Friday 21 October 2011

Directing cameras in Muvizu 3D - An overview

I thought I'd do a little overview video this week to explain all of the available controls for directing your cameras in Muvizu 3D animation software.

There are a lot of options to do this however, most of them take a bit of practice to get the most out of them.

To begin with you have the keyboard controls. These are WASD, Q, E, [, ], Page Up, Page Down and the arrow keys.

The W and S keys will let you move the camera forward while, the A and D keys will let you strafe your camera left or right. The Q and E keys will let you move your camera up and down respectively. Next up are the square bracket keys (that's [ and ]). These will let you roll the camera to the left and to the right. Additional to the roll you can tilt the camera up and down with the Page Up and Page Down keys and finally the arrow keys will allow you to move the camera forwards and backwards as well as rotating the camera view to the left and the right. The main difference between the forwards and backwards arrow and the W and S keys is that W and S will move your camera on the level it is at, regardless of the angle that the camera is facing whereas the forward and backwards arrow keys will let you apply the tilt angle to the forwards or backwards movement.

Next up is the mouse, you can use the left mouse button to move the camera forwards, backwards and steer to the left and right at the same time. The right mouse button allows you to rotate the camera around 360 degrees without moving it from the current position. Finally you can use both mouse buttons together to lift the camera up or down as well as strafing to the left and right.

My big tip for directing camera movement is to use the mouse wheel. If you push this forwards then the camera will start moving forward and continue to do so until you pull the mouse wheel back a little to stop the movement. The same will happen if you pull the mouse wheel backwards, the camera will automatically continue to move backwards until you push the mouse wheel forwards to stop the movement.

This is my preferred method of directing camera movement in Muvizu 3D as it allows me to set the camera moving and then all I need to focus on is using the keyboard to rotate left, or right and tilt up, down and so forth without trying to hold another key to keep the camera moving.

So what do you do when you direct cameras? Leave a comment with you top tips below!

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