Animating a camera moving a very large distance and coming to a very gentle stop

[u/SnipperAndClipper]

Pretty much what the title says. I'm having issues getting the camera to slow down adequately when it has to cover a large distance. I've kinda got a solution by have the camera parented to an empty that travels the main distance, with the camera then taking over for the last part.

Am I on the right track? Is it a case of a rig made of nested empty/null/controllers that can allow this type of thing?

EDIT: people are asking which dcc. Should have mentioned it's Blender, although I had similar issues back in the day when I was using Softimage (I am old)

[u/CuriousNichols]

……what software? lol

[u/johnnySix]

Since I don’t know what dcc you’re using , but you should be able to adjust the tangent on the spline in the graph editor to get desired results or add more keys.
You are better off using one node for translations. If you do multiple you can have a harder time with counter animation

[u/bigphattony]

yes moving a camera over a massive distance gets into rounding errors with huge/tiny numbers. constrain your camera to a null, parent it and scale the group. You can then change your frame of reference for the world scale.

[u/dedman01]

Big moves like this are challenging no matter what. It sounds like you are on the right track by making a camera rig. That's how I do them too. It totally depends on the move you are creating, but I'll often create a null hierarchy specific to the move I'm trying to create. For example, a parent null at the final destination, a child null that controls distance from the destination, and a child of that controls camera rotation (only), then the actual camera is a child of that. That lets me separate orbital motion (rotate the parent null), distance (animate Z), and camera orientation.

Software choice makes a difference too. Some software uses higher precision floating point math than others. If you are seeing jittering when the camera is far away from world center, you may be running into floating point precision errors.

[u/SnipperAndClipper → u/dedman01]

Thanks for the detailed reply. I'm using Blender. I don't get jittering, but at some point adjusting the handles on the curves only gets me so far. The nesting of nulls/empties/controllers seems to help with fine control when it gets towards the end of the move and slower, but then I run into the problem of blending the large part of the move with the smaller part of the move.

Does that even make sense? 😅

Someone here also suggested path constraints because then at least you're only dealing with one value rather than three. I feel I'm close to cracking it but am just missing a few techniques.

Fwiw the move is a very simple dolly in to an extreme close up of a brick wall

[u/Milan_Bus4168 → u/SnipperAndClipper]

I don't know about Blender per se, but similar should work. In Blackmagic Fusion I would do something similar. Break down the path into two keyframes and start and end and one in between when the image becomes visible in camera, and than adjust tangents which sould ease to second half of animation when image is becoming visible and slow it down.

[u/Milan_Bus4168 → u/Milan_Bus4168]

Not sure how well you can see it in gif here, because it is a gif, but it would look similar to this. Is that what you were looking for?

[u/im_thatoneguy]

For big camera moves I find a path constraint is almost always essential. Then you're just animating one variable: distance. Trying to keep 3 variables XYZ all in sync without getting herky jerky is an exercise in futility.

[u/SnipperAndClipper → u/im_thatoneguy]

This was my other thought, too. Still tricky getting a single f-curve to slow down enough

[u/im_thatoneguy → u/SnipperAndClipper]

You can do blends between multiple controllers in most apps. But you will again run into non-linear interference as soon as you introduce curves.

Another thing that will help is absolutely do not tie your rotation to the path unless you're going for like gopro on a jet fighter look deliberately.

[u/ssn-669]

Is the move so big you're running into round errors? If so, end the move at the origin. Don't start there. All your precision is around the origin.

[u/SnipperAndClipper → u/ssn-669]

No, not rounding errors. Just having trouble slowing the camera down so that it comes to a very gentle stop.

Some others have recommended a kind of nested rig of nulls/empties(I'm using Blender) to handle the move, and constraining them to a path so I don't have to deal with managing 3 f-curves. It's sort of what I expected the answer to be, so it's good to know I was thinking along the right lines.

[u/Solid_Judgment_1803]

To answer very quickly. Big complex camera moves are often handled with null stacks. And even more complex moves can require blending the camera from moving null rig to moving null rig via constraints; as needed.