Thread by @cgratzlaff

I want to revisit this old thread I did about this shot I animated on #TheMitchellsVsTheMachines and give you a bit more of an in-depth technical look at how a shot like this was managed for all you 3D animation nerds out there! ⚡️

https://twitter.com/cgratzlaff/status/1392926595208269825

Unfortunately I'm not allowed to share what the layout on this shot looked like when I got it assigned to me, so you'll have to just imagine the Mitchells all in T pose moving in a straight line through the mall 😅

When we get shots from layout, all of the animation is baked on ones on the characters' main controls and camera. Usually this is fine because we won't need to touch the camera too much in anim, and if we do then it will be a small adjustment (most of the time).

But for a shot like this where the camera movement was so dependant on what the chars were doing/where they were going, I needed to be able to control the speed and motion as cleanly as I could to allow for easy changes without any counter-animating.

If you animate a shot like this straight ahead (no constraints/cam rig set ups) then you're gonna have a bad time 😵‍💫 One small note to change the speed of the chars or to adjust the framing could unravel the whole shot and cost you hours of work.

So in order to get the most control over the cam/chars in this shot, I had to delete what layout had put in there and created my own camera rig using locators and groups.

At the very base level, I created one main locator whose only job was to move from the starting point to the end point. This was to control the overall speed of the chars/cam and everything was constrained to this locator.

From there, I could easily move the characters around to adjust the composition without having to worry about their TZ curves controlling their speed, just their placement in the frame!

For the camera, it's very tricky to animate big sweeping camera moves if all you're animating is the camera itself. But! If you constrain your cam to a focal pivot point, move the cam away from it and then animate on the pivot, then hey! You've got a nice arc goin there!

Here's my cam hierarchy. First above the actual cam was an extra node to allow for a layer of texture, giving the cam a "handheld" feel. The position_adjust was for smaller adjustments on the composition. cam_position was to adjust how far away the cam was from the focus point.

I only used TZ on cam_position. cam_pivot was rotation only, I used this in order to get nice clean sweeping arcs. pivot_position was translation only, and used to adjust where I wanted the cam to pivot from. All grouped together and constrained to that first main locator!

I use this trick all the time to get big sweeping arcs, like in this same shot I used it for all the props flying at camera! Since the cam is travelling so far in this shot, it would have been very tricky to manually animate the drones flying at cam and have them read in frame,

so for them I constrained their main controls to the cam, animated them away from cam in TZ on their COG offset, then used their COG to animate them in RX into frame.

Having everything constrained and organized like this helped me focus on the actual composition of the frames instead of having to constantly manage the distance they were travelling. It was a tricky shot for sure but I love technical challenges 🤖

Planning/setting up 3D anim isn't just about shooting reference/sketching thumbnails, but about figuring out how to make your life as easy as possible when animating! Try to think ahead to the problems that might come up and set your shot up in a way that will work best for you🤘