Copying real camera movement to 3ds max

[raphael]

Hello,

Few years ago I found in Internet short animation showing big kitchen. Model itself was very nice but biggest impression made camera: the way it was moving. It was like real handheld camera. And it was like this in reality. Guy who created it informed he copied movement of camera into 3ds max, he also probably wrote how to do this. Unfortunately I didn't copy this description and I can't find this animation.

I wonder if anyone knows how to do it and could share this knowledge 🙂

[leeminardi]

There are two approaches that I see for getting the camera position data.

1. Use camera tracking software that determines the camera position, orientation and FOV  (and key geometric details in a scene) from a video.  Import the data into 3ds Max and scale it as needed.

2. Track the location of a sensor as it is traced through space.  A GPS unit probably would not work as it would be difficult to get a signal inside a building.  From what I've read it would be difficult to get good data from the accelerometers of a cell phone as the relative position information they provide  is very crude.   Perhaps there is software that uses cell phone positioning data but its accuracy and precision is unclear.

I think method 1 is your best bet.  Create a video with a camera of the path you want to take and  and run it through some camera tracking software extract only the camera position from the output.   The 3ds Max Camera Tracking features could be used but it requires a lot of knowledge about the scene.  There are other commercial products that work from raw video and only require you to do some scaling of the resulting data to match a CAD model.