freeze camera temporarily or a second stationary camera...

fracturedray · Post by **fracturedray** » Mon Jul 12, 2010 4:00 am

I have a scene with several layers at different z values and a camera panning to the left creating a nice parallax.

I am in the middle of animating a character to walk to the right on one of the layers

I can easily hide the other layers I'm not using and only focus on the ground and the character. However the camera is still panning and while I really like the panning motion/placement it is distracting when I try to get the character feet in the right place as he moves forward.

So I had the remove all of the camera animation (not to big of a deal but I didn't really enjoy doing it). Is there a way to freeze the camera temporarily? Could a way to do this be added?

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Mon Jul 12, 2010 5:49 am

I just want to make sure I understand what you want.

You have camera motion to create a parallax movement of layers. The camera movement is making it hard to animate a walk cycle of a character and you want to temporarily "stop" the camera movement while animating and then later turn it back on without having to delete the camera keys.

Is this correct?

I can think of a couple of ways but the easiest and most straight forward would be to "move" the camera movement keys down the time line while keying your walk cycle. Just copy keys of the camera not moving for the length of the time line you need to key frame the character. When complete then put the keys back the way they were.

Another way would be to use the "front" direction under the "view" menu. This view would not be effected by the camera movement, unfortunately it also won't display the parallax.

-vern

fracturedray · Post by **fracturedray** » Mon Jul 12, 2010 7:15 am

View / Front is exactly what I needed, thanks heyvern.

I just needed a simple camera that wouldn't move and I didn't really care about parallax, just getting those tiny little feet in the right place.

You ever find the more you do with this program, the more amazed you become with classic animators before computers?

elbramtsol · Post by **elbramtsol** » Mon Jul 12, 2010 7:30 am

I've been moving camera keyframes all the time. Front vew... who would have thought it? Thanks Vern.

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Mon Jul 12, 2010 7:52 am

The main reason I didn't like the "front view" solution is that you have to get to it via the menu. There is no key command for it. Glad I could help though.

-vern