Camera not staying where it was placed

[robotechgreen]

Hi all,

This may be a simple problem but I can't find an answer online anywhere so perhaps one of you could help

I'm starting to explore the animation features of Maya and after a few basic efforts I thought a good learning exercise would be to re-create the Star Wars opening scene where the ship first flies over the camera and then the camera jumps to show you the ship heading towards it.

Everything works fine if I just create keyframes for the ship flying over the camera, but if I then try and create keyframes for the camera showing the ship flying towards it the camera ends up at a seemingly random location different from either one that I specified in previous keyframes.

My workflow is this:

- Create a new perspective camera and rename it

- Position the ship and camera so the ship is behind the camera. Create keyframes for both.

- Move the ship to a suitable position past the camera to create the flyover and create another keyframe for both the ship and camera a couple seconds into the timeline

Now if I leave it here everything works fine. The next step messes everything up

- Move the camera so that it is looking at the front of the ship some distance away (again, think opening scene of Star Wars) and create a new keyframe exactly one frame after the previous camara keyframe. Essentially I'm just trying to create a jump cut from behind the ship to in front of it.

That's all I want to do but if I run the timeline the camera ends up in some nearby but completely wrong position for the entire length of the animation. It seems like very odd behaviour but being new to this I could be missing something very obvious.

Any help would be much appreciated.

All the best,

Rob

[mspeer · Accepted solution]

Hi!

What happens here might be the result of not having a linear interpolation between the keys.

Please open Windows -> Animation Editors - Graph Editor.

To change your resulting animation curve you can add more keys, manipulate the existing ones or select the keys and change the tangent-type. You may also go to Preferences -> Settings -> Animation -> Tangents and change your in and out tangent to something more predictable like "linear".

If that's not the case, can you please upload a file only with the camera and the animation?

[robotechgreen]

Hi mspeer,

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll try that today and let you know how it goes.

All the best,

Rob

[robotechgreen]

Thanks for your help.