006 , 05:38 AM

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Oops,

I've run out of bandwidth for the month, sorry. I'll mail you the tutorial if that's ok,

Mat.

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# 5 22-10-2006 , 08:42 PM

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Thanks for the tutorial matt explained everything perfectly. I am sorry to be a pain but I am still having a couple of probs though. The option for render cam is different in my menu though but this may be because I am using maya 7.0 and I see you are on 8. In my render globals it simply says camera. I set this to my camera I have set up and click render but it is rendering the scene from my perspective view. Thanks again for all of your help so far matt it is greatly appreciated.

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# 6 22-10-2006 , 09:34 PM

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if you are attempting to render an animation but you're just testing by rendering one frame, maya will render from whatever viewport you have active, even if you changed which camera to render from in render globals... when rendering an animation sequence, maya will only pay attention to which camera you have set in render globals while you're batch rendering.

if you want to only render one frame, change one of your viewports to the camera you want to render from, make sure it's the active viewport, then render.

Accept no substitutions.

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# 7 22-10-2006 , 10:11 PM

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No probs Leon,

NeoStrider's absolutely right about the single frame render. I thought that I explained that you change the render camera to affect the batch render, sorry!

I'm still getting used to Maya 8 myself and I sometimes forget how much the menu system and names have changed, I'll bear that in mind for any tutorials I make in the future.

Cheers,

Mat.

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# 8 23-10-2006 , 01:29 AM

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Sorry guys but I am an idiot with this stuff still and cannot suss how to change to my new camera so it is my viewport.

Cheers leon

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# 9 23-10-2006 , 01:50 AM

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in your viewport, click on the panels menu, choose perspective, then your custom camera should be in that list (after persp)

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# 10 23-10-2006 , 02:24 AM

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right everything is set up and working fine but suprise suprise I still have one final problem. I set it to render from frame 1 - frame 178 but it only renders the 1 st frame. Thanks for all of your help and patience so far guys since I would be lost without it.

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# 11 23-10-2006 , 03:24 AM

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to batch render, go to the rendering menu set and under the render menu, at the bottom is the option for batch render.

a few things you want to keep in mind in render globals before you batch render...

1.) don't forget to change your image format from .iff to something else (jpg is kinda crappy, so .tif or .tga would work better)

2.) when rendering an animation, make sure you put down your start and end frames, and that your frame padding matches the amount of frames you're rendering out... if you're doing 178, use a frame padding of 2. that way it'll number them 001, 002, 010, 011, all the way to 178. if you don't, your animation won't be imported correctly in compositing programs (after frame 1 you'll get frame 10-19, then 100-178, and THEN frame 2, then 20-21!! that sucks!)

3.) make sure you're using a frame/animation ext. that's compatible with your compositing program. the safest to choose is name#.ext or name_#.ext, followed by name.#.ext or name.ext.#.

4.) make sure the camera you want to render from is selected in render globals, make sure you checked steps 1-3 above, then save your file incrementally (if your file was file.mb, save it as file01.mb just to be safe)... you can never be too safe when rendering out animations!

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# 12 23-10-2006 , 06:01 AM

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thanks for all of the help guys, I now simply need to leave this to render and can hopefully get it all put together in after effects tommorow.

:bow: user added image