:) Thank you so wery mush. It´s the best made tuturial stof for a newbee i could get.

I am your fan for ewer.

For the love of 3d http://www.safegaard.com

thank you for doing this - very helpful and insightful

Dude - I'm still laughing over the Spielberg joke... :w00t:

:D

This tutorial is really fantastic! Thank you so much for sharing it with us.

Cathy :hehe:

Just click on the graphic to go there.

thanks for the comments! been consumed these past few hours trying to resurrect my pc after i got a black screen of death - blank screen with nothing but the mouse cursor - turns out this si a common problem with Vista

mine happened after a windows update - after a ton of hours trying to troubleshoot and using my lappy to look for solutions, it ended up being the video driver (ati) - i uninstalled the driver, booted up ok- then re installed the driver

Gabe You are just the greatest!!! I have stumbled around for so long never very happy with what I have made.  This tut will really help me prepare scenes in the future.

I am so grateful for your teaching skills!

movichick

thanks moviechick - working on the camera tutorial now - was hoping to get it up last friday but vista problems set me back

Yipeeee! My cameras at present will give viewers vertigo :)

Thanks some more Gabe.

moviechick

Thank you SO much! I love you! Oh wait I'm married :D Seriously, this is awesome stuff, thank you so much for sharing. I have just glanced over this quickly, but I can see where this is REALLY going to help everybody... thanks again!

Working with Cameras
ok so we have our cabin scene, added a couple of characters (more of character texturing down the road) and now we want to film a dialog

The shot as i imagined it: camera flies into the room, we see the captain near his desk, camera slowly pans to the side, shows that there is another guy in the room. Camera cuts the the captain who starts talking. Camera cuts to the other person who responds - so in total i will have 3 cameras in the scene that i can use to render the scene. Of course i can render out each camera separately and use a video editor to make my camera switches, but iclone provides a neat tool called CAMERA SWITCHER that makes it easy so you can render in one session -more on this later

i consider iclone having 2 basic cameras - the preview and the shooting camera - i also call this the numbered camera

AnimaTechnica's iClone Camera Workflow Basics
the PREVIEW camera is the default camera - i primarily use this to experiment, locate the shot i want to capture, my workflow is as follows:
a) position the PREVIEW camera to the starting shot of let's say camera 1, note the position numbers
b) position the PREVIEW camera to the ending shot of camera 1 - note the position numbers
c) Add camera and use the position numbers to position Camera 01
d) check playback, fine tune as needed
e) to add another camera to shoot from a different angle, repeat steps above

of course once you get used to it you can discover shorts cuts but for beginning try the above

The Preview Camera
The TRANSFORM controls moves the camera using the selected object as it's axis
So if for example you imported a prop but it got placed somewhere you can't see, clicking the 'CAMERA VIEW" icon as shown below moves your camera to the prop

The reason i play with the PREVIEW camera is that is is not animatable, if you work with the numbered cameras you might inadvertently insert a keyframe which screws up your shot. You can practice the positioning, angles, even depth of field with the PREVIEW camera



Here's a couple of areas in the workstage you need to remember



HERE WE GO
1) First since the focal point of the scene is the captain avatar, click on him. Start at Frame 0 and use the TRANSFORM controls to position on the shot we want...



The reason you want to note down those numbers is that when you add the numbered camera (for rendering) you can position them exactly as how you setup your preview camera. Once you get proficient, you can eyeball it or just bypass the preview camera altogether
By the way if you are rendering a shot where the camera does not move, then you can just use the PREVIEW camera

2) now let's move the preview camera to where we want to end the camera 01 movement. In this case i wanted the camera to fly into the room then slowly turn so it captures both characters in its viewport. Note in the example below my end point was at frame 900 - the more frames in between, the smoother the movement.



ADDING CAMERAS
3) We have established our camera 01 shot, now let's add CAMERA 01 to the scene
you can add a lot of cameras in a scene - the most i've had was 6 but you can have more



position Camera 01 to the ending position using the numbers we noted above - again you can eyeball it if you want



you can now click PLAY on the timeline below the workstage to check the camera movement. iClone calculates the position of the camera between frame 0 and frame 900. At this point you can jump into any point between Frame 0 and Frame 900 to fine tune the camera rotation etc..

4) Time to add another camera - this shot we want to be pointing at the captain as he will be speaking his lines. for this process, well bypass the PREVIEW camera to show how to do it directly with the numbered cameras. This camera will not be moving




5) Repeat the same process above for CAMERA 03

THE CAMERA SWITCHER
to me this is one of the most useful tools in iclone. It allows you to setup many different cameras at different angles and use the switcher to jump from one camera to another- this is particularly useful for fight scenes where i use the same motion but film it from the different angles to make it look like a fight is longer (for example checkout the the fight scene here starting at time 04:32)

How it works
you use the timeline to tell iclone at what frame to use a certain camera, start at 0 with camera 1, then at frame 100, switch to camera 02 - and so on

1) open the animation timeline


2) on the ANIMATION TIMELINE use the drop down menu and select CAMERA SWITCH. Now lets start at frame 0 - click there, so the red timeline marker is at frame 0, then RIGHT CLICK - and select CAMERA 01 as shown below. now let's say we want the camera to switch to camera 2 at frame 800, we just right click on frame 800 and select camera 2. Repeat for camera 3 let's say at frame 1500



3) so now we have setup the camera switch - to check it, go to the workstage and use the camera drop down menu to select CAMERA SWITCH. now press play in the animation playback control to check how the switching works.

now when you export the movie it will now export using the switch