#3D Spiral Camera Paths
4 messages in this thread
We're trying to create a camera in 3ds that moves in a 2D spiral, moves up a
bit, and repeats the spiral. We've created the 2D spiral , but I don't know
how to stack two spirals in 3 space and connect them. The 3D editor won't let
me import the 2D spiral, since it is not a closed polygon, so I can't just copy
the spiral to different heights and link them together.
Has anyone solved this problem? Is there some way I can describe the spiral in
a text file? Is there some other tool I should be using to create this path?
All responses greatly appreciated.
MikeA
Mike,
Have you tried creating a helical path in the lofter then using get path from
the keyframer. That would give you a spiral path for your camera to follow. I'm
not sure what you;re trying to do so this may be competely wrong. If you'd like
to give some more info I'll be glad to help.
Dave Mennenoh Office Tech.
Actually, the path is not exactly helical, it is a FLAT spiral.
Allow me to elaborate.
I'm building a 3D walk around system in windows. I plan to generate a LOT of
frames (a few hundred), and show the appropriate frames as the user moves
through the space.
The space is a cylinder, and users will move about it using cylindrical
coordinates.
That is, they will control their height within the cylinder, their distance
from the center, and their direction ( angle away from "north"). For
simplicity sake, the user is always facing out from the center (Obviously,
there are actually two paths, one for the camera, and one for the target, but
they are almost identical). Currently, the cylinder has about 30 cameras in
it, and each camera sweeps out a flat spiral path. It is critical that that
each of the camera paths be flat. Each camera path differs from the others
only in the Y coordinates of each of the keys.
Obviously, this is a rather cumbersom solution. I would like to use 1 camera
to achieve what the 30 are doing now, so I need to somehow combine the paths of
the existing cameras into one path. Unfortunatly, I don't see how I can do
that in the context of 3D studio.
Thanks,
MikeA
I may be still missing something but you could use a helical path with no
height to make a flat spiral path…
Dave Mennenoh